#translator notes

In case Episode 03 confused you...here's me explaining a little xD

You giant galaxy-brained bastion of knowledge, tell me everything and more.

Tell me about fruit I’ve never heard of. Tell me of unheard song, of ancient poetry, of brand new slang. Tell me the colours that are not named in my language, flavours lost to time, impossible smells that take a paragraph to describe. Tell me to crack my chest open, turn the aching cavity towards a distant place, and bleed for somewhere unfamiliar.

Hey, everyone!  I’m back, getting started now with translating the second book of the Young Pommern side story manga.  Enjoy!

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Translator Notes:

I do my best to hew as close as possible to the original Japanese when translating, but every now and then you run into something that I assume worked in Japanese but just doesn't work in English... like, at all.  Sometimes that's due to grammatical differences between languages, and sometimes that's due to difference in how word choice comes across in one language versus the other, but either way, in those cases, I tend to just throw out the Japanese lines that don't work and come up with brand new lines that in my view still get across the spirit of the original Japanese lines while sounding like much more natural English that fits the characters in question.

In this chapter, there were two cases where I had to do that, which cover both of those circumstances.  The first was Segwell's line, "What devilry is this!?"  The original Japanese was konna koto ga--!!, which literally translates as, "This sort of thing...!!"  Obviously, that would be absurd to include as-is, so I instead substituted a completely invented alternate line that was intended to convey his shock and horror at the scene before him while still sounding like a thing he might say.

Japanese has a grammatical feature where you can often just completely leave off an entire part of a sentence if the emotional expression is conveyed adequately without it, and it always is a bit tricky to know what to do with those lines when translating to English.  The most extreme example of this is the word chotto, which literally means "a little bit", but can be used as a way to politely decline something.  For example, if you asked a polite Japanese woman whether she wanted to do something tomorrow and she did not, she might simply reply, Ashita wa chotto... ("Tomorrow's a little...") and it's up to you to fill in the blanks that she's trying to let you down easy.

The second case was this exchange:

Zanzekuel: "The hell!?  I thought you took care of that one!"

Annette: "Yeah, you an' me both, idiot!"

The exact Japanese was this:

Zanzekuel: Nanda arya!?  Omae chanto taoshite oke yo!! ("What!?  Damn!!  Defeat them properly before moving on!!")

Annette: Dekiru nara yatteru wa yo!! ("If I were able to, I would be doing so!!")

In this case, the direct translation isn't missing any part of speech like it was in the case with Segwell's line, but the direct translation in English just sounds super stilted and out of character for those two.  Since the main idea is to convey Zanzekuel's annoyance that Annette hadn't fully defeated a monster and Annette's annoyance that he thinks that's her fault, I figured I'd just replace these two lines with lines of my own creation that sounded in my view much better in English while still conveying the general idea underpinning the Japanese lines.

Episode 1467: Vikala’s Debut

Translator Notes:

Oh boy, this is a great episode!  There’s a lot of clever and neat stuff in here that deserves to be unpacked, a lot of which were somewhat lost in translation.

First, one interesting thing is that, in the Japanese script, Vikala’s personality change between yin and yang is even more explicit - she actually changes which pronoun she uses.  When she’s in bubbly yang mode, she uses boku, which is most commonly a male pronoun, but which is also often used in Japanese media by somewhat tomboyish, energetic girls.  When she slips into sullen yin mode, however, she uses atashi, which is a much more girly pronoun.  This isn’t really something you can translate into English, aside from having her be generally more tomboyish when in yang mode, but it’s a neat thing to note.

Second, there’s a triple pun in the final panel that is just marvelous, but which I unfortunately can’t translate in the slightest into English.  Vikala’s yang-mode name is Vicky, or Bikki in Japanese (the Japanese language has no V sound, so a B sound is used in its place).  The sound effect used here to indicate Vyrn’s brain stimulation is bikibiki, so in a very literal way Vyrn is “Vickying” Vikala to turn her back to yang mode.  In addition to that, Vyrn’s Japanese name is Bii, so in her final line, Vikala comments that she is being Biikibiki’d, thereby adding Vyrn’s name to the pun mixture as well.  It’s really silly and clever, and I’m sad that I more or less had to just remove it all while translating to English.

Phew, this was a long one.  Have a chapter!

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Episode 1449: Lobelia Being Shown Around

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