Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi] with English Subtitles

I am extraordinarily pleased to announce that I've finished up my subtitles for two of the surviving three episodes of Comedy Trio. This is the first time any of Yoshiko Otowa's work has gotten English subtitles. Please check the episodes out here. I also timed everything completely by hand.

As always, I want to make it very clear that I don't know enough Japanese to just bang this out by ear, so this translation was assisted by dictionaries and carefully cross-referenced machine translation. This particular job was especially difficult because the style of dialogue in a live comedy show is much different from a normal scripted drama. People talk over each other, talk during audience noise, don't enunciate, speak too quietly or too far away from the mic, and so on. These subtitles are not perfect, but I really hope they're more good than bad. (I’m gonna be honest, I doubt I'll be subtitling live television again any time soon.)

If anyone out there wants to mess with these, I'm more than happy to provide the raws and my .txt files.

Some TL notes under the cut:

"A Story of Edo Men and Kyoto Women":

• This episode repeatedly references the proverb "The best men are from Edo [Tokyo], the best women are from Kyoto".
• The word "azuma" is also used repeatedly. It means "east", but especially areas of Japan that are east of Kyoto.
• It felt appropriate to include "Kashimashi Musume" in Romaji since it's the name that the Shōji sisters performed under. The song that Kashimashi Musume sings involves a lot of Kansai dialect:
• "Senanda" is an old dialect word that was used as a suffix equivalent to "shinaide" (roughly "did not"/"didn't do").
• "Shintorotorori" refers to the intense and passionate love between a man and a woman. It is the title of a song by Kimie Nihonbashi.
• "Beni-ya" is the word for a shop that sells cosmetics such as rouge [beni] or the proprietor thereof.
• "Sanjukoku" refers to a passenger ship route that traveled up and down the area of Hirakata.
• I'm on the fence about using "country bumpkin" English to indicate that characters are speaking in dialect as a lot of translators do, so for the most part I haven't done it here, but I did put in "thank'y'" to indicate that the word used was "okini", which is Kansai dialect for "thank you".
• In the exchange where Machiko meets her old friend Hanae and introduces her to her husband, the original dialogue was Machiko using the word "taku" (husband) and the sisters misinterpreting it as "takushi [untenshu]" (taxi driver) because they were unfamiliar with the word. I tried to keep the original spirit of the joke while making it make sense in English.

"Today is Moving Day":

• Takeo Fujishima was an enka singer and very much not an actor, which I think is apparent from the way he's so awkwardly shoehorned into a role here.
• Clapping hands is a traditional way to make a contract for payment, deposits, or buying/selling.
• "Amakara Yokocho" (literally "sweet-and-salty alley") is the name of the street where Comedy Trio was set at this time. From what I can gather, little side-streets containing shops that sold various things (usually small restaurants) sprung up post-WWII and were often named "Amakara Yokocho". Some restaurants with this name still operate today, although from the lack of clear information available online, it seems like this name is somewhat dated, and nobody has taken the time to explain the history of it.
• "If you cry, the crows will cry too" are lyrics from the song "Akagi's Lullaby" [Akagi no komariuta] by Shoji Taro.