More R-L Translation Oddness. Dunhill, huh?

I enjoyed Hellsing enough that I didn't feel quite done with Japanese vampires. As luck would have it, I had a DVD I'd dug out of a Target discount bin a few years ago and never got around to. It's "Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust".

Vampire Hunter D was one of the first Japanese animation movies I'd seen. It was a crappy thrice copied VHS tape without the most legible of subtitles. After watching many hours of subtitled Japanese, the cadence, if not the meaning, of the language becomes familiar. D introduced a word I'd never seen in blood sucker lore, dampire. Meaning half vampire, probably someone was thinking demi-vampire. Our hero, Vampire Hunter D, is a dampire.

Japanese speakers have an r and l oddness, they just don't recognize a difference. The default is l, but an r like sound will pop up sometimes, depending on the surrounding sounds. In Japanese, the r in dampire becomes an l, but not completely. It almost collapses into an Eastern European rolled r. Which sounds kind of cool, actually.

So I'm watching my Bloodlust DVD, which oddly does not have a Japanese track or a subtitle option, English only. D makes his appearance and is dubbed the "dunpeel" hunter. It takes a few more goes before I realize that the translator must have transliterated the word without any thought to context. Damn, that was annoying.

Written by a native Japanese speaker, I found this quite enlightening.