Monthly Archives: May 2016

Road of Resistance (BABYMETAL Song) — My Translation

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I actually wasn’t sure if it was worth doing a translation Road of Resistance, as it has been around for a while and there are probably a lot of translations of this song already. But its lyrics are pretty straight forward and so for the sake of completeness, I went ahead and did one. It was probably the easiest song on METAL RESISTANCE to translate, along with Meta Taro, of course.

With this post, I have now finished translating all of the songs of the International version of METAL RESISTANCE that are in Japanese: From Dusk Till Dawn and THE ONE are both in English. It’s tempting to now go and start translating the songs from BABYMETAL’s first album, but like Road of Resistance, there are probably a lot of translations of those songs already…

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Amore (BABYMETAL Song) — My Translation

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I had thought that Amore was going to be pretty easy to translate but as it turns out, more than any other track on METAL RESISTANCE, Amore is packed full of beautiful, poetic language. As I’m sure you can appreciate, this makes it rather vague and therefore hard to understand at times: I probably ended up spending about as much time on Amore as I did on GJ!, mainly because I rewrote many lines several times. Even now, I’m not convinced I’ve got the translation down pat, but it goes without saying that I’m reasonably happy with it, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting it. [^_^]

A point of interest is that in Japanese, Amore is subtitled 蒼星, which means “blue star” or “blue planet” and obviously refers to the Earth. This suggests that this song is just as much about the Earth as it is about love.

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GJ! (BABYMETAL Song) — My Translation

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As I had feared, the BLACK BABYMETAL songs on METAL RESISTANCE were both very difficult to translate. In the case of GJ!, it took me a long time just to decide what it was even about! It mentions trains, mosh pits, stores and breakdowns and I couldn’t for the life of me find what the connection was. But I think that this song is simply about going to a big sale at something like a department store, an experience which is likened to being in the audience of a heavy metal concert. A fairly good analogy, isn’t it? [^_^]

One important thing to keep in mind: GJ! features a lot of English words, which I decided to leave as is (they are the italicized words). They generally fit the flow of the text well, with one exception. But you can read more about that in the notes below. Yes, that’s right, for the first time I’ve added notes to one of my translations, because I felt parts of it would be hard to fully understand without some kind of explanation. The notes are marked by square brackets (for example, [1]).

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Sis. Anger (BABYMETAL Song) — My Translation

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Of all the METAL RESISTANCE songs, the ones that seemed the most challenging to translate were the two BLACK BABYMETAL ones. Well, I finally decided to have a crack at one of them. As the title may suggest, Sis. Anger has a lot of strong words and the temptation was there to use profanity in the translation. I decided to avoid that and I think the translation still works. There are, however, a couple of things that perplexed me.

The first is the chorus; for some reason, some of the lines are in quotation marks (for example, “Enough already. Oi! Hey!”). The only way I can make sense of this is that MOI MOI are not actually saying this to the person they are addressing in the song, but rather this is what they want the person to shout out with them (in order to help them straighten out their attitude). Otherwise, I would have translated that part as “Quit fooling around. Oi! Hey!” or something like that.

The other thing that perplexed me was the very end of the song. I’m not really confident about the line Trying to suck-up? The actual Japanese line is ゴマすり, which is a person who sucks up, but the context was difficult for me to grasp. My guess is that MOI MOI say this because they realize the person they are addressing in the song is only feigning to have fixed the problem with their attitude. Hence the following two lines, where MOI MOI show that they are up for the challenge. But again, I may be mistaken.

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