Legion World Forums LEGION OUTPOST Bits o' Legionnaire Business How To Write "Karate Kid" in Japanese

Hiya! Not sure this exactly counts as a fanart, but I thought this was the best place for this.

Also not sure if anyone else has tried this before. I'm minoring in Japanese right now, so I figured, why not try and figure out how to write the name of the Legion's Japanese-ish-est member?



The first part, karate, was pretty straightforward. The "kid" was hard to decide on, though. There's lots of words in Japanese that mean 'child,' 'boy' and 'kid.' I first thought about using Ko, since it's gender neutral outside of names and sounds like 'kid' a bit, but decided not to since this is a name, and 'ko' is only used at the ending of women's names (so it might be read Karatette or Karatella, sorta!)

What I decided on was "Bouzu." Bouzu (or bozu) is a word for 'boy,' but it also can be a way to refer to a buddhist priest. I thought this suited the post-boot zen Karate Kid pretty well! I couldn't find a word that suited 'kid' better, I hope this is a good substitute.

Hope someone found this interesting or informative. And any requests for other names? I may not be a master of Japanese yet, but I have my trusty dictionaries to help!

Cool!

How about Invisible Kid or Brainiac 5? Hey! Why not do them all for us.

Do something silly and fannish for Brainiac 5? Why, whatever would make you think I'd enjoy a thing like that?



Actually, I'd thought about writing Brainiac in Japanese before... since "Brainiac" is a kind of made up word, I have to either find a Japanese equivalent (the top option, "Tensaijin 5," or "Geniusman 5") or write it by pronunciation as a foreign word, the bottom option ("Burainiakku 5," or Brainiac 5.) I think the bottom option would be more realistic as a choice if it ever went to Japan... has the Legion been published in Japan? American comics aren't all that popular over there, from what I hear... anyway!



This one was hardest... the only word in Japanese that I could find for invisible was basically "Not seen," which while literally true, doesn't look as cool... The "kid" in this case was "seinen," but I changed it to "shounen" just now after thinking about it a while.



And I did Andromeda and Supergirl while I was at it! (hey, that sounded kinky)
Andromeda in Japanese is a foreign import word, so like Brainiac, I wrote it in katakana, the 'pronunciation' written language for foreign and strange words. There is no unique Japanese word for Andromeda...
Superman has been published in Japan, and in Japan it's simply written "Suupaaman," or "Superman" for pronunciation. So the first Supergirl I wrote followed this, "Suupaa Shoujo" or Super Girl. ("Suupaa" is also the word for supermarkets... aheh.)
The second is just a more Japanese version, "Chou Shoujo," which also means "Super-girl."

That is interesting and informative Mearl. Please continue, if you have the time.

I would have thought that The Legion would be the sort of book that would be popular in Japan, the premise at least. Teenagers battling disorder and evil in a sci fi setting... Maybe the western art style is just not popular there?

I did do a search a few months back, looking for some evidence of Japanese Legion fandom. There was one guy with a website summarizing the issues - I e-mailed him and invited him to LW, but no response. Never found anything else on the internet.

I only went into two comic book stores when I was in Tokyo, but even though they were pretty big and had multiple floors there wasn't a single sign of an American comic anywhere. I know that Spiderman was actually adapted to a more 'manga' style when it was brought over to Japan, but I don't think that's common. American comics aren't very often read over there in comparison with domestic works.

Superman's well known, there's parodies of him in a lot of different comedy series. And I've seen X-men themed 'doujinshi' or fan comics. But that could just as easily be from the movies.

I think since Japan has such a large domestic comic base, with a lot more variety in stories than in America, it's difficult to market American comics there. Also, I think American comics tend to come across as a little watered-down when compared to some Japanese comics.

That doesn't mean Legion *hasn't* been translated, though. I've heard of (haven't seen) that American comics tend to only be sold in small specialty shops. If the Legion were really translated into Japanese, odds are they'd all either be re-named to fit Japanese conventions or their codenames would all be treated as foreign words in katakana... maybe even "karate" in "karate kid." Just as Chinese characters are pretty popular in the US for decorative purposes, English and foreign words are considered exotic and 'cool' over there. The names I'm coming up with are literally correct, but probably wouldn't sell in Japan...

I'll try to come up with some more later! Thanks for your response!

Mearl, cool topic! Do some more later please!

Hiya! A whole bunch this time!

To explain further (man, I love reading my own words) what I'm doing is translating what I can and transliterating what I can't, but probably if the comic were released in Japan they'd just use a transliteration too. For instance, one of my favorite characters in a Japanese comic is a sage/monk whose name is translated "Inside-Clouds Sage" but I always call him Unchuushi, since that's how his name is transliterated... anyway.


Here's two Superboys, how it'd be written in the comic (since I know at least Superman is released) and how it'd be translated, I think! I've been having trouble deciding between two forms of 'boy/young male,' the shounen that's in the first 'boy' and the seinen in the second. Shounen is for young boys and younger teens, and seinen for older teens and young 20-somethings. Since most of the Legion characters are on the cusp of this, it's hard to decide which is more appropriate... I ended up deciding that someone would probably want to be called seinen more at that age, anyway. Aheh.
But I think of Superboy as younger, so I included both the first, younger 'shounen' and the later older 'seinen.' If you think of the Legionnaires as younger, just take the two second characters I've put on the 'boy lad kid' names and change them to the first set here!


Sun Boy. This one was pleasantly straightforward. You got sun, you got boy, you're set!
I ended up deciding to make this "Sun Boy" as the younger characters instead--if you noticed the change, that's why. I did it to fit the girl Legionnaires' "shoujo" mostly.


Saturn Girl. Another easy one. For 'girl' I've been using the word "shoujo" which does kind of imply someone younger the same way "shounen" does, but the older equivalent "jousei" I've only heard in reference to women, not older girls.
The characters for Saturn mean "earth star." Weird, huh?


Phantom Girl had two choices, but since one word for 'ghost' is also a word for 'monster,' I picked the prettier word.


Gah. This seriously tested my (really really weak) Japanese skills. I'm still not sure I phrased it correctly. "Matter-Eater" was hard to write with Japanese grammar. It ended up being more like "Matter Eating-Capable Boy." I might rewrite this one sometime to try to make it less awkward.


I know two characters for "dawn," so I tried them both.

Ah, oh yeah. I looked in the YahooJapan auction site for American comics, and while I found a few pages of them for sale (enough that there was a section on it, not enough that there were lots of sections the way there are for Japanese comics) I didn't see anything Legion. Most of what I saw was X-Men, Wildstorm stuff, and Batman or Superman.

This is really cool, Mearl! I'd love to see more!

These are great, Mearl!

Yeah -- isn't A-Ko (of "Project A-Ko" fame) supposed to be the daughter of Superman and Wonder Woman?

I think I remember reading something like that, although I never really got into Project A-ko (it was shown on the sci-fi channel several years back, and that's all I know of it!)

I'm going to make some more names soon, just been busy with school and things. I've also decided to change the boy's names' ending to 'shounen'... although the implication is younger and therefore somewhat unsuited to the characters, so is the word "boy," after all... so it'd probably be a better translation.

Requests:

Timber Wolf
Sensor
Princess Projectra
Ferro

Your wish is my command!


Timber Wolf was really easy, just "forest" and "wolf," which are even both words I know off the top of my head.


Literally just the character for "Iron." It'd fit on his shirt, at least!


Sensor is hard... I decided instead of convoluted conjugation like poor ME-Lad got, I'd just be creative. The top version is Sense (as in, 5 senses) and Woman, but the 'woman' could just be seen as 'female.' The main reason I liked that was because it could be pronounced as "Kan'nyo," which I think sounds really cool. Aheh.


Projectra is even harder! The pronunciation part was easy, at least. Since it's a completely made-up word, I don't feel sooo guilty about making up a word/name to equal it.
Projector in Japanese is "projection" "device." Projectra is a twisted form of "projector" to make it a girl's name. So I took the "projection" (first two characters up there) and then instead of "device," I made it a girl's name by adding "ko." This third character is the same one I rejected way back when for Karate Kid's "kid," since it has that feminine sound to it. So Princess Projectra became "Eishako-hime," a very feminine and totally made-up sounding name. Maybe instead of the Japanese "Princess" at the end, though, I should have transliterated "Princess" from English too... oh well.

These are great! Thanks, MD!

This isn't Legion-related, but folks interested in Japan's comics industry may want to check out The Floating Girl, a mystery by Sujata Massey. Plenty of info and an excerpt here.

Nightcrawler, pretty please.