Episode 1393: A Musical Connection
Oh boy, I have quite a bit to say about this one!
First, “tomboy” is a bit of a slant translation - the Japanese word used was higomokkosu, which is a word I’ve never heard before this comic. Using the slang reference site I often use, it appears to be a word that refers to a somewhat brutish sort of guy who’s temperament is stubborn and manly. When used with regards to girls, it seemed at least fairly close in semantic meaning to the English “tomboy”, so since that both was fairly close and created a nice bit of English alliteration, I went with that.
Second, when addressing Augusta and Robertina in the second panel, the Japanese script has Cecile describing their activity as a henna gishiki, or “strange ritual” to translate it literally. However, I felt like that sounded kinda weird in English, so since the intended meaning is just that Cecile has no idea what on Earth they’re doing, I figured that the English version I came up with was a reasonable more natural-sounding English approximation.
Third, for those curious, a tlepilli was originally an Aztec word for a bundle of resinous sticks burned for illumination. So... yeah, actually, it has a similar sort of visual effect as glow sticks, in fact. Cute bit of allusion by the original writers.
Finally, the last panel I changed up quite a bit. It originally spoke of the two having a connection formed through tsukkomi-ing, tsukkomi referring to the straight man of a comedy duo, and being a perennially hard word to translate exactly, found often in Grand Blues! Given that translating the counterpart of tsukkomi as “idiot” in English has worked in the past, I figured that this was a reasonable approximation of the original Japanese intent.
