EDM Translations

Disclaimer: The lyrics of 'Ed Rec 100', from Ed Rec 100, are not copyrighted by this blog nor by the author of this post. The Italian lyrics as posted here are the work of u/Jockbaia; care has been taken to make sure that the English translation in this post does not match Jockbaia's translation, but without compromising on accuracy at the same time. The author claims ownership of the English and Korean wording of this translation, which does not deny nor seek to possess the existence of other translations. Should certain lines be clarified further, or an official version of the lyrics released, this translation may change in the future.

Notes:

프랑스어로 10은 'dix'고 6은 영어와 비슷하게 'six'로 읽으니, 10LEC6은 영단어 'dyslexic'(난독증)으로 읽힙니다. ↩︎

이부분만 샘플링... ㅋㅋㅋ ↩︎

Holly e Benji is the Italian name for the televised anime of Captain Tsubasa (1983-1986). That would be quite some kick up the ass indeed ↩︎

이탈리아에서는 1980년대 캡틴 츠바사 애니를 Holly e Benji라고 부르더군요... ↩︎

Original source translated this as 'zero zero frenzi/friends (?)' - I'm inclined to think that it might be the English word 'frenzy', if only because that seems to make marginally more sense than any alternatives I can think of. I can't hear it as anything else, and besides Mr. Oizo and Phra have a song together where the words 'No English today' are repeated throughout in English so the interjection... probably makes sense... ↩︎

The original source is lost on this one and so am I. If the word is 'Renzi', then I'm wondering whether it might refer to the politician Matteo Renzi - popular for excellent Twitter usage, among many other things. Phra's rap isn't meant to make a huge amount of sense and I think this is just a symptom of that. ↩︎

Although the great French bands of the rough present - Air, Phoenix and Daft Punk - musically only partly have something in common, they are nevertheless united by their enormous degree of design and perfection. Enveloped by a cloud of aristocratic sovereignty, they sit in their high-tech studios, away from the noisy Anglo-Saxon world of pop. There, in peace, they screw on their always somewhat-withdrawn masterpieces that shift the world at well-chosen intervals into delicate-to-intense excitement. Even my conversation partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, one half of Daft Punk, cannot really look into the map of his emotional world in a telephone interview. As they created the monster hit ‘Da Funk’ in their early twenties, which very impressively illustrated an entire generation, how awesome it can be on the dance floor - did they know what they were doing?

“We weren’t naive and didn’t want to be. We had an idea of the music, and the visual conception - and believed that we could act on it. And back then, as it is now, our fun was in the foreground. First we had to like it - then the label - then the people.”

According to your own legend, Daft Punk transformed (probably not completely uninfluenced by Kraftwerk) one day into robots - a perfect image. Namely, robots have no need to bother with any of that banal 'feelings’ nonsense. Robots are not normally hunted by the paparazzi. Robots simply function as they are - machines.  

“As the advertising began for our first album ‘Homework’ and our photos were expected to be on the magazine cover, we thought: ‘we don’t want to be a part of that’. If you start this first time around, you won’t be able to come out of that number any more. You become slaves of the system. So we created the robots, which also had the positive side effect of introducing a more creative level. We had a whole team with whom we developed the design. This is fun. And it’s wonderful, being able to continue leading a quiet life in all anonymity. Money and image were never important things for us.”

With so much thought and planning, it is but a little surprising, that with Daft Punk many decisions are made spontaneously and on a gut feeling.

“We were just about to shoot the video clips of our latest album ‘Human After All’ in the USA, and always wanted to (after our Japanese anime film) make a new film again. We also shot ‘Electroma’ - in eleven days. Or when we played in the Coachella Festival in California: There we thought, why not go back on tour? We take care of our label. We’ve designed a table for the furniture store ‘Habitat’ [as well]. I just produced the new album by Sébastien Tellier. Much of what we do don’t turn to be so large in the public eye.”

The wording of the translation is © 2017 luminatranslations. First posted 01 May 2017. The full image and documentation are available.

The answer is over five minutes. Yeah.

I can’t really defend myself in that regard. I don’t know why it took so long for it to look right - I hit on the right font, the line height and word spaces are okay, and the line lengths are about right compared to the actual German. The caption isn’t quite on the center of anything, is my only excuse; the hardest things to account for during projects like these are always the irregularities, and the position of that caption is most definitely it. It looked tilted and poorly placed no matter how much I fiddled with it, until I hit on the position that seemed to work out. Let’s hope it does.

This is only a very short phone interview, but I like it because 1) I am always extremely invested in what Guy has to say about anything, and 2) his final answer isn’t actually an answer to the question that was posed him. He’s answering more the magnitude of Daft Punk’s decisions and how fast they get things done - his speech isn’t really a comment on the spontaneity of their actions, as was asked. Guy seems to have had a lot of their ongoing projects in mind when he was answering this, and may have gotten sidetracked (or the interviewer was condensing his words, as often occurs); usually he has the opposite problem, of being far too laconic, so I’m fond of that moment. 

As for the image editing, I originally thought it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Edit out the caption with the clone stamp, crop only the image, and get to work on a new canvas, I thought. How hard could it be?

But what’s this???

It’s not easy to tell from a distance, but there actually is a faint background in the entirety of this interview - it consists of circuit symbols, the image of a phone, the backwards SONY logo, and other lettering that I couldn’t simply emulate from elsewhere. This meant that I couldn’t simply crop out the image, set up a new canvas with the adequate background colour, and paste the image on the proper place in order to go to town. If you remember my Electro Book 2013 translations, you know that I try to save as much of the background elements as possible, but that I also try to recreate the page layout from scratch whenever I can because it just makes for a cleaner and sharper PDF/PNG/JPG that way. 

I wondered if I could erase out the background and save the SONY logo etc as a transparent + white PNG to add later on, but there just isn’t enough contrast between the background colour and the white to make that possible. Neither could I stand to just erase every background element and start anew.

So, uh. I did exactly that the above image implies. I eliminated every black/orange/grey near the background images via the clone stamp and drew some parts anew by hand, because I couldn’t think of a better way.

And here’s the blank canvas. That’s all one image.

Said blank canvas with words on. Finally. I usually go for Roboto as my body text, because it has the easily legible and adequately informal charm that works for most interviews. The original interview here has a more formal font, though, so I adjusted accordingly. Merriweather 9pt proved an appropriate substitute for the body text, and I saved Roboto for the caption text, the title, and subtitle. 

The ‘Daft Punk’ part is in orange in the original interview as well, but it’s the leftmost word of the second line there. There was no way to adjust this translation 100% so that the exact same effect could be achieved, sadly, so this is the best that can be done. The original is also four lines while this is five, but I guess that’s the disadvantage of having too few words to juggle around. Isn’t much you can do with only 22 words, y’alls.

And the full image!

Again, as is the case with so many text copies or captions, the translations themselves weren’t the problem. I did them over a year ago and I don’t remember struggling with anything in particular. About the only thing I think needs an explanation is the ‘Machine Baron’ part - as previously mentioned, it’s a reference to a character from an old anime, Steam Detectives. A VAIO C1 looked like this, and indicates a short-lived line of subnotebooks. The above magazine was published sixteen years ago, squarely during the most active period of VAIO C1 production - quite suited to DP’s aesthetic of the time, if I say so myself. 

So I went to clean up the images.

The text-included version.

And repaired. I’m getting better at this!

Adding the text. I usually try not to touch anything that’s in English already, mainly because I’m not confident that I can recreate title fonts exactly - but the credits at the bottom still needed to be rewritten afresh here, otherwise they wouldn’t have come through very clearly. The font is Signika 6.5 pt. I think page 075 was the hardest to balance out. There was just too much of the translation compared to the actual text, and of course English text doesn’t space out as well as Japanese, so working out the exact font size, spacing, and line height to preserve roughly the same atmosphere was rather difficult. As the title image shows, though, I think I got it right in the end.

I apologize that you may not be able to read some bits smoothly where the text overlaps with Thomas’s hand. This is a problem in the original too. Unless I can darken specifically his hand without having it lose its shine, there’s no real way around it.

If only all translation blocks can be like this!  This was extraordinarily simple, compared to page 075.

A quick preview of the result! This was a delightful piece to work on overall. I think next up is one of my German translations!

There was a lot less work involved with this one because it wasn’t even an interview translation, but still, I managed to learn some good things out of it. I had no idea the pen tool could even define a text path, though I’m not surprised by it. I like to think I’m not too bad with Photoshop by now, but I’m always discovering new methods. 

There’s not much I can describe in regards to the actual Japanese text of the caption nor the process of translating it. I did this over a year ago and don’t remember much of the translation process at all, nor is anything strange jumping out to me at the moment. The text was easy to edit out and replace, too.

The finished caption (in Roboto Bold 12pt). I had to add a few filler words and exploit some of the spacing to get the final ‘... and you’ to end where it should - the original copy + paste had the text spill onto the heart, and that was unacceptable. The subheading above the ‘SWEET’ is in Cooper Hewitt Heavy 18pt. I’m very pleased with how this part turned out, actually. 

The cover was, predictably, a bit harder.

THOSE LEATHER GROOVES

I mean, as you can see, it’s nothing some persistence with the clone stamp couldn’t fix, but the chunk of text near Thomas’s derrière was some of the hardest part of this to edit out. Thom y u do dis

I still persisted, and I think it turned out pretty well.  Not sure if I’d have the ability to edit out everything else. I did think about erasing that ‘ON THE COVER: DAFT PUNK’ yellow circle for a while, mainly because there is a ‘ダフト・パンク‘ at the bottom of that circle - which is, if translated into English, just ‘Daft Punk’ again. A similar problem exists with the gap atop ‘For all with the Vision’ on the upper right of the page - that just had the katakana version of ‘Eyescream’ written on it. I added my watermark there in the fully patched version, but the bit at the bottom of the circle, I’ve had to leave blank.

This was, however, important information. So I did keep it, though it was easily the fiddliest part of the entire cover (as the title image shows). Eh. Close enough. The ‘Total Vol.’ (通卷 - ‘consecutive number of volumes’ more specifically) is not really all that relevant - like, for matters of citation or whatever - but I felt the need to include it anyhow.

And there was this weird tilt to think about, too. It’s also in the original and has nothing to do with the orientation of the page from where it was scanned - nothing to do with the page crumpling or anything, in other words. But it was no problem to keep it. After all of that was done, it was time for the big title...

ugh

That block of text actually works best divided into four rows of increasingly smaller text, but because Japanese names are inevitably longer written out in English than in Japanese, it was a bit of hard work trying to avoid the text spilling onto the circle. (That’s kind of why I thought of getting rid of it.) I was really pushing it by this point, but I got it done in the end.

And the final preview of the cover page!

There’s a few of those text copy edits to make still, and then I might move onto non-Japanese articles and interviews. There are plenty there to work on, after all. It’s just that I’ve seen Japanese magazine scans floating around so often with nobody adding a translation or explanation to them for years on end - and I can’t have that!

1. Would you be able to tell us why you established Bromance Records?

Brodinski: At some point, I thought that I wanted to release the kind of music I liked on my own label. I wanted to broaden the scope as much as possible and show my affection for the kind of music I like, as well as the music that I'd like to play at clubs; that's one of the reasons. The idea of running my own crew also contributed to it, I think.

2. You're already releasing various unique sounds from all kinds of genres (via Bromance Records). If there is an underlying concept in the label, we'd love to hear it!

Brodinski: The concept is very simple. Release the kind of music you like, and never mind the specifics of genre! Focus purely on whether the music is good!

3. Where did the label name 'Brodinski' come from?

Brodinski: I mean, I was inspired to use the name 'Bromance Records' by following up on 'Brodinski'. (Laughter) But that's not to say that there isn't another meaning; 'Bromance' encapsulates in one word the relationships between everyone in this label. We're all good friends and tour together, no matter where we are in the world. The most perfect name, if I say so myself!

4. Artists from places other than France, such as the USA and Canada, are signing onto your label. Where did you get to know them?

Brodinski: All thanks to the internet. And as I said, we roam the whole world - sometimes we meet up by coincidence somewhere, and we did actually all become friends that way. Right now LOUISAHHH! lives in Paris, working not too far away from us. As for our artists who are abroad - PIPES is one, ILLANGELO is another. Who knows, we might have a lot more international artists before long!

5. As a DJ and producer, who were your influences?

Brodinski: There are so many. Especially DJs, I think. Ivan Smagghe, Damian Lazarus, Erol Alkan, TIGA, Boys Noize, Yuksek, DJ Mehdi, 2 Many DJs... you might forget for a while, but no matter how many years come in between, they're all DJs who know how to make you feel refreshed and anew. I still consider myself a DJ, and at the same time, I'm undertaking work on my album as a producer, too.

6. What do you think is the best track of 2013?

Brodinski: The top three tracks of 2013 are!

<James Blake - Retrograde>

<Future feat. Rocko - The Chosen One>

<SCNTST - Percee Scan>

7. Last year, for Kanye West's album Yeezus, you were involved alongside Daft Punk and Gesaffelstein. What was the process by which you became involved?

Brodinski: Kanye West dropped us a line first in my management office, that was the cause. Around the same time, the work on the album was confirmed. It was a fantastic experience and I'm very proud of it! Working with [Kanye] was excellent, truly something special. It was an amazing opportunity, I learnt a lot from it.

<Kanye West (ft. Brodinski, Daft Punk, and Gesaffelstein) - Black Skinhead>

<Kanye West (ft. Brodinski, Daft Punk, and Gesaffelstein) - Send It Up>

8. Please tell us about your plans for the future.

Brodinski: At the moment I'm preparing for the big tour in Australia, as well as the tour in Japan. The latter I'm planning to go to with Sam Tiba, complete with the promo for the Japan-only Bromance compilation CD. After Japan, there's the Winter Music Conference in Miami; from early April to June we're planning on a large tour across Europe and America. And there's a really cool EP coming up, too! And afterwards, there's the Maelstrom & LOUISAHHH! project, Sam Tiba's new EP, the upcoming work from ILLANGELO... all of that's due, and more.

9. Finally, a message for the Japanese fans, please!

Brodinski: I was really happy to be able to come to Japan again. I'm really looking forward DJ-ing here!

Now Available: the much-praised compliation album, Bromance, from Bromance Records. Details: http://www.rambling.ne.jp/label_detail05.html

The wording of the translation is © 2017 luminatranslations. First posted 27 March 2017. The full PDF version and documentation are available.

Not a long documentation process for this one. It was my first time structuring an online interview, though, and I think I’ve done the best job I could manage of it. It was a perfectly straightforward interview, save for that hiccup in the fifth Q+A that I simply can’t understand. 3 and 4 follow each other, then... 5 just gets shoved to the side of both before resuming from the bottom of 4. I have no idea what happened there.

I literally screenshotted this element and incorporated it into the PDF. Sadly you cannot interact with them; it was a structural thing more than it was meant to be actually functional.

Translating the title was a bit of a bummer, because the Japanese original has the interview title - as in, the exact same one - in place of where I put ‘Special Interview’. Call it a cop-out, but it just looked so odd having the same title twice, not to mention that I couldn’t fit in the full title anyway in that space.

But structurally, this interview gave me very little trouble. What really bothered me was my inability to incorporate a major part of the supporting material: the PDFs I produce aren’t capable of embedding videos straight from youtube, not to mention the fact that some of those linked videos from the original Block.fm page straight up no longer exist:

That’s a problem. In the end I just had to link the videos in the text and hope for the best.

I... I couldn’t keep the column structure for no. 5. I’m sorry, man.  There’s respecting the original text and there’s asking me to make things literally illegible. It just can’t happen.

And the final preview!

As promised in the LOUD no. 168 documentation, I’m going light for a while. Total time taken for this interview? Probably 3 hours from start to publishing. That’s the translator’s life.

The wording of the translation is © 2017 luminatranslations. First posted 27 March 2017. The full PDF version and documentation are available.

— First, please tell us about the documentary! What were your reasons for setting your North American tour as the backdrop of the film? Xavier de Rosnay: The first reason was that we'd never filmed anything over such a long period before. Like, for example, for a whole year... The American leg of the tour happened to take place over twenty days, so we thought we'd be able to film that in an aptly compact way. And the second reason was that every time we went back and forth between the USA and Canada, we could experience all of the four seasons. Unthinkable in almost any other country.

— That's true. Xavier: This tour began in the West Coast of America, and it felt like spring there - but cross the border to Canada and we were right in the middle of winter! It was so cold! Then we moved towards the East Coast and then it felt summery all around. You move around just a little, and everything down to the season and the surroundings change - how could we not film that? Even in Europe the scenery barely changes throughout the year.

— I knew it! Xavier: And I guess we were... kind of anticipating something big to happen? You know, just because it was America? That feeling was strong in both of us. We supposed that if we were going to film this, we might as well choose a location where a lot of things were bound to happen.

— The documentary truly did end in a rather rock-and-roll fashion, it felt that the behind-the-scenes aspect of the tour was laid out bare. This may be a rather direct question, but wasn't it overtaxing a little, showing off your darker sides, or were you genuinely all right with it? Xavier: I see what you mean, and yeah, we were. (Laughter.) And in addition to that, the parts where we limited ourselves... I mean, I guess... they did exist... Basically, no scene in this documentary was forced. It was filmed according to the meaning and value of what was actually there. So anything that was repetitive was edited some, but otherwise we showed it all, whether we were unsightly at the time, miserable, or being complete idiots. The terrible habits we showed in the documentary might well have been, uh, illegal... Gaspard Augé: Ahahahaha. Xavier: But right now it's 2008, and from the present perspective, I don't think there's a problem.

— It's an attitude that still suits your appearance in the work [A Cross the Universe] immensely. Xavier: Thanks a lot. Though we did have to follow regulations some. Like, for example, we had to edit out everything that showed an alcohol brand name. There’s a regulation that says that any scene or footage depicting alcoholic beverages have to be blurred out; but honestly, I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you saw a video where somebody was drinking a thing, and if it was all blurred out, wouldn’t it be more obvious upon watching it that they were consuming alcohol?

— You're right. (Laughter) Xavier: And also, there was the rule that you couldn't show a woman's nipples. But seriously! Who goes through life without ever seeing a nipple? If you blur that out, you'd be like 'oh my God, these are nipples, all right!' for sure; isn't that more lewd? (Laughter) And if you blurred out a woman's panties, it'd probably look like she wasn't wearing any. It's a real paradox, that. Censoring such things make them more grotesque than if you'd just let them be!

With the Cross

— Returning to the topic at hand, what ideas did the mutual director of the project - Romain Gavras - contribute to the making of this work? Xavier: He was the director, if anything it's us who tossed small ideas towards him. Of course we participated in the production, but this documentary wasn't produced in a pre-structured way. Romain and So-Me had a bunch of videos and images they took of the tour, and we connected them afterwards to craft the scenario [for the documentary].

— I see! Xavier: The work led them to create some interesting methods of operation, which might have meant that Justice wasn't at the forefront of things. There's a lot showing the tour manager - you know, the gun maniac - and the tour bus driver, and that was their idea. Romain and So-Me were the ones who decided to film them, so they did. And as a result, I think the documentary ended up a lot more entertaining than it could have been.

— It wouldn't have been as entertaining without the driver or the tour manager, no! Xavier: That's sort of why the camera wasn't on us a lot of the time. (Laughter) And during our live performances, Romain was always next to the stage and So-Me always in the innermost parts of the venue. The differences in camera angle from them both, as well as what they chose to focus on, really helped to lend a new depth to the work.

— In addition to that, the title A Cross the Universe seems to be a homage to the Beatles' Across the Universe. Whose idea was the title? Gaspard: From yours truly. A Cross the Universe seemed like the most fitting title to what happens in this documentary. Xavier: Having such a simple and effective title is what helped to complete this documentary, no lie. What's the most memorable thing in live Justice performances, it has to be the cross. And we - ourselves and our staff - sure are roaming the universe with a cross in tow!

— Did Gaspard also come up with the stage structure as well? The cross, the martial amps - the hard rock-esque atmosphere? Gaspard: That's different. We came up with that together. But as you said, that stage set was inspired by the hard rock feel of the seventies. We had some help regarding the theatrical light effects from a fellow member of staff who'd actually worked in theatre, as well. I think that restorative, monotononous mood was exactly right for our overall image. Xavier: Everyone seems to think that Gaspard's in charge of the metal and I'm in charge of the disco and pop, but that's not the case. As Justice, every idea we produce is something that the two of us discussed together beforehand. There's no one factor that only one of us is in charge of.

The Evolving Live Sound of Justice

— Please tell us about the live CD, which is also at the heart of the film. The live CD gives the feeling that what you play live is very different to what is on the original album ([Cross]). Xavier: That's right.

— How do you feel that Justice's sound has evolved through your live performances? Xavier: Eh... how our musicality's evolved over time, you can probably tell at sight from all the grey hairs we've got. We can barely goddamned breathe nowadays! Gaspard: Hahahaha! Xavier: Or all the hidden kids we fathered all across the universe... (Laughter) Things like musicality are influenced by our spiritual world, too, most certainly...   I mean, we're forgetting how to speak French. For real, it's all growing dim. All those things are probably reflected in our live sound in some way.  

— Back to the serious discussion. (Laughter) How much ad-libbing is there on average in your live sets? Xavier: Almost none, we barely touch it nowadays. This tour's taken eighteen months in total, and for the first few months, we sought the best format for our performance through trial and error, but around halfway through we felt deep in our hearts that we'd completed the best set we could possibly make right now. And we've played that arrangement ever since.

— Why is that? Xavier: We're a team: the sound engineer, the lighting staff, everyone moves as one. Someone ad-libbing in that scenario would break down everything we worked so hard for, wouldn't they? Our live performances, therefore, are all based around the thought - how complete can we make it? And if you think about it, someone who saw us live in Tokyo today is unlikely to see us live again in Berlin tomorrow. That's just a part of it, but we're always trying to make each performance the best that we can.

— I see. So what's on the CD must be the best set you've played until now! If this is so, where was it recorded? Xavier: The San Francisco live. From March to September this year we've recorded something like seventy to eighty live performances, but only the five or six recordings that we thought were the best made it through. It's a far more perfect set than the one done in Summer Sonic this year, by the way. Festivals, you can't skimp out on.

— What was your favourite thing about the San Francisco performance? Xavier: We made a few little mistakes here and there, but I think we had the most excellent chemistry with the audience there. We recorded this performance with the mic stood in the audience section, that was completely intentional. You know, the weirdly bootleg-like feel. By the way, we actually thought that the live performance in Belgium was the absolute best for us personally - but the audience was so loud that none of that could make it into the CD! (Laughter) They were screaming, like, 'kyaaaa~' for over fifteen minutes straight...

— What a shame! Then, before we bring this to a close, please tell us about your future plans! Are you working on any new songs? Gaspard: Nah. Xavier: We were busy editing [A Cross the Universe] as soon as the tour was over, after all.

— Are you taking a break for a while? Xavier: Nah, it's not about that. We've had our break, as you might have guessed from the film - while we were touring, it was exactly like being in holiday, all the time. (Laughter) I feel as we've mucked around for an entire year and a half, to be honest with you. Thanks to that, we're actually geared up to put some genuine work in at the moment!

The wording of the translation is © 2017 luminatranslations. First posted 27 March 2017. The full PDF version and documentation are available. 

I wish I could say that this interview was manageable in most extents, but that’d be lying. LOUD 168 is one of my absolute favourite interviews, and maybe that played a part in it, but it was also an absolute pain to get right. Nothing in it was simple, not the interview, not the ad translation, not trying to pry apart illegible kanji... it was worth it, but believe me when I say that I was working for days on this, and that I needed all of that time to make this translation the best that I possibly could.

Well tell a lie. I was working on the translation a long time ago. I was just really lazy and didn’t get to it properly until recently, is all. 

[ Article source: (x) ]

Unfortunately, that is because I am not that good at Japanese.

I can link the above image without pixelation because 1) the article is freely online and 2) the parts relevant to the translation I’m talking about are not in that image. I don’t distribute scans or document versions of the original language text on this blog as a rule, and try to blur out as much as I can/reveal as little as possible, but: chances are, a lot of you already have seen the LOUD 168 scans a long time ago. (I did not work with those precise scanned images when it came to cleanup + translation, because those aren’t big enough to create legible PDFs - but attribution is attribution.)

But yes. Anyway, a lot of disclaiming aside, I’m not that good at Japanese. A huge hurdle in any hanzi-based language that I know is the fact that if I can’t read it, I can’t translate it - my Japanese simply isn’t good enough to figure things out from context unless I sit there with dictionary in hand, going through each kanji bit by bit. It’s very exhausting, and unfortunately this interview was chock full of those moments. A big part of why it took me so long to write out this translation and edit it was because, when I was working with only the above scans (because I had the illusion that I could just skim-read and jot down my notes, or something), I could flat out not read half of it.

That’s not pixelation. I just zoomed in on the A Cross the Universe ad from the above post and tried to make out the kanji. I face this problem all the time. What the hell is it? I don’t know, just looking at that image. I’m not good enough to figure things like that out by looking at small or scribbled text. Until I had the idea to start looking in archives and old ad copies of this film - because it did not appear to be a magazine-specific ad, the one given in LOUD 168 - I had no idea what to make of most of that text, and thus gave up.

(I finally found the online version, linked up there. HMV ad. Of course. The kanji is 撮影.)

What I’m trying to say is that a lot of mental gymnastics needed to be done simply to make this translation legible and accurate. I don’t get the choice to walk away from a kanji I don’t know, and I rightly shouldn’t; even if I have to search by radicals and scour every bit of joyo kanji for a likely fit, I need to find it and gather the correct meaning through any means possible. I claim days of work on this interview, and I must clarify that I’m counting this by the hours - I really must have spent 48+ pure hours working on this interview, a good chunk of which was devoted to pure comprehension. 

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. I was able to have some fun with the text while I was translating - they don’t actually mention A Cross the Universe by title all that much in this interview, at least not as much as I’ve mentioned it within square brackets in my translation. I attempted to make up to this by having a couple of relevant quotes reference back to the title.

The better translation is ‘... roaming the world’. I just couldn’t miss the opportunity, that was all.

Eheheheheheheh

That’s actually in the text, too. That’s not just me being silly. The nipple discourse is also word for word, pretty much. Why would I need to put in so much effort to be humourous when the masters of electro can do the job so much better eh

and of course it’s just the best feeling in the world when your translation length doesn’t fit

This happened a few times in this interview, though admittedly, not as often as I feared. The interview has such a weird layout that any mistake or under/over-writing would have affected the cross-shapes negatively later on.

A preview of the full title page. Originally the translation at the bottom was ‘Chosen By Our Top DJs’, but there was no way to make that fit.

Finding the right font for the surprisingly long ad was an art form on its own. I’m satisfied with the end product, but I do wish that it could have been a bit shorter - I don’t reckon there would have been a good way to do so, though, without compromising too much of the content. You make do.

I hope it doesn’t look so claustrophobic. Thankfully, my text was much more co-operative when it came to the actual interview. Forming the cross shape wasn’t as awful as I thought the task would be, having to resort to literally putting tape measures on my monitor aside.

And the preview of the full PDF!

That’s about all that needs writing down for the documentation. I’m honestly very exhausted after finishing this project, I think I’m going to go light for a while. There are some big projects I have in mind - Daft Punk Crossbeat 2001, Electro Book 2010, and so on - but for now, they can wait.

Next up is some good old Brodinski, I reckon. Thank you for reading this far, and for enjoying the translation! My readers make it all worthwhile. <3333