“koto” is not “mono”: YOI mistranslations abound

fencer-x:

YOI is a great series, and it has a great fandom. But in their enthusiasm, it seems some fans have taken to playing armchair translators, encouraged by posts rightfully pointing out mistranslations in the official subs to try and find errors of their own where there are none.

Two posts have propagated mistranslations in the past 24 hours that I’ve seen, though there are probably more, and I was confused when I got asks about it, wondering if there was a mistranslation, until I saw the offending posts for myself (here and here). To the OPs of these posts: thanks. Thanks for spreading misinformation in a fandom already rife with it. To the people who reblogged those posts: I’m sorry. In the future, be very VERY suspicious of any Japanese translations those posters give.

Let’s discuss what it’s actually supposed to say.

“KOTO” is not “MONO”: Japanese 101

Now, Japanese is a fun language. It’s difficult for some, easy for others. But it has lots of quirks that sometimes don’t make sense to new speakers of the language, and one of them is in the translations of the words koto and mono.

Both of these words mean thing. But they do not mean the same type of ‘thing’.

Mono is a concrete thing. A ‘thing’ you can touch. If you want to say “This is mine”, you can say “Boku no mono da” [I-possessive thing is] (among other variations, but you get the picture).

Koto, though? Koto is a more abstract thing. You can’t touch a ‘koto’. It’s used often in grammatical constructions as part of a larger fragment of a sentence, not as a word in itself. It’s used to form gerunds, for example (aruku–> walk, aruku koto–> walking). And when it’s coupled with a noun, it can mean things like about (boku no koto, dou omoimasu ka?–> about me, how do you think? [What do you think about me/How do you feel about me?]).

But very often, it’s something of an intensifier, to indicate the noun it’s attached to and everything associated with it. You can say “kimi ga suki” for ‘I like you’, but if you say ‘kimi no koto ga suki’, you aren’t saying ‘I like your things’ but rather ‘I like you and everything about you, everything that makes up you’. This is also why you’ll often see ‘XYZ no koto ga…’ as a short preface to a love confession, because suki for love comes right after it usually in such situations.

So what does this have to do with anything?

Well, in the ending scene of episode 9, Yuuri says the following to Victor:

引退まで、僕のことお願いします！

intai made, boku no koto onegaishimasu!

Let’s get one thing straight: Crunchyroll did NOT translate this correctly. Apparently they added coach in there, and as you can see, it’s nowhere in that Japanese 😛 It’s a VERY liberal translation and one that was uncalled for IMHO.

Yuuri literally says: “Until [my] retirement, please do me-and-all-about-me”

okay STOP SNICKERING it’s not that kind of ‘do me’ XDD

onegaishimasu is a stock phrase in Japanese that literally means ‘please do [it]’ but is more shorthand for ‘please/I’m counting on you/thanks for doing this for me’.

Yuuri is asking Victor to continue to take care of him/look after him–and ‘him’ in the sense of ‘me and all that I am, everything about me’–until he retires.

That’s it.

He’s not asking Victor to ‘be mine’, because koto does not mean thing in that way. It seems that some of these mistranslations mixed up koto and mono or just didn’t realize you can’t use koto to mean a tangible thing.

tl;dr – “Please take care of me/look after me until I retire” is what he said, not “Please be mine until I retire”

Please please don’t try to point out translation errors like this unless you’re a professional (and if either of the people who did this are actually professional translators? Yiiiiiikes). If you’re concerned about a translation, ask someone who does this for a living. I know there are a few of us in fandom–I’m N1, translate scientific content as well as manga for a living, and have been living in Japan for 10 years now.

I’d really appreciate it if people could signal boost this, since the original posts have something like 5000 notes. That’s 5000 people who trust people not to spread misinformation through their faulty understanding of a complex language and have been betrayed _o_