forever on speed

I'm just as happy to meme about it as anyone, but Sonic Channel did not call Sonic a Japanese word that means "mature sexiness." They called him 色気 "iroke" and the translation software just turned that into sexiness because there's no English equivalent to what that word is meant to convey.

First, it is very common in translation across any language pair (especially for languages from noticeably different language families like Japanese to English as opposed to, say, French to English) that you have words that lack isometric, direct equivalents. This in itself does not equate to being untranslatable.

Anyone with any measure of bilingual or multilingual capacity could tell you that nuance is arguably ALWAYS lost in translation, even for sentences with direct translations available.

At the end of the day, the source language can never be the target language. The two languages are necessarily different and translation is an art form.

That being said, a lack of a directly equivalent term does not equal to being untranslatable.

Even a term that is far more obviously difficult to translate, よろしく (yoroshiku), by genuinely lacking a direct equivalent in English, is still translatable! Precisely because there are multiple possible ways to translate the word, multiple possible techniques employing indirect means, that term can be translated! It's just that the exact nuance you'd have in the source language is harder to capture – but again, that's very much a feature and not a bug of translation.

You have translation choices that could be closer or farther from capturing the nuance of the original, but the only term that actually fully captures the original nuance is...the original term. In the original language.

For the term in question itself, there are multiple possible meanings – it is up to the skill level and judgement of the translator to choose the most appropriate translation (which, in some cases, may not even involve lifting one of these definitions directly! It may be appropriate to be more indirect translation techniques). In my personal opinion, judging from the intended target audience of all-ages for a franchise like Sonic, a term like 'mature charm' would be most appropriate, with 'allure' being possible. Invoking 'sex' or 'sexiness' would be inappropriate for the source material and its inferable intentions.

Another thing to note is that the article cited is generative AI slop.

It is from a Medium account with a genAI profile picture with a slew of articles in the same structure: that various Japanese terms (which, just from a glance at my level, are very, very translatable) are elevated or special in some way by virtue of being...Japanese.

This is orientalism.

Related to the point, I actually texted my friend, who is Japanese and lives in Saitama, the other day about an Instagram reel arguing that Japanese street fashion in Tokyo is so special because people save up for distinctive fashion pieces that won't go out of style soon. His general remarks, with a bit of vulgarity that's out of place with this blog but I personally have no issue with, that I've pasted below are relevant.

(Incidentally, taberu means 'to eat'.)

Chaotix drawing inspired by an illustration from the Sonic Japanese Survival Guide

Official Glasses Pics! January 2026- June 2026

I love this pairing so much