German subtitles are writing him Ruffy. It is the English Internet that writes Luffy. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/OnePieceMonkeyDLuffy
And sadly even 1000+ episodes listening to Japanese have barely taught me anything.
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Ruffy is still an interesting choice, by default, does that read like roofy in German, or like roughy?
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like roofy
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I have a few more names that are translated differently in German than English.
German: Lorenor (Zoro)
English: Roronoa (Zoro)
From Apothecary Diaries
- Rifa vs Lihua
- Rihaku vs Lihaku
- 楼蘭 → ロウラン → Rouran (de) → Loulan (en)
So I take it there are two variants and German translations use the Romaji spelling or are at least more likely, too. Perplexity suggests this may be because “Germans in particular are used to reading almost phonetic spellings, so “Romaji” feels like normal name spelling to them.”
I am not sure because I mostly notice this with L/R sounds and this is specifically how English and German differ around the pronunciations of these two letters.
When I listened to the Japanese VA’s pronunciations, I cannot really tell the letters apart. It could be both Luffy and Ruffy to my ears.
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I wonder if Luffy was chosen to avoid similarities to “roofie,” the street name of the problematic drug
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Yeah, it’s kind of an in-between sound, could fall either way, but tends to be more like r I think.
But that’s not really what I was focusing on. In English, apparently unlike German, Luffy and Ruffy have u pronounced like “rough”, which is very distinct from u as in “Rupert”. It’s also a weird choice since I think most people would read Rufi and get it right. (Maybe not Lufi).
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Would probably have to spell it “Loofy”.
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Oh that sounds weird to my ears.
I forgot one that is also written very differently:
Usopp becomes Lysop in German. This is the one character where I really can’t wrap my head around the difference.
For reasons I don’t remember, the topic of animals that have become verbs came up today. For example: to parrot, to hound, to hare off, to horse/monkey/swan about, to badger, to pig out, to outfox, to wolf down, to weasel, etc.
My wife, who likes to read books in their native language when she can, said she recently encountered the French verb ‘papillionner’, literally ‘to butterfly’. I don’t think this exists in English but she had no trouble at all understanding the meaning, and as far as I can tell the verb came from the animal rather than the animal being named after the verb.
So, I’m curious. Are there any animals that have become verbs that you particularly like? Any language, including English, acceptable but bonus points if the direct translation doesn’t exist in English (posting the meaning is optional or can be left as a guessing game)!
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Only anecdotal family usage “Du bist am rumkatzen”–usually referring to taking up a lot of space on the couch.
“Geiern”-- Geier = vulture. Geiern would refer to “impatiently watching” with a decidedly negative connotation. Like a vulture waiting for something to die.
“einigeln”. Igel = Hedgehog. Refers to curling up trying to protect yourself from something be it cold, other people …
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I think that’s accounted for by “flit” in English. There’s also “social butterfly”, but I can’t think offhand of other butterfly based behavioural metaphors.
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‘Hobby butterfly’ as well, flitting between projects.
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Nothing immediately came to mind for Japanese. Not sure it really counts, but you can add a verb and a particle to some animal nouns and get some results. Like 鴨にする, which literally means to make someone a duck, and loosely means to fool or use someone, use them as bait, or similar. Or 猫かぶり, literally put on a cat, meaning to pretend to be innocent. Last example, 鯖を読む, literally read mackerel, meaning to misrepresent numbers.
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We have Dogging.
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