Another sad example of nuance being lost in the localization. If you're only paying attention to the subs, his confusion about the word "owner" might make it seem like he's balking at the concept of OWNING Pandamon, which will give you a different impression than what was probably intended.

The word they're saying in japanese is something like 'saponushi' which to me sounds like it's meant to be written as サポ主 a combination of Sapotama (the eggphone things) and Mochinushi which can be translated as owner or proprietor. So he's asking if he's the person who owns Pandamons Sapotama. And the show has invented the fake made up word of "saponushi" to refer to that concept.

Very much difficult to translate that into a single comprehensible english word. But using "owner" might convey the wrong impression to an english audience that's only looking at the subtitles and doesn't have an ear for the japanese language that they're actually speaking out loud.

If I wanted to be literal, maybe I'd have used "support owner" instead of just owner? Then the confusion of "I don't know what a support owner is" would make a little bit more sense. The subtitlers decided to just ignore the combination word aspect of the term probably for practicality reasons. I just worry about the way the english speaking audience will get the wrong impression about the story because of that choice.

To note, he called him 親分 "oyabun"

which is very uhh.... Yakuza coded =P

one of those little bits of nuance that is impossible to translate properly

Panda GUMI?

Yeah, straight up the yakuza x3

Inspired translation choices here

In the first panel Sonic is calling Shadow ニセモノ野郎! "Nisemono yarō" (Sonic calling him yaro is so fucking funny for reasons that are hard to explain). ニセモノ Nisemono is indeed something like "imposter" in this context.

Shadow responds by calling Sonic フェイク"Feiku" which is LITERALLY just the katakana spelling for "fake". So Sonic called Shadow the japanese word for "faker" and Shadow responded by saying Sonic is the fake one USING THE ENGLISH WORD. Hilarious on multiple levels, since Sonic is often the one using english words like that.

This is A: completely accurate in terms of translation since that is literally what they're saying in japanese, "imposter" and "fake". But also B: a fun reference to SA2. In SA2, they have this exact same exchange in the japanese version. Sonic calling Shadow ニセモノ(野郎) "Nisemono (yaro)" which subtitles often translate into "imposter." And Shadow responding with "Imposter? Heh, aren't YOU the fake one here?"

Contrast this against Azure Wind Productions translation

The nuance of what they were saying in japanese gets lost because of the forced reference to the english localization version of SA2 of having Sonic call Shadow "faker." There's no real way to properly convey the fact that Sonic used the japanese word while Shadow used the english loan word, but just translating both ニセモノ AND フェイク as "fake" is objectively the wrong choice. In my opinion.

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Also, is it just me, or is her constantly going 'Mr Tails' feels a bit shoe horned in? Like, it varied from character to character (Amy was just 'Amy', Big was 'Mr Big', ect).

She's been voicing Cream since 2010 so if you're not used to her now I don't think it's gonna happen lol

The whole "mister/miss" thing from Cream always feels extremely awkward because it's a basic bitch translation of her referring to everyone with extremely polite honorifics. In Japanese she always uses "-san" which stands out because most of the cast does not use honorifics when talking to or about each other. And also because you might expect her to maybe call people like Amy "Amy-chan" or Tails "Tails-kun" but nope, everyone is "-san."

She also bows to greet people and uses somewhat formal language as opposed to what you might expect from someone her age, like Charmy whose subtitles are rendered in hiragana even things that should be written in katakana.

Debatably, this is untranslateable into English. But just having her call everyone "mister/miss" is a, in my opinion, really lazy method of communicating that concept in English. It works, but I'm personally not a fan of it because it just disrupts the flow. "Mister" just takes a lot more to verbalize before a name in English compared to the Japanese prefix of "-san" after a name.

Thems the breaks I guess. I just accept it as a translation compromise and try to keep in mind that she's not ACTUALLY calling him "mister Tails." The "real Cream" started calling him "Prower-san" as proper formal Japanese etiquette would expect in referring to someone by their family name, Tails responded that they're close enough that such formalities including the honorific aren't necessary since nobody else uses them, and she responded by calling him "Tails-san" which humorously misses the intention.

Maybe it's just because I'm jaded by seeing "itadakimasu" translated a thousand different times in a thousand different ways. But I'm really starting to feel like it's one of those words that is better left untranslated.

Like. We don't "translate" rendezvous. Or zeitgeist. Or fucking sushi.

Bruh

Those are NOT accurate translations. That is some machine translation bullshit. Sonic is 100% sassing Shadow.

According to my local multi lingual

This is sass. Japanese sass.

The script isn't different. English and Japanese are just different as languages.

Google translate is not a reliable method of translating Japanese text to English. Nuance gets lost. I trust the professional localizers who handle the translation of the series more than I trust Google translate.

Sorry for the quality

In Japanese she's actually saying "I'm Sonic's honey"

ハニ

It's just katakana, they're not using the Japanese word FOR honey like 蜜 "mitsu" or anything like that. She's literally making the sounds "haa" and "knee". So the colloquial intention is that she's saying she is Sonic's "honey" in the romantic sense.

You could argue it's essentially saying the same thing, but as the fucktard in that screenshot is demonstrating: "girlfriend" is a pretty loaded word. And clearly the concept of someone calling themselves someone else's girlfriend against their consent hasn't aged particularly well. But it was pretty common back in the day.

I would argue that in the original japanese, Amy calling herself Sonic's honeybunnybooboobear accomplishes the same thing of demonstrating that she is delusional about her relationship with Sonic, WITHOUT the baggage of designating herself by the romantic title of "girlfriend."

There IS a Japanese word that means girlfriend 彼女 "kanojo" which they COULD have had Amy say. But they didn't. They deliberately had her use the anglo term "honey" instead. The translators decided to change it to girlfriend, either oblivious or apathetic to the fact that the original japanese writing very specifically did NOT use the Japanese term for girlfriend. I personally consider that to be bad localization.

The character profile in Generations IS saying girlfriend ガールフレンド literally "Gārufurendo" again it's katakana. So that one's a pretty straight forward translation. It should be noted that Sonic Generations takes place after Sonic Unleashed and Sonic and the Black Knight, which both end with more or less explicit confirmation that Sonic and Amy were going out on dates. So while it is "self proclaimed" that's just because Sonic is uncomfortable with romantic entanglements at this point. That text is also not in either version of the Sonic X Shadow Generations rerelease, in the rerelease it says "ソニックに憧れて 理想の自分になろうとしている" which is something like she admires Sonic and wants to become her true self.

The English manual from Adventure can be pretty much completely ignored in my opinion, those things are always bullshit.

So overall conclusion: nothing was "amped up" except for the shoddy localization. The localization for Sonic in the mid 2000s was INFAMOUSLY bad (I will never forgive them for "goodbye forever Shadow the Hedgehog"). And the only issue with Amy calling herself his girlfriend is that it's been twenty years and everyone's a lot more of a stupid humorless pussy now, because that WASN'T a big deal back then.