#Still kind of malding over my Seven Samurai remaster boxset I can't watch because it's a 4k Blu-Turbofuck Ultra DVD

[solradguy]

They made an error in the Crunchyroll English subtitles for Dual Rulers when they're doing a recap of the setting's history right at the beginning and it seems to be confusing a lot of people

GG uses two words for "magic" in a way that English generally doesn't. There's 法力 (houriki) and 魔法 (mahou). "Houriki," the one they used in the subtitle at this part, generally refers to the concept of magic as a whole as an energy in the Guilty Gear universe, while "mahou" is more like how we generally use "magic" in English.

It's hard to explain so to make an analogy out of it, "houriki" would be like the raw kinetic energy turning a wind turbine or hydroelectric generator and "mahou" would be the output electricity that can then be used for everything else. There's no good way to explain this, I'm sorry... Just take my word for it that they're different 😭

Anyway, so the mistake they made in this subtitle is that "houriki" is actually a Buddhist concept and refers to the supernatural power/ability one can gain from practicing Buddhism. The kanji for it, translated literally, are law+power. This is a really easy mistake to make if you're unfamiliar with GG's setting terminology (I made it too when I first starting doing GG translations lol.............)

I have a sneaking suspicion that we might see more funky translations like this in the future so here are some other terms they might mess up if someone doesn't give them a lore localization sheet:

法術 (houjutsu) - "Magic spell" but they might translate this literally as "law technique" or "Law Power technique"

第一の男 (daiichi no otoko) - "The Original" might get translated as "The First Man" or maybe even "The Great Man"

聖天貸法 (Seiten Taihou) - "Arcanum." I have no idea how they might end up translating this but it's the collective name of the 666 known spells. "Nandikesvara Lend Law" could be a possible direct translation of the kanji but it might be more likely that they just call it something like "the book of spells" (which isn't wrong and I think they do/have localized it that way before, it's just gonna be really obvious if they get it super wrong)

For the most part though, the Dual Rulers EN subtitles are good. There are a few really minor translation oddities besides Law Power that make me think they just didn't have a localization guide for the translation team, for some reason. I don't have plans (or know anyone else that does) to retranslate or edit the subtitles, and I feel good about the possibility that the Blu-ray release will have fixed these strange minor mistakes.

tl;dr: "Law Power" is just "Magic" and they made an oopsie by translating the kanji literally