Herbal medicine
Added 2021-04-12 05:01:00 +0000 UTCAt the beginning of volume 7, Casca and Guts are recuperating in the cave after falling down a cliff into a river. Realizing Casca was sick, Guts has gathered medicinal herbs and hands them to her, wrapped in a leaf. Then, Dark Horse has him tell her to "drink it".
Drink herbs and leaves? Seems odd, doesn't it? Well, not if you know a bit of Japanese. Guts does literally tell her to drink it: "飲んだけ". That's because in Japanese, when talking about "taking medicine", the idiomatic expression is "薬を飲む", literally "to drink medicine". Even when it's a solid, like a pill.
So when Guts tells that to Casca, the implication to the Japanese reader is that it's medicine. The problem we have here is that this idiom was translated literally instead of being adapted to the English language.
