I’ve decided that my future is in translating the show Ninja Warrior from Japanese to English. Well, perhaps translating is too strong of a word, making shit up would fit the job description better. I’m relatively sure that what is being said by the announcer is not what is written on the screen. Or maybe it is, I’m not sure anyone would notice either way.
Anyway… there is an obvious formula to the whole process, and I think I could become rather expert at manipulating it given a little time. So, in my immensely benevolent current mood I will share with all of you how to write subtitles for Ninja Warrior.
1. Give the ‘ninja warriors’ dumb nicknames. On the show there are everything from the famed ‘Mr. Ninja Warrior’ to the less than cool ‘Monkey.’ So, in order to make a good example of this, we shall call our fictitious ninja warrior ‘Stinky Leopard.’ Its perfect. Totally irrelevant, but it sounds kind of cool.
2. Our ninja warrior makes it to the starting… thingy. He motions to the crowd, trying to pump them up or get some spare change or something, and the announcer (or subtitler?) mentions what the ninja warrior does for a living (as a rule he is either a television personality (which means he won’t make it past the first obstacle), a fisherman of some sort, athlete, or a public official (fireman)). Our ninja warrior will be a garbage man (hence the stinky part of his nickname). Before he can really start the course, the announcer will ask him a rhetorical question.
“Next up is Stinky Leopard, the garbage man from Tokyo. Will he be the one to scale the arduous Mount Midoriama?”
3. Now, for the course itself. While the ninja warriors are doing the obstacles, the subtitles must read like a really obvious statement that was just eaten by a thesaurus. For instance: The Stinky Leopard climbs the warped wall on his third attempt becomes…
“The Stinky Leopard clambers over the thorny warped wall after a multitude of arduous attempts.”
As you can see, we changed the verb into something nominally more obscure, and added ridiculous adjectives to describe the obstacle and in place of just giving the number of times the contested attempted it.
4. But what do you do when the ninja warrior isn’t doing anything interesting? That is, what do you do for the next 12 seconds that the warrior is on an obstacle after you’ve already talked about what was actually happening? That’s when you talk about one of two things: what the ninja warrior has accomplished in previous tournaments, and how he practices.
“Stinky Leopard has a life size Ninja Warrior course totally made of discarded soda cans built in his back yard. He invites all the other competitors to train on it with him.”
That is all.
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