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In Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai, Rikka refers to herself as 邪王真眼 ( _Jaou
Shingan_ ). Wikipedia says this translates literally to "True Eye of the Evil
King".

![Rikka with her jaou shingan exposed](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yMHFp.jpg)

A while back, I watched a fansub which translated it as 'Tyrant's Eye'. I'm
now watching the official Sentai Filmworks translation, which I've so far been
pretty underwhelmed by. The official translation uses 'Wicked Lord Shingan',
as if _jaou_ is a title and _shingan_ is a name.

Why are these three translations so different? 'Tyrant's Eye' is easy enough
to see; the meaning is close to the literal translation, and it sounds better
in English. But why is the official translation so far off? Is there some
ambiguity in the original Japanese that makes this hard to translate? Or did
the official translators drop the ball?


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2015-05-19T19:13:36.053
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2018-03-05T23:00:11.363
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japanese-language love-chunibyo-and-other-delusions
Why are the translations of 邪王真眼 (jaou shingan) so divergent?


The Wikipedia translation "True Eye of the Evil King" is a character-for-
character translation of 邪 _ja_ "evil", 王 _ou_ "king", 真 _shin_ "true", and 眼
_gan_ "eye". The fansub translation "Tyrant's Eye" is, as you say, a nice
localization of that, where we view _jaou_ ~"tyrant" as an attributive
modifier for _shingan_ ~"eye".

Sentai's translation appears to proceed along the same lines: they view _jaou_
~"Wicked Lord" as attributively modifying this thing called _shingan_ (i.e.
what property does _shingan_ have? The property of being a wicked lord, of
course). And, in fact, if you were presented with the phrase _jaou shingan_
**completely devoid of context** , Sentai's translation is not _obviously_
wrong - it could well be that _shingan_ is the name of some being who is a
wicked lord or somesuch (in Japanese, unlike in English, proper nouns are not
always easily distinguished from common nouns, particularly when it comes to
edgy chuuni things). Indeed, one might be inclined to translate it this way as
a parallel to structurally-similar phrases like 魔王サタン _maou satan_ "demon lord
Satan", where, of course, "Satan" is a name (though in this case there is no
ambiguity, since サタン "Satan" is obviously a loanword).

But the phrase _jaou shingan_ is **not** devoid of context. As anyone who has
watched the show knows, _jaou shingan_ is what Rikka calls her eye. As such,
it strikes me as bizarre to treat _shingan_ as a proper noun rather than
translating it as "true eye" or something similar.

I think Sentai screwed the pooch on this one.


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2015-05-19T19:41:24.843
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answer


When translating, they need to find words that fit the amount of syllables the
mouths show. They keep it as accurate as possible while still keeping with the
mouth flaps. So even though "Tyrant's Eye" may be the most accurate
translation, with the amount of mouth flaps in the anime it may be harder to
fit and still make sentences that make sense.


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