LAST EDITED ON Jan-27-15 AT 02:51 PM (EST)
>If she was still a sergeant when she got it, it can't be higher than
>4th. If she was a field-grade (whatever that means) officer it's at
>least 4th; given the lack of red/blue (and her not being a general
>officer), it's not 2nd or 1st. Well, amusingly enough (to me, anyway), that fits too - I decided when writing her OWaW bio that hers is Fourth Class, because it splits the difference eligibility-wise between her NCO and junior officer days.
Field officers are military middle managers - anyone ranking above a company commander (who are usually captains in an army-ranks context) and below a general officer. So, majors and colonels, basically. Mio is a field-grade officer (her canonical rank, shōsa, is variously translated as Major, Lieutenant Commander, or Squadron Leader, depending on whether the translators are using army, navy, or Anglophone air force ranks); Yoshika, even after receiving her commission for meritorious service, is not. Again, depending on how you choose to translate chūi, she's either a second lieutenant, an ensign, or a pilot officer.
(The translations I've seen are not consistent about this. FUNimation's official subtitles call Mio "Major Sakamoto" in spite of the fact that, since she's a naval officer, if you were going to translate shōsa at all, the more appropriate translation would be "lieutenant commander". Shirley Yeager, on the other hand, is a captain in the Liberion Army Air Force, retranslated "taii" in the original Japanese, but the subs render her rank as the confusingly equivalent British RAF "flight lieutenant". By contrast, Gertrud Barkhorn is also called "taii" in Japanese, but that gets rendered into English as "captain" (the direct translation of the German Hauptmann) - but they're the same rank. Meanwhile, apparently taking a cue from this, the fansub of the movie I've seen calls Mio a Squadron Leader. This, as noted in Liz Windsor's OWaW bio, is also one of the puzzlingly named RAF ranks, and doesn't mean she actually leads a squadron - in fact, it's RAF for Major. Confused yet? :)
--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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