Pears, apricots and squid on pita bread...a glossary of frequently mistranslated words in JAV titles

branbran726

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It's another name kanji that's been unnecessarily translated. 香 is usually read in a name as [ka].
 

maelstrom9999

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OK found a few more. Chewy.

DVDMS-991 When The Female Boss's Bread Is Too Chewy.

SSIS-243 Aika Yumeno's Chewy Support Luxury That Stimulates Your Five Senses Five Healed Erection Situations That Fill Your Brain With Eros


Looking at the word "healed" in ssis-243, variations of heal, healed and healing appear in about 4K titles. Not generally clear what it means. Besides the above title, here's two more recent ones.

IPIT-031 Dog Girl Who Will Surely Heal You, Ashitaba Yu AV Debut

EBOD-919 Fair-skinned Beauty Busty Healing Mistress And Compliant Hot Spring Affair


Best guess is it is related to "delivery health," a euphemism for either prostitution or just sexual servicing.

Final one. "Irama." Based on the content of the titles, I assume this is a variation of "irrumatio"?

BLOR-184 Aza And A Cute Big Ass Sister Who Works In A Fruit Parlor Actually It Was A Metamorphosis Of De M ... Big Cock Irama, Vulgar Acme Fell By Strangling Copulation

MIAA-572 If You Want To Go On To School, Accept My Throat Boco Irama. -Deep Throating Guy ● Compliant Uniform Beautiful Girl- Nana Maeno

 
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gingergauge

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The English description for Aika Yumeno latest vid (SSIS-435) contains this line: God-friendly Service Makes A Virgin Addicted To Sex In A Month.

What the hell does "God-friendly" supposed to mean?

I'm not a religious man, but I'm pretty sure God has nothing to do with making a virgin addicted to sex, lol. Seems likely something was lost in translation there.
 

ding73ding

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The English description for Aika Yumeno latest vid (SSIS-435) contains this line: God-friendly Service Makes A Virgin Addicted To Sex In A Month.

What the hell does "God-friendly" supposed to mean?

I'm not a religious man, but I'm pretty sure God has nothing to do with making a virgin addicted to sex, lol. Seems likely something was lost in translation there.
Once again, this lost-in-translation is too good to pass up. Let's check it out ... ahhh yes: 神対応

I won't attempt to translate it properly, just explain how auto-translate made "God-friendly" out of it. It certainly is not saying something something is friendly to God. More like something something is friendly and also is so superlicious it's like/related/kinda "not of the human world". Remember Japan is pan-theist so there's human realm, the demon realm and the god (神 kami) realm where a plethora of divine beings exist.

So something along the line of "affectionate/intimate [better translation than "friendly"] services corresponding to [that makes customer feel like he is one of the ] Gods. "
 
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ding73ding

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I need to stop reading and responding to this stupid stupid thread

After a lot of splicing slicing and scrambling I isolated the mystery bytes to be "シコシコ" pronounced shiko shiko. And according to following:


It's ... (I guess) the sound of chewing or fapping. Therefore, in JAV title it mean Aika Yumeno will jerk you off, but auto-translate chose the more "civilian" chewy.

Looking at the word "healed" in ssis-243, variations of heal, healed and healing appear in about 4K titles. Not generally clear what it means. Besides the above title, here's two more recent ones.

IPIT-031 Dog Girl Who Will Surely Heal You, Ashitaba Yu AV Debut

EBOD-919 Fair-skinned Beauty Busty Healing Mistress And Compliant Hot Spring Affair


Best guess is it is related to "delivery health," a euphemism for either prostitution or just sexual servicing.
"Healed" is not such a terrible translation. At least it's not more terrible than other candidate words. The problem is cultural not linguistic.

Japan (or at least in the parallel universe of JAV) believe that libido is a health condition that can be "healed" by ejaculation. So it's not totally ironic. I mean "delivery health" is perhaps NOT a euphemism. There's a kinda-parallel universe that a erect penis is a stress/tension and together with other problems (neck pain? tense muscles? etc) are to be treated in a "healing" session. I know what I'm trying to express is probably impossible for most ppl of the world to process. I am trying to say "delivery health," is (was) real, the customer is getting some kind of health/healing/massage service that may or may not including "healing" the stress in his penis and the healing involve using the girl's hand or mouth or vagina. The "healing" part is real, the ejaculation is optional service that may or may not be needed.

Similar to "healing" you see "salon" or "este" in similar context.

OH... I can think of a better word than "healing": therapeutic. As in "therapeutic shpping", "aroma-therapy" etc. Add to that "horny-therapy".
 

branbran726

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シコシコ [shikoshiko] is 'chewy' specifically when used to describe noodles, and then it's almost always udon. Classically, the ideal udon noodle is smooth on the outside and chewy on the inside. 'Smooth' is [tsurutsuru], 'chewy' is [shikoshiko], and these words are usually used in a pair. The chewiness of udon is also described as its [koshi], which just is the sounds in [shiko] reversed.

I wouldn't try to find significant etymological relationship between [shikoshiko] as 'chewy' and the same sound-word being applied to fapping.

19360_000.jpg 56d869d0.jpg 1556240-948ddec5-5d08-4829-aded-d94ace0b1491.jpg


Looking at the word "healed" in ssis-243, variations of heal, healed and healing appear in about 4K titles. Not generally clear what it means. Besides the above title, here's two more recent ones.

IPIT-031 Dog Girl Who Will Surely Heal You, Ashitaba Yu AV Debut

EBOD-919 Fair-skinned Beauty Busty Healing Mistress And Compliant Hot Spring Affair

The verb in question is 癒す [iyasu], and it can be thought of as meaning 'to make someone feel better'. It is not limited to alleviation of physical distress; it's the verb one might use when listening to a cat purring, or when enjoying a quiet walk in a garden. @ding73ding 's choice of 'therapeutic' is good; 'relaxing' is appropriate, too.

IPIT-031 references a dog-like girl: dogs>pets>relaxing.
EBOD-919 uses the verb in a special case, 癒し系 [iyashi-kei], a word to describe a type of person who makes those around them less stressed with their very presence. It's someone around whom it's just impossible to stay angry. The autotranslator just turns it into 'healing' and applies it to some noun, but [iyashi-kei] exists as its own concept.

The words 'heal' and 'health' look the same in English, but they don't share any of the same characters in Japanese (癒す [iyasu] vs 健康 [kenkou]). It's the latter term that gave rise to Fashion, Hotel, and Delivery Health - this use of a direct translation into katakana ヘルス [herusu] was meant to differentiate these establishments from more normal massage services without using explicit language to do so.

Furthermore, one does not result in the other: saying "I was 癒す'ed, so now I'm 健康." doesn't make sense in Japanese.

Any relation between the porn title mis-translation of [iyasu] as 'heal' and either the actual removal of injuries OR 'health' as a form of sex service, is likely coincidence.

Yes. It saves room on the cover to shorten the word, like 'fellatio' is often shortened to [fera].
The English description for Aika Yumeno latest vid (SSIS-435) contains this line: God-friendly Service Makes A Virgin Addicted To Sex In A Month.

What the hell does "God-friendly" supposed to mean?
神対応 [kami taiou] 'godly treatment' is a word that got popular with events where you'd go meet some idol or celebrity. If they were so nice you wanted to blow your month's paycheck on them, that's [kami taiou]. Lately it's shifted to being used to describe any highly positive customer service or interpersonal experience.

Conversely, if someone make you wonder why you ever wanted to speak to them in the first place, that's 塩対応 [shio taiou] 'salty treatment'. This term also occasionally shows up in titles, where it is sometimes 'salt corresponding', sometimes 'salt-compatible' or 'salt-friendly', but lately it's being translated succinctly as just 'salty'.

Bringing pantheism into the discussion is going too far. There's as much religion to its use as there is when someone says, "This chocolate is just divine!"

.
...I leave this thread alone for a few days, and folks go extrapolating the living daylights out of stuff. I mean, it's great to draw inferences, but it's better to keep things grounded in reality with usage examples.
 
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maelstrom9999

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Alright, thanks again. We're up to 43 entries at the moment. Soon I'm going to ask a mod to sickie the thread and see if they'll do it.
 

maelstrom9999

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Hmm. Doesn't look like anything is mistranslated. It's just a sexual position I did not know the name of.

I kind of like that one, but I'm pretty sure if I tried it I'd pull several muscles and be on my back for a week. Sucks getting old.
 

branbran726

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Some fun things from those links concerning Piledriver:

Wonder If: This is often, but not always, a mistranslation of the actress' name 'Kana'. When [kana] appears at the end of a sentence, 'I wonder if...' is a valid translation. Which is not to say the autotranslator will necessarily get anything else in the title correctly, as this title's wild translation demonstrates.

Ria Mitsuru: Mistranslation of リア充 [ria-juu], an abbreviation of a phrase: リアルが充実してる [riaru ga juujitsu shiteru] 'leading a fulfilling (real) life'. It's evocative of the feelings of jealousy or hate one might hold against someone who seems to be achieving "normal" life goals at a "normal" pace. [ria-juu] is almost always thought of as that goal-state, the assumption being that people who say [ria-juu] are not currently leading a fulfilling life. The title linked above is about getting payback on someone living their best life by fingering the fuck out of them.

[ria-juu]'s translation failures are various: Rear Charge Rear Filled Rear Football or just Rear.

This makes for a troublesome experience for people reading the translated title and imagining ass-centric or anal action from the word "rear", when it's just a coincidence of phonetics.

The [???-juu] construction is also coopted into words like ヲタ充 [wota-juu], 'leading a fulfilling otaku life'.

Manbira: 'Labia'. In this compound word, [man] is from [manko] 'pussy', [bira] is from [hanabira] 'flower petals'.

Tide: the liquid expressed during squirting. The word in question is [shio] 潮, literally hydrological 'tide', but the same character also is used to refer to the spray from a whale's blowhole. It's the 'whale spray' meaning of [shio] that got applied to squirting. As you can see from that title, the autotranslator correctly identifies 潮吹き [shiofuki] as 'squirting', but when [shio] is by itself the translation is mistaken.

JAV creators being the clever folks they are, there is at least one work where they play on the fact that 'squirt fluid' 潮 [shio] and 'salt' 塩 [shio] are homophones.
塩ラーメン [shio ramen] literally 'salt ramen' is one of the most basic flavorings of ramen noodles. So it was only a matter of time before there was a JAV where they season ramen with squirt.

1rct515pl.jpg
 
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maelstrom9999

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Thanks again. Will look those over. One thing I notice is that while the word Mitsuru is in around 60 titles, that full phrase Ria Mitsuru is only in that one title.

I have another one: chestnut. I couldn't resist this one, as the first title is comedy gold. It appears that they have some appreciation of Andrew Lloyd Weber in JAV! Wait, what? No, probably not...

VRTM-071 Jesus Chestnut And Squirrel Superstar Yoshidamitsuru Asama Yuko VS Joiner (Japan-US Counter)

CHRV-159 The Chestnuts And The Inside Are Too Lively Every Time! Dirty Metamorphosis! Sensual Novel Ikuiku Alien! My Sister's Huge Breasts Are Worth A Look! H Cup 99cm Rihocchi


Oh, and there are 6 others in the "Jesus Chestnut, Squirrel Superstar" series, all with the same title but different actress names.

Chestnut separately appears in 323 titles. "Jesus" only appears in three other titles besides those 6, but I'd sure like to know what "Jesus" has to do with Japanese porn. If I find out it is a mistranslation of a Japanese word that means something like "licking cum off the floor" I just might just lose it.
 
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branbran726

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Thanks again. Will look those over. One thing I notice is that while the word Mitsuru is in around 60 titles, that full phrase Ria Mitsuru is only in that one title.

I have another one: chestnut. I couldn't resist this one, as the first title is comedy gold. It appears that they have some appreciation of Andrew Lloyd Weber in JAV! Wait, what? No, probably not...

VRTM-071 Jesus Chestnut And Squirrel Superstar Yoshidamitsuru Asama Yuko VS Joiner (Japan-US Counter)

CHRV-159 The Chestnuts And The Inside Are Too Lively Every Time! Dirty Metamorphosis! Sensual Novel Ikuiku Alien! My Sister's Huge Breasts Are Worth A Look! H Cup 99cm Rihocchi


Oh, and there are 6 others in the "Jesus Chestnut, Squirrel Superstar" series, all with the same title but different actress names.

Chestnut separately appears in 323 titles. "Jesus" only appears in three other titles besides those 6, but I'd sure like to know what "Jesus" has to do with Japanese porn. If I find out it is a mistranslation of a Japanese word that means something like "licking cum off the floor" I just might just lose it.
First, I can confirm that is absolutely a pun on Jesus Christ Superstar. If you look closely at the VTRM front cover in the upper left, though, you can see (misspelled) the word 'clitoris'. 'Clitoris' is transliterated クリトリス [kuritorisu]. There happen to be two words, 栗 [kuri] 'chestnut' and 栗鼠 [risu] 'squirrel', that, when combined with と [to] 'and', become 栗と栗鼠 [kuri to risu].

So the crucial part of that series is really 'Jesus Clitoris, Superstar'. (Looks to be a series of old VHS titles re-released on DVD.)

Much like [irama] and [fera], [kuritorisu] is usually shortened to [kuri]. Autotranslate parses it as 'chestnut' because of course it does.

It's also worth noting that 'Metamorphosis' is actually 変態 [hentai], because the word is also used in entomology. Might as well just translate it as 'hentai', since enough English-speaking people recognize that for what it is.
 

maelstrom9999

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I had forgetten that upthread, post #22, you had already explained that chestnut+squirrel = clitoris. And in post #25, you explained that squirrel, separately, was "to insert." And just to be clear, chestnut sepratetly is a shortened form of clitoris, like "clit"?

When you identified that title as a play on words of the title of that musical, I thought it was odd since it had not occurred to me that they might be widely familiar with Jesus Christ, Superstar in Japan, which would make such a pun meaningless to Japanese viewers. But when I googled Andrew Lloyd Webber and Japan I discovered that, for example, "Cats" opened in Tokyo in 1983, just 1 year after it originally opened on Broadway, then ran for 25 straight years up to 2008, meaning it was quite popular there. On Amazon you can actually buy an original poster commemorating 25 years of "Cats" in Japan (for $50!). So I can only assume if they are familiar with "Cats" they must also be familiar with "Jesus Christ, Superstar."

"Jesus Clitoris, Superstar" as a porn title is quite inspired, I must say. I don't think Christians would like that too much, but I don't subcribe to religion so I give it a big thumbs up.:D
 
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branbran726

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I had forgetten that upthread, post #22, you had already explained that chestnut+squirrel = clitoris. And in post #25, you explained that squirrel, separately, was "to insert." And just to be clear, chestnut sepratetly is a shortened form of clitoris, like "clit"?
′Squirrel' as a mistranslation of [hame] ハメ 'insert' is entirely unrelated to the 'squirrel' in [kuri to risu]. Two different words somehow are getting translated as 'squirrel', but [risu] actually does signify the nut-eating animal . 'Chestnut' should indeed be glossed as 'clitoris' when it comes from [kuri].
That one is a broken translation inside a broken translation...

So, 筆下し [fude-oroshi] is 'the act of using a new brush for the first time'. When a calligrapher gets a new brush, the bristles are rigid and do not hold ink, so there's a process for getting that brush usable by wetting it.
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I think one can easily see how this process became an idiom for a male losing his virginity: he's wetting his brush for the first time.

The 'Wholesale' part comes from an largely unrelated concept that is simply homophonic, 卸し売り [oroshi-uri] 'selling goods wholesale'.

(Well, if you're interested in that sort of thing, the concepts are not entirely unrelated. Several words pronounced [oroshi] conceptually gesture toward moving something from a high place to a low place, or moving something to a state of greater entropy. In [fude-oroshi], the high place is the state of being new and pristine; the low place is the state of being used and dirtied. In [oroshi-uri], the high place is a good's location far up in the supply chain (i.e. the producer or their warehouse), the low place being a subsequent point in the supply chain (i.e. the retailer or the consumer). While the specific verb in [oroshi-uri] 卸す is usually limited to topics of commerce, the verb in [fude-oroshi] 下す is also used in more mundane discussions of de-elevation, like to take something off a shelf.)

I'll also note that the original Japanese titles are redundant vis a vis the idiom of [fude-oroshi], in that they include the word for 'virgin' 童貞 [doutei] followed by [fude-oroshi], when a knowledgeable reader does not need the additional explanation.

When the term is used without [doutei] 'virgin', it predictably gets mistranslated as stuff like 'down brush'.
DASD-771 A Super Public Bath Gently Brushed Down By The Older Sister In The Band.
BEB-019 Nishina Down The Brush Of One Hundred One Hundred Hana Hana Teacher Kiss
SKMJ-151 Active Yariman Mama Brush-down Seeding Party!
 

branbran726

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Three different words being translated as 'Fluffy' there.
たわわ [tawawa], a semi-onomatopoeic word usually applied to fruits that have grown large. In a porn sense, it's used to describe big breasts instead. If I were translating, I wouldn't try to go word-for-word, but instead I'd take the fruit-theme and translate boobs as "Melons".
ふんわり [funwari], another semi-onomatopoeic word. Imagine a feather floating on a breeze; a soft, thick pillow; or the fur on a pet rabbit. These would be described as [funwari]. When it's applied to a person, it speaks to their character rather than their texture. I guess you could translate it 'soft and genial', but the word is supposed to conjure more imagery than that.
ふわぽよ [fuwapoyo] . [fuwa] is a different form of [funwari] above. [poyo] could be one of two things, or indeed a little of both. For one, [poyo] is a suffix that gained popularity with the influx of Korean culture into Japan in the last decade or so; in that sense it does little more than make a word more girly. Another [poyo] is a sound-word that conjured images of something that ripples or rebounds when tapped or squeezed - in the case of a person, it calls to mind someone with a little bit of fat on them. So [fuwapoyo] could be 'soft and voluptuous', though that lacks a certain lightness present in the Japanese.
 

maelstrom9999

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Almost certain that "anal cunnilingus" (LOL) just means analingus, but want to check just to make sure. I guess there isn't a word in Japanese that translates as "analingus." It never occurs in any title. Also, javlibrary seems to use the "cunnilingus" genre tag in most cases to refer to analingus. The tag is pointless otherwise since over 90% of all titles feature cunnilingus.

BBAN-361 Please! Let Me Lick It! Anal Cunnilingus Appeal Lesbian Mina Kitano Asuka Momose

DVDMS-834 Let's Lick Anal, Small Devil J System Rubs The Smell And Taste With Anal Cunnilingus And Rolls Up With Bare Ass Hole SEX! 10 Days Satsuki Mei Who Continues To Be A Slut With The Ass Hole Marking Of The Pre-buttock Bitch


And a small devil no less. It's the younger generation, man. A complete moral collapse. Anyway, that second title seems to give it away.