#especially if the song is either mostly innuendo or in a language other than english

[duskerot]

u go in the comments of ANY song about sex and all the comments are like ermm🤯 did ANYONE know this song was about s-s-SEX ... childhood RUINED.

[slugtranslation-hypmic]

Your thoughts on the anime made me smile like an idiot bc i can relate to it sm ToT

I watched the first episode with subtitles (and a friend - it’s always more fun with a buddy) so I am back with MORE thoughts: Subtitle Edition. Idk if they will be interesting to anyone, but here’s a sampling from the notes I took.

The Hypnosis Mics are not treated as proper nouns. They’re also called solely “mics”, never microphones. I thought this was a really unusual choice (and fwiw, although you can’t usually tell because of the fonts we use, the Hypmics are proper nouns in the manga).

It turns out an “act” and a “law” are not perfect synonyms of each other, so “H Law” (Funimation) is technically more correct than “H Act” (me). Oops.

Not sure how I feel about “Brother Ichi”. It certainly works for “Ichinii” and is pretty cute, but I do really dislike having siblings call one another “Brother” or “Sister”. While this is not always the case (especially in Asian-American households), it’s atypical for Americans to call their siblings that. I know there’s no exact reason Japan has to stick exactly to American English (and I’d REALLY like to talk sometime about some thoughts I’ve had in regards to removing my natural regiolect (regional dialect) from translation and/or creating a “new regiolect” purely for J -> E translation), but it does stick out like a sore thumb in otherwise American English.

Speaking of Brother Ichi, “Brother Ichi’d never lose” made me make this exact face:

I was surprised by how much characters in the MTC sequence used the word “fuck”. I’ve been learning (slowly - I have a natural potty mouth) that excessive swearing can very easily lead to your translation sounding quite childish, even if it would fly quite naturally in real life. This certainly didn’t sound childish, but I kept going, “Oh my god. Can they get away with that?” Loved the “fucking maggots” from Samatoki.

Juuto has a catchphrase in Japanese (やれやれ) that I’ve been using as either “Good grief” or “Good lord”. He didn’t say it in Japanese as far as I heard, but I did see the translation use “Oh my” for him at one point. I wonder if they’ll continue to use that going forward.

I take character voice very seriously for Hypmic, which means I will occasionally make some fairly arbitrary decisions in order to have each character sound unique and not simply various different shades of “me” speaking. (For instance, Sasara uses “man” rather excessively in English mostly because I started writing him that way due to a casual tone of voice and then it stuck. There’s nothing really in Japanese that suggests he should use that more frequently, but it’s there because it served me a purpose in English.) It’s veeeeery interesting for me to see someone else approach these characters and create their own voices for them, especially because the voices we’re writing match up a lot. Ramuda’s use of “pretty please” made me think of this, but other characters kind of surprised me too. Their Jakurai sounds a lot like mine (albeit a bit more forceful, which is a bit closer to the original imo) too, so much that I was kind of surprised when he said something I normally think of as a Gentarou line. I had to remind myself, “Duh, it’s not me writing this.” Still, it’s fascinating to me to watch someone else start out on their own and end up with relatively similar conclusions.

That being said. The elephant in the room. Gentarou. I’m kind of on the fence on whether or not I liked those choices. Gentarou speaks in Japanese with occasionally archaic language and (almost always) formal language. The archaic language he uses is called bungo, aka literary Japanese, which hasn’t been widely spoken or used since the early 20th century. Gentarou uses it because he’s - ding ding, you guessed it! - an author. Now, I know that I’m just biased... because I translate for another series which is written in a much more obnoxious hybridization of bungo and modern Japanese... but I don’t think Gentarou is that heavy of a bungo user to really necessitate the entire “thee” and “thou” thing. I also don’t particularly enjoy using these excessive archaisms for bungo because 19th - 20th century English literature doesn’t sound like this. It sounds more like extremely formal and verbose modern English, so I prefer to use that and throw in some outdated words from time and time again for similar effect. Of course, one could argue that 19th/20th century Japanese literature isn’t necessarily an exact approximation of 19th/20th century English literature, but bah, humbug. I don’t think anyone but me gives a damn about this anyway. Overall, I liked his speech style quite a bit besides that.

Also really enjoyed the use of “wee bit leery of lending more”. The “wee” almost suggests a British accent, and I will be the biggest advocate of British English Gentarou until the day I die. The choice of dialect can make or break a translation (would love to talk about this sometime too), and using British English for him among an otherwise American English-speaking cast would be STELLAR and BRILLIANT.

I was not at all fond of the use of “D’oh!” as one of the little “Gh!” or “Urp!” noises. Sound effects don’t tend to make, but they can absolutely break a translation. (Also know that I criminally awful at sound effects, so this is the pot calling the kettle black.) “D’oh!” brings to mind Homer Simpson, which is okay for Dice, but not... not good at all for Hifumi. Funimation subber, if you are reading this... I’m sorry... I don’t... I don’t like it...

slaps the table with both hands GOD, “COFFEE AND CHILL” IN THE FLING POSSE RAP IS SUCH A BRILLIANT LINE. (Original was “珈琲タイム” iirc - lit. coffee time) (Also while I’m here, I love the fact that “coffee” is written in Gentarou’s bungo whereas “time” is written in the style of Ramuda’s English loan words. Even the way the lyrics appear onscreen is a mixture of FP’s various styles.) This is such a quick and easy way to provide background about Ramuda’s flirtatious nature and put in a bit of harmless innuendo that often appears in Ramuda songs. This also handily explains the entire “Want to go grab a bite to eat?/How about we get a cup of tea?” thing that appears often in Japanese but is less natural in English. Who thought of this? You’re a genius. You deserve a medal.

I have Jakurai use phrases containing the word “I” a lot (in phrases like “I suppose that x”, “I’m afraid that y”, etc) as a way of softening his speech and making it sound like he’s more ... personally responsible for the words coming out of his mouth, I guess. The translator used quite a bit of those similar phrases, as I mentioned previously, which surprised me a good bit. They also used the phrase “I assure you” which is AN AMAZING line for Jakurai. It gives him a much firmer tone than I normally write him with but also suggests by way of similar sounds “reassuring” the listener and overall making him sound more confident and capable. This is so good. I’m going to steal it.

Overall, I thought it was a really solid translation with a lot of thought clearly put into it. I’m excited to see more work from this subber. Mr. Josh Cole, you are killing it. Huge shoutout as well to Kotonoha Consulting and Sarah Alys Lindholm for their work with the lyrics. Incredibly strong effort. Loved it.

On the other hand, it was a bit affirming to me to see that the quality wasn’t vastly different from some of my latest efforts. There were none of the awkward lines which are still prone to crop up in my work, and it was a good bit more creative than what I can normally produce. Additionally, Hypmic is, relatively speaking, fairly easy to translate if you ignore the god damn raps. All that being said... of course I won’t have the same experience as someone who has quite literally been working in Japanese teaching or translation for as long as I’ve been alive, but it’s enough to make me think that I can, conceivably, start selling my work for money in a couple more years. Whoo. Have to celebrate the little victories.

I’m so sorry to anyone who started reading this in the hopes that it would get interesting. It didn’t.