Catch You Catch Me: Part 3

Onward to line three of Cardcaptor Sakura‘s opening theme song, Catch You Catch Me

だって　だって　翼広げ二人で

だって　だって　つばさ　ひろげ　ふたりで

Continuing the trend of lines repeating the same verb, this line repeats the conjunction “だって”, meaning “however” or “because”, two times.

Anyone who knows anything about Syaoran’s counterpart’s series, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, may be familiar with this word already. The word tsubasa means “wing”, and Sakura can’t be without all her wing-related goods and trinkets.

The verb 広げる (ひろげる) means “spread”. 翼広げ, “tsubasa hiroge”, means “spread wings”.

二人 (ふたり) consists of the kanji 二 (ni, two) and 人 (hito, person), meaning “two people”.

Finally, the particle で means “with”.

And when it’s all put together? “However, however, (we’ll) spread our wings together.”

Or how about this? “However, however, the two of us spread out wings.”

I think the first of the two is the better-sounding of the two, but the “however” is a bit clumsy. I could use “but”, but that still doesn’t flow well for me.

The bootleg translation goes, “Because. Because. Together we’ll spread our wings…” I don’t know if “because” is a better or worse translation than “however” in this line. I still think “however” doesn’t sound quite right.

The official licensed translation from the region one release chose to go with, “But still, but still, I want to spread my wings with you…” Yeah, that completely knocks my try out of the ring. This translation uses a more comfortable “but still”. While my translation and the bootleg’s translation suggested that both Sakura and the other person would fly with wings, this translation goes with the idea of Sakura being the one with wings, a much better translation I feel.

This line continues into the next.

空をマラソン　夢をユニゾンしたい

そらをマラソン　ゆめをユニゾンしたい

This line contains all words I know. Nothing to look up. It also continues on lessons learned in prior lines.

I’ll begin with the end. したい comes from the verb する, but puts it in the -tai form, making it a desire. The word する means “(to) do”, so したい means “want (to) do”.

There are two English words here. マラソン is marathon, and ユニゾン is unison.

Finally, 空, そら is sky and 夢, ゆめ is dream.

This compiles easily: “I want to marathon (across) the sky (with you), to dream in unison (with you).” The “across” is added in to make the sentence flow better in English.

The bootleg uses the translation (continuing from the previous line) as, “…and I want to run a sky marathon and dream in unison with you.” The licensed translation can only top that, and does so with (continuing from the prior line), “…marathon across the skies with you, and have dreams in unison with you.” Somehow their translation always outdoes mine. This is why they get paid to translate and I get paid to write software. I’d say “have dreams in unison” is a huge improvement over “to dream in unison”.