[Übersetztdildo] Watashi to Watashi: Futari no Lotte TV (1991) - 01

Raws from this release
Timings by Sub-RoRo
Translation by Perevodildo

Well, I had to take quite a detour before coming to translate this. Never heard of it until the Lucy-May debacle, then watched just to make sure we've picked a better show (which we eventually had to abandon anyway)
Spoiler: we didn't really pick a better show. I was initially bored by a seemingly banal concept of twins getting separated at birth, all the way until I fell in love with this series. So bucolic. So charming. So bona fide pure and innocent. Really deserves to be considered a sister series to World Masterpiece Theatre. My respect, otherwise huge enough already, for any anime with classical music in it, went through the roof after this one. But because the only video I have is such a dross, some pre-historic DivX5 mp3 .avi VHS(?) 480p encode, I figured there's no reason to sidetrack the guy who suggested this in the first place from his own current endeavors of scavenging terrorist cult anime, neither to offer my translation for checking to any other dork, because who in their sound mind would ever wanna get embroiled in a series that is, to say the least, not exactly the looker, am I right? Long story short, I proceeded to dying on this hill by myself.
No! This is actually not nearly enough rambling about the video. This avi is so shit, I have to reencode everything into h264 just for subbing purposes because I need to constantly jump back and forward through it, preferably without seeing the gray screen every time I do so. Moreover, the spectrogram on it looking like this - means no dice for any keyframe snapping. If and (hopefully) when a proper video comes to light, the subs would additionally require a ton of major retiming work, as in the current version, some episodes only have the opening, some - only the ending.
Normally, in this section, I put some interesting TL notes, explanations for puns and such, but... Firstly, nobody fucking cares, and secondly, they are usually a whole bunch of nasty spoilers.
So, either way, I'm doing this as a diversion from another 90-eps series that's draining my life away. Truth be told, my commitment to this series is rather 50/50. Maybe because nobody wants it, seeing how nobody bothered to procure a proper video. Maybe because I can't have a full commitment to everything I do.
You wield the power to change it, though. ¯\(ツ)/¯
The biggest amount of tomfoolery here has been around choosing the names in translation. Some I left intact in german, because they don't have english analogs, or said analogs sound like a nail screeching on the glass, when you also hear them pronounced in japanese, distorted in a cardinally opposite direction. Some I borrowed from english translation of the original book, because that translation is verdammt feuer.
In fact, the translation of that book is so 🔥 I occasionally just end up copy-pasting whole lines from it into the sub, only sometimes pruning the baby-talk, since the girls are depicted as though they are 6 y.o. in the book and 12 in anime, even though they're supposed to be 9/10 respectively. The moral of the story is, if you ever happen to actually watch this sub and think to yourself, "damn, this translation solution is ingeniously groß" - without a second thought, ascribe this merit to Cyrus Books.
All in all, it saves me a shitton of time. Another shitton of time is saved by the arabic subs from Sub-RoRo. Whereas their translation is mostly worthless and about half of lines are guessed wrong, the timings are workable. Also, I get bangers such as every now and then
Erm... What are you looking at? That's the last line of description, my friend, ain't no weird confessions here, they are all hidden in the text blob above. Make sure not to enjoy it too much all at once, since episode 2 is unlikely to come out in this decade. Auf wiedersehen.

AniDB | DDL | Sub files only