Talk:Emergency Everyday/Music

Stage 3 Theme Name

Uh, it just occurred to me that there's lots of ambiguity with the むげん in むげんせかい. It could be either 無限 (infinite), 夢幻 (illusory) or 无現 (unreal). Given that I'm pretty sure this might have been intentional on Daijin's end, is there a way to apply this to the English translation? ――Popfan ^{(talk/contribs)} 15:41, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

AH... MUGEN PUNS... MY NEMESIS...

Trying to cover all three meanings would probably come out clumsily in English. (also i... don't know how you'd cover all three at once either :V)

I guess the boring-but-practical option would be to just pick one and put the others in a translation note. Alternately... one could preserve the ambiguity by just leaving it as "mugen"? eg. "Mugen World". ...Which would obviously be a huge faux pas in other translation contexts, but "mugen" already comes up a lot in Len'en (obvious example: Mugenri), so maybe it'd work here?

(also the original title's hiragana usage feels kinda reminiscent of JP retro video game text-- to me at least?-- so i feel like stylizing the title as "mugen world" or "mugen_world" in lowercase would look cool. but that's just me lol) Gilde (talk) 04:22, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

If anything, retro game English text tends to be in all-caps, but that doesn't really convey the retro effect unless you use a certain 8x8 tile font. Anyway, maybe Releska has any extra ideas if he sees this. I don't really know what to think. ――Popfan ^{(talk/contribs)} 05:29, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

I agree that the lack of kanji makes it difficult to interpret exactly how we should interpret the title. In my opinion, though, I think the way we have it translated at the moment captures the essence of the song itself - looking at the music comments, it's clear that the main idea behind this theme is repetition - the same melodic material is repeated over and over, and it's based on the idea of 'perpetual/eternal history.' With that in mind, I think it's called 'infinite world' because the world keeps repeating. If you follow the old game metaphor, it's like you reach the end of the screen and loop back around.

I also feel that if they didn't want the title to be interpreted in the most common way (which I think is 無限世界), they would have written specific kanji in. But I only say that because I prefer clarity when writing and translating things, and it's entirely possible that this is a deliberate choice...

Perhaps we can just add a translation note in and leave it at that? Sorry I can't be of much use here. Releska (talk) 06:25, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Oh right. I completely forgot about the comment itself. It does make sense if you look at it that way, though at the same time I still feel like 无現 may be part of it, the 2D world being 无現里, after all. ――Popfan ^{(talk/contribs)} 17:33, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

OH LMAO god i forgot to look at the actual comment too....... thank u releska..... & yeah def. infinite world in that case Gilde (talk) 22:47, 24 June 2017 (UTC)