#macula marius

Episode 1278: Erin’s Ice Art

Translator Notes:

One interesting thing you sometimes come across when translating from one language to another is cases where one language has a singular word that spans multiple concepts that are individual words in another language, which both provides a bit of a challenge sometimes for translators while also providing insight in assumptions about what one thinks are intrinsically separate concepts that may in fact not be (or vice versa).

In the case of this comic, the thing that made me think of this is that Lyria and Erin are both talking about helping in the first panel, but Lyria’s using the word tetsudau, which means “help” in the sense of assisting someone with something, whereas Erin’s using the word tasukaru, which means “help” in the sense of saving someone from an unfortunate or problematic circumstance.  It seemed kind of weird and repetitive in this case to render both as “help”, but in another circumstance, translating both as “help” might’ve been a perfectly fine call.

In the other direction, one Japanese word I always have trouble knowing exactly how to interpret is omoshiroi, which entirely depending on context can mean either “funny” (funny ha-ha, not funny strange) or “interesting”.  I at least think you can interpret it as basically being in general describing a circumstance where the thing being described diverges from what otherwise would be a base state, but in different possible ways... but as an English speaker who would never conflate those two concepts natively, I must admit that having the same word stand in for both potential contexts is still to this day difficult for me to fully grasp.

Got some beautiful, beautiful characters today

not pictured are Summer Ilsa, Ferry, Summer Yuel, Sara, and Earth Eustace