#i;m fairly certain that this is also how you're supposed to say the x sound in seeker's tribe letters

[dovalore]

[ background from song for my lost ghost friends ]

xajah'a (left) and xana (right) as kids

oc lore under cut

these two are my twin cabbits (viera x miqo'te)

xana loves bugs, xajah'a is more neutral about them

xana's favourite thing is finding cool bugs to show people, she gives regular bugs to xajah'a to 'fish' with (he's tying them to the ends of his stick and dunking them into water, which isn't an effective way to fish at all but he's just a small kid mimicking what the adults around him are doing)

mostly xajah'a enjoys climbing trees, but he's not very good at getting down from them (and neither is xana, for that matter)

xajah'a is pronounced za-ya-ha OR sha-ya-ha

xana is pronounced za-na OR sha-na

their mum thought it would be cool to have both of their names start with the letter x and their dad thought it would be funny to give them alternate pronunciations lol

(for reference, their dad also has multiple pronunciations for his own name that he swaps between, because he thinks it's hilarious)

genetically, they're more viera than miqo'te, mum's also a cabbit and their dad's a viera

the main visual difference between them at this point of their lives is their ear shape, xajah'a has rounder ears while xana's are more pointed

their mum may or may not know which of the two is the eldest, the twins certainly don't know and their mum doesn't tell anyone either because she thinks it's funnier that way

deeply unserious family

[slugtranslation-hypmic]

Hi slug I was wondering if you ever have a moment when you're trying to translate be like "How the fuck can I word this as accurately as what they actually say in Japanese-" like for example whenever jyushi talks in his chunni mode or when gentaro say 「おや？」 would you translate it to "oh?" Or "my" (like "oh my") by the way gentaro talks because I tried to translate something by myself and what I tried is to translate it by how in character would the sentence be said by the characters just like how you did when ramuda say "playdate" in dirty dawn chapter 5

Unless you have a different ways when you tried to translate

Sorry for asking to many questions www have a good day and take care!

"How the fuck can I word this" is my constant mantra, but it doesn't tend to happen in the situations you've mentioned. For Juushi's chuuni mode, the Japanese text is always bombastic and over the top, so I likewise go nuts and scale everything I write up to ridiculous proportions. I actually tend to handle this performance mode more loosely than I handle most characters, since it's a bit easier to hit peak bombast when I'm thinking solely in English. What I tend to do for him is figure out what he actually means underneath all that nonsense, phrase that idea in English, and then gussy it up as much as I can without it becoming utterly incomprehensible. For Gentarou's "Oya?", it really just depends on what meaning this sound has in context. It could easily become "Oh?" or "Hmm?" or "My word".

Like you mentioned, I do consider "How would character x express idea y?" as I work on Hypmic. The Japanese text has very distinct character voices which make for a rich, enjoyable reading experience. It's usually very easy to tell who is speaking even if the illustrations don't specify. However, while some of this is carried through via the word choice (for example, Hifumi uses a lot of words that are made up in such a way that is supposed to sound trendy and goofy), a large portion of it appears in the grammatical structures via particles and the politeness of the characters' dialogue. A translation concerned purely with semantics may lose a lot of that fun, so I work very hard at establishing and maintaining consistent character voices. This forces me to think outside the box and consider wording things more creatively than I would if I was speaking normally. Most of these creative choices tend to be received well, as far as I can see, which is an affirming thing. To bring up the example of Hifumi again, I've seen a lot of people really enjoying the "Boy, am I a real smart cookie!" line from FP/M+ 1 which came from 俺っちマジ天才！ (more literally: I'm an actual genius!) or... everyone's favorite... "Good lord, seems like I'm becoming quite the popular guy," which came from やれやれ、だいぶ気に入られてしまったみたいですね (more literally: Oh great, it looks like I've accidentally become well liked).

Since there are no direct analogues for most of the small grammatical points that make for each unique character's voice, this means I also get to make up certain traits to give each character in English to keep them sounding distinct. Almost all of these are grounded in considerations of the Japanese text. For example, Juushi uses "so" more than any cast member because it makes him sound softer and less aggressive than other cast members, just as he does in Japanese, and Otome shouldn't (I say shouldn't because I occasionally forget and notice it later, whereupon I edit it out) ever use contractions because she speaks especially formally in Japanese. The only times they aren't are when I need to make fairly arbitrary decisions in order to having characters bleed together. For example, when multiple characters are swearing in the same scene, I have certain characters favor one curse word or another. Samatoki's favorite curse word is "shit", but Juuto and Ichirou both favor "crap" to keep them from accidentally treading on Samatoki's territory. Then to keep Kuukou from running into Ichirou, Kuukou uses "ass" liberally, in addition to having the biggest potty mouth of the cast. (Although, come to think of it, Kuukou talks about asses a fair deal in Japanese... so maybe this one isn't as arbitrary as I thought.)