>>497
It's not a pun. In Japanese, it's not uncommon for words created with Chinese characters to have more than one reading; as such, it's also not uncommon to see explicit readings (in the phonetic alphabet) given in small text right above the word in question. Also, not all Chinese characters wind up being pronounced according to their traditional Chinese readings (or even their Japanese readings).
For example, 吸血鬼 means "vampire." Its normal reading (the one you'd find in any dictionary) is きゅうけつき (kyuuketsuki). However, in Hellsing, they replace きゅうけつき with ヴァンパイア (vanpaia - "vampire" with a Japanese pronunciation). Basically, replacing the original reading of a word with the reading of a different word is a kind of literary trick in Japanese. Sometimes words are replaced with similar foreign words (like kyuuketsuki and vampire) sometimes they're replaced with similar Japanese words (like, you might replace "cheat" with "deceive"). The idea is to give the word added punch, an artificially created double meaning. In this short flash, the author writes the reading for "wound/scar" above the word for "patchwork," which is really just an explicit way of saying, "Hey, look, when I say patchwork I really actually mean wound!" It's not limited to words that only use chinese characters, since ツギハギ, the word for "patchwork," is written in katakana (a phonetic alphabet), rather than kanji.
In fact, most of the text in that flash is written in hiragana (without punctuation, except for quotation marks), the other phonetic alphabet, which gives the whole thing a sort of diminished feel. Including Chinese characters makes text feel stiff and formal and intellectual; not using chinese characters has the reverse effect. That's why I wrote it all in lower case.
There's no equivalent literary trick in any European language for the substitution of word readings that you see in Japanese literature, so unfortunately it gets lost in translation, like you said.
