Sorry it took me such an incredibly long time to get around putting this together. Here are some notes about the translation in the previous posts, including a list of lines I most likely got wrong (please correct me if you can), as well as comments on Akari's letters, Takaki's train trip, the distance between them, the funny animals in Akari's book, and a few other things.

Akari's letters

You probably noticed how her letters all begin with some kind of observation about the season—the heat in summer, the momiji in autumn, the snow in winter... This is actually the traditional opening to any Japanese letter: it is said to be improper to state one's business up front without this seasonal introduction as a mood-setting reference to a common, everyday experience. Of course, the 四季 four seasons and their traditional features, are quite significant throughout the movie, but Akari's formulas are nothing out of the ordinary. And neither is her use of formal speech in writing: addressing her friend as “Tohno Takaki-sama” as she does in her first letter, for example, is not at all surprising, though perhaps slightly distant. (I hope the less weeaboo of my readers will not mind those honorifics left as is in translation too much. I like fansubs better that way).

By the way, the 2007 hanami season is just around the corner.

On an other note, did you notice that Akari's last name, 篠原 Shinohara, is the maiden name of Shinkai Makoto's wife, who voiced the female part of Kanojo to kanojo no neko and the original version of Hoshi no koe? Also, when was the last time you wrote a letter to a friend in longhand?

Takaki's train trip

The Japanese have a very complicated but (usually) very efficient railway network, and they use it a lot (most employees in urban areas commute to work on the train, as driving in often not an option). They are in excess of 3 millions everyday passing through Shinjuku station alone, where Takaki arrives from the Odakyuu line.

Shinkai's depiction of this trip is quite true-to-life, and will certainly strike a chord with anyone used to train travels, especially in Japan, and especially if they have faced their infrequent but oh-so-frustrating malfunction. It is also quite accurate, which makes it easy to follow Takaki in his every steps.

Follow the pink and blue dots starting from Shinjuku to track his trail.

That may seem like a long and winding road to reach Akari's station, which lies only about 80 kilometers away, and I must say I was a little surprised that it involved so many changes, so I looked it up. The Jorudan Norikae-Annai service tells us that one can normally travel from Shinjuku to Tochigi in a little more than an hour, these days, by the Spacia Kinugawa express train. It was only set up recently, however (March 2006 says Wikipedia), so the option wasn't available at the time of the story, and neither was the Shounan-Shinjuku line (operating since 2001; it's amazing how precise the railroad-related articles on Japanese Wikipedia always are: thanks to all the 鉄道ヲタ typing this ^^).

I'm not sure what the time of the story exactly is, actually. The synopsis from the Cinema Rise website says it begins in the first half of the 1990s. Some posters to the Animesuki thread have claimed that the segment is set in 1995 or perhaps 1996, but I couldn't find a reliable source for either claim. 1994 sounds like a more reasonable bet to me, though, since March 4th, 1994 was a Friday (and that's the day of the week you can read on Takaki's alarm clock and on the blackboard).

A view of Oomiya station, just not on a snowy evening.

Wontaek, who was quite vocal on various blogs about his (or his wife's) dissatisfaction with the movie, questioned, among other things, whether actual trains would stop for extended periods of time in the middle of nowhere, suggesting that much of the storytelling suffered from overplayed dramatization. Well, I don't know about JR trains, but in France, it does happen now and then. And when it does, the announcements sound nowhere near as apologetic :-).

Speaking of the announcements, by the way, they're quite typical, so I used in the translation what I thought were standard formulas in English for similar situations, only trying to preserve some variations from one message to the next (not sure about the English, though—all I can guarantee is that the corresponding lines on the French track are quite authentic, as I hear them pretty often). A literal translation might sound mildly amusing to Western ears, though. For example, the line at 12:27 says お急ぎのところ大変ご迷惑をおかけいたしますが、今しばらくお待ち下さいますよう、お願いいたします, which literally means something like “We cause you considerable trouble at a time when you are in a honorable hurry, but we humbly beg you to be so kind as to grace us with your waiting a moment.” More or less.

About their distance

Another common gripe with the segment, as expressed by jpmeyer for example (see also the answer of cardcaptor to Kurogane in this comment), is that “the distance between Akari and Takaki seems trivial.” I think that's because you Americans live in too big of a country :-).

The distance between Takaki's home in Tokyo and Akari's in Tochigi is about the same as the distance from the place where I lived in 1995 (I was 12 at the time, so pretty much the same age as Takaki) in the Paris suburbs, and a town like Amiens. I don't think I could have thought of going to such a remote place alone. It may not be very far in reality, but it's certainly far enough to be nothing more than a name on a map that you sometimes hear about in History class. It feels far away, and I thought Shinkai rendered that feeling beautifully.

Come to think of it, a very good friend of mine moved to Lille about a year ago, and I still haven't taken the train ticket to go meet him, even though it hardly takes over an hour to get there, if you look at things rationally. But again, it feels far, I guess. Well, it's not like he's my girlfriend either :-), but Takaki and Akari didn't have that kind of relationship at the start. Not consciously anyway.

After Takaki moves to Kagoshima, even jp agrees that it's really getting a bit far, at least by Japanese standards:

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of geography, I should mention that Katsushika is a ward in North-Eastern Tokyo (to the North-East of Ueno).

The Anomalcaris and friends

There were several questions in the comments about the Cambrian bestiary that is alluded to in the sequence about Akari's prehistory book. As Scottie and I pointed out earlier, the Anomalocaris, the Hallucigenia and the Opabinia are three extinct animals from the Cambrian period (which is well-known for the impressive amount of species that appeared at the time—a phenomenon referred to as the Cambrian explosion), 540—490 million years ago and hence roughly 4 billion years after the formation of Earth. Fossils of all three species can be found on the Burgess Shale.

Here's a picture. As you can see, the Hallucigenia model that Akari makes with her fries is quite resembling, and the Opabinia does indeed have five eyes.

An Anomalocaris hunting down an Opabinia, with Hallucigenia in the back.

And now for something completely different, Anatoliy rightfully observed that the name of cat that Akari pats in the segment is a reference to Shinkai's lovely short movie Kanojo to kanojo no neko, where the cat is called Chobi and her “girlfriend” Mimi. This is the corresponding screencap.

Chobi and Mimi's circumstances.

Lines I got wrong (or not at all)

Here's a collection of lines that I probably heard wrong, since the Japanese is unnatural or doesn't really compute. Some of them have already been corrected by Ｌａｎさん in these comments (let me reiterate my thanks for this), but if you can help with other lines, I would be very grateful for you to do so. m(-_-)m

0:58.「桜花抄」

I'm not sure of what could be a good translation for the title of this piece. The character 抄 means something like “extract” or “excerpt”, and is used in words such as 詩抄, an anthology of poetry, and 抄本, an abridged copy of a book. I guess the right word might be something like “kerasiology” (i.e. “anthology”, with the flowers being cherry blossom), but that's a bit abstruse.

2:22.「三学期っぽいです」

Is this right? What I hear sounds more like っぱい, and it seems to be a bit of an unusual context for っぽい.

3:27.「ものすごい樹霜日で学校に通っています」

As Ｌａｎ pointed out, this should read 重装備 heavy equipment (especially clothing), rather than 樹霜日 (day of rime). In other words, Akari is not talking of a rime-covered landscape, but of the heavy clothing she has to have on when going to school.

3:45.「？？——でも行いでもきついぜ」

I just don't get what Takaki's classmates are talking about before Takaki butts in about going to Tochigi.

4:25.「電車に乗って会いに行けるような郷里がなくなってしまう」

This is not about 郷里 “a hometown” they can no longer return to, but 距離 “the distance” that will no longer allow them to 会う “meet” each other. It makes so much better sense that way that I can't believe I dug up that uncommon word 郷里.

6:17.「私の駅まで来てくれるのはとても助かるのです」

Well, I'm pretty sure that is what Akari says, but my translation is probably a bit off-mark. How would you translate 助かる in this context? “It's great that you can come” doesn't really capture that meaning, does it?

7:20.「昨日一晩で４０億年分読んじゃった——どの辺り？」

My translation, “I read 4 billion years' worth last evening,” seems to have confused several readers. I believe there's a play on words here: ４０億年分 literally means “the part of 4 billion years,” so it probably refers to 4 billion years of the history of Earth in this case. But I think it can be used to mean “a lot” (i.e. “I read enough for the next 4 billion years”). That translation was an attempt at preserving that wordplay, but it seems I failed to convey either meaning... orz.

8:34. Announcement at Shinjuku station

I can't seem to make out the exact words of the announcement at Shinjuku, especially the bit about JR lines. At any rate, they probably refer to the Keiyou line, not “Keio” as I had written.

9:10.「この前の子、どうだった？——誰？——ほら？？の——えっ、趣味悪い」

What does the girl on the bench say, here?

11:18.「到着が1０分ほど遅れております」

Yet another announcement. Do they really say “10 minutes late,“ or is that 80, or something?

13:50.「見たこともないような雪の孤影も」

The “lonely figure of snow” just doesn't sound right (and my page is the first Google hit for 雪の孤影, which is definitely suspicious). Is that really what he says? I guess not, but I can't find the right words.

18:25.「なにもない孤影で」

Same problem as before.

22:52.「中３年間生きてきたことすべてを分かち合えた」

中３年間 doesn't mean anything, does it? Well, even if it does, my translation evasively eschews the actual meaning, which I don't understand. I might have said something like “throughout 3 years,” but then I don't see which 3 years he's referring to.

23:25.「僕たちの前にはいまだ強大すぎる人生が、茫漠とした時間がどうしようもなく横たわっていた」

Does he really say 強大すぎる人生? I feel like my understanding of the whole sentence is approximate at best.

Some final notes

I think this wraps up Bikasuishin's coverage of Oukashou. Thank you very much for all the kind words I've been receiving about the bit of work I put into this, even though this was really not such a big deal. Let me just add a few further comments.

First, I was not informed of Dattebayo's re-time and re-encode of my translation, as part of their YHBT initiative. Actually, I hadn't heard of this group before. Anyway, they seem to have done a beautiful job, and they were considerate enough to link to this site for more information, so I'm rather grateful for what they did. It looks like they succeeded in bringing this movie to a new audience, which is nice.

Second, some words of clarification are probably in order concerning the French GGF fansub that was discussed here. In French, I guess. Il semble qu'une petite flamewar ait éclaté à ce propos sur ce site (il doit falloir s'enregistrer pour lire). Je ne l'ai découvert qu'il y a peu de temps, et j'y ai alors signalé que Vinvin, alias Ippo, responsable de l'équipe GoGoFansub m'avait contacté pour s'excuser de l'indélicatesse en question, et me proposer une collaboration en vue de sortir une traduction française de meilleure facture, proposition que je n'ai pas refusée. En ce qui me concerne, donc, l'affaire est close : je n'ai pas l'habitude de nourrir des rancœurs pour de si petites choses. Voilà, voilà. Je m'excuse ici aussi pour avoir tardé à apporter ces précisions.

Third, you can't really say that the theatrical premiere of the movie elicited a strong reaction among English-speaking bloggers, for obvious reasons, but Cardcaptor was lucky enough to be in Tokyo for the screening, and he leaves a summary and a few comments here. I refrained from reading most of this article for fear of spoilers myself, but his general opinion isn't terribly enthusiastic, as far as I can tell. But then he didn't really like the first segment so much to begin with.

And lastly, there were two Youtube links I wanted to share. The first one is the official music video for the re-release of One more time, one more chance. It features short sequences from all three parts of the movie, and some people on the Animesuki found this much to be spoilerific, so you're warned again. I wonder if a higher-res capture can be found somewhere. The video below, on the other hand, was put up several months back, but I only discovered it the yesterday and it made me smile.