Bonus Translation Notes: On “English”

One of the weirdest and most paradoxically challenging tasks when translating fiction is when you’re called upon to translate something from one language...into the same language.

This comes up more often than you might think, and in a wider variety of ways than you might expect! Take, for instance, how loanwords can complicate the translation process: in a book I translated recently, I ended up rendering a phrase that would literally translate as “A-5 rank marbled meat from a domestically raised cow” as “A-5 wagyu.” In other words, I translated one Japanese phrase into a totally different Japanese word, because that Japanese word happened to be the most concise and natural means of expressing the concept to an English-speaking audience.

As weird as those instances are, though, they’re not what I’ll be focusing on in this section. Source language to source language translation is a really fascinating subject, but when Andou’s in the picture, target language to target language translation is the much more prominent problem. And by target language to target language, I mean, of course, translating “English” to English.

Now, before I really dig into this issue, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: this is not a case of “the author was bad at English and made a bunch of questionable decisions that had to be corrected.” In fact, it’s exactly the opposite: a lot of the English in Supernatural Battles is pointedly, deliberately bad in ways that are actually quite clever! Take, for instance, Andou’s misunderstanding about how the word “great” works, and how that contributes to Kudou’s misunderstanding (and, by extension, the conflict that drives the first half of this volume). That’s not the sort of joke you can write unless you have both a pretty solid grasp of English grammar and a solid understanding of common mistakes second-language learners make—or, at the very least, it shows the ability to do your research in those areas, and do it well.

The thing is, though, that multilingual jokes that lean on a character being bad at a foreign language can be really awkward when you’re translating the work into the exact same language that the character is supposed to be bad at! Mishandling that sort of content means your translation will read as awkward in the best case, and make no sense at all in the worst. If you just translate the Japanese and leave the English entirely as-is, you’ll almost certainly end up in one of those two areas, even if you do an excellent job on the “translating the Japanese” part.

Further complicating the issue in this particular case is the fact that Andou isn’t actually bad-bad at English. In fact, considering his age and demographic, he’s actually pretty good at it! He wouldn’t have been able to come up with the Route of Origin double meaning if he wasn’t, after all (which, I should note, was not a localization flourish—that English double meaning was explicitly present and noted in the original Japanese text).

It felt important, as such, to make him come across as being decent at English, but prone to the sort of careless mistakes and awkwardness that a high schooler like him would tend to fall into. This is a big part of why we decided to refrain from altering some of the slightly awkward power names and titles. World Creation might sound more natural than World Create, for instance, but World Create’s English isn’t awkward because Kota Nozomi made a mistake—it’s slightly awkward because Andou made a mistake, and as such, it’s a sort of awkwardness that feels worth preserving in its English incarnation.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I go into the particulars of how we’ve been addressing the “English” in Supernatural Battles, I’d like to talk about some of the other techniques that we could’ve gone with but ultimately decided against!

Probably the most immediately obvious technique to deal with a character speaking your target language in the original text, and one of the most common, is to have the character say the same phrase in a totally different language. A character who decides to get all fancy by speaking English could speak in French instead, for example. I’ve used this technique myself in the past, and in many circumstances, it works great!

The thing is, that technique only really works when the important factor is just “this character is speaking in a foreign language.” The moment the specific language they’re speaking becomes important, it all starts falling apart, and that becomes more and more likely the more they speak in it over the course of the story.

This problem is also vastly more dangerous when you’re working with serialized media rather than a full, self-contained work. One volume you’re making a character who likes saying “please” for no apparent reason say “s’il vous plait” instead, the next volume you have to make it so that character lived in France for a year in their backstory instead of America to justify the change, and the volume after that when the characters end up going to America for whatever reason, you’re stuck desperately retconning everything you’ve translated up to that point.

This is the stuff that translators’ nightmares are made of, and I think that all of us have come uncomfortably close to making this sort of mistake at some point in our careers. Or maybe I’m just projecting. Moving on!

A couple other possibilities for handling this issue are sort of polar opposites to each other: glossing over the use of English, and making the use of English very clearly and specifically marked whenever it comes up.

The former would involve finding a functional equivalent for the character speaking English that’s language-agnostic, based around the context of the English’s original use. If the character uses random, gratuitous English because they’re a globetrotting businessperson who likes to show off, for instance, having them use a ton of corporate buzzwords and business-speak could potentially serve as a functional equivalent. The goal is to identify the effect that English being used has on the character’s portrayal and come up with a quirk that has the same effect without requiring them to actually speak in a different language.

In Supernatural Battles’s case, of course, this was never an option. Scenes like Andou discussing his test with Miss Satomi wouldn’t work at all if we took the English factor out entirely, and more importantly, doing so would be a major betrayal of one of the series’ core sources of humor. This technique can work great in some circumstances, but in this instance, it wasn’t on the table to begin with.

The other technique I mentioned above, however—clearly and specifically marking the use of English—is actually very close to what we ultimately settled on! The purest example of this would be coming up with some manner of clearly marking when characters are speaking another language. Enclosing English dialogue in brackets [like this] is a technique I’ve seen used on a number of occasions, and it works really well when the fact that a foreign language is being spoken is plot-relevant!

The one issue with that version of the technique is that it’s, well, a little jarring, in my mind. Not so much when it’s used in rare, isolated cases, but when you get to the point where you have bracketed dialogue every three or four pages, it just feels like a bit much to me.

That, finally, leads me to our solution to the “English” problem in Supernatural Battles: we decided that we would go to great pains to make sure that whenever a character speaks or otherwise uses English, the fact that they’re saying/writing it in English is acknowledged in some capacity without resorting to a specific, recurring mark like the bracket method.

The big benefit to this method is that as the series goes on and conventions are established, we’ll be able to be more and more subtle with our use of it, and as such get closer and closer to the experience of reading the series in the original Japanese. Take Andou and Kiryuu’s power names, for instance. One of our early priorities in volume one was to establish quickly and consistently that the names of all the main characters’ powers are being said in English. By doing so early on and getting the reader used to the idea, we were able to save ourselves a lot of hassle and omit a lot of what would otherwise have been necessary additional exposition during the entire Kudou-misunderstanding-her-power’s-name sequence.

By the time we got to the part where Kiryuu introduces his team’s power names, the convention was so thoroughly established that we didn’t feel the need to add in the specification that they were in English anymore. Our readers know how Andou and Kiryuu behave well enough at that point to make that conclusion themselves. Or at least, that’s the theory—hopefully it worked out for you! Other, less recurring uses of English will still need supporting text, of course, but once the idea that the characters are canonically mostly speaking in Japanese but sometimes dip into English is clearly established, it becomes much easier to note when the English moments occur without having it feel awkward and jarring.

Anyway, I hope that this long, meandering ramble has given you some insight into how translators approach one of the stranger issues that can crop up when working with this sort of media. There are a lot of other ways in which Supernatural Battles plays with English that are worth discussing, but I’m running out of space, and they’ll have to wait for a future TL notes section!

And speaking of TL notes, it’s time for the real meat of this section: the preposterous pile of references peppered throughout the volume! As always, I’ve organized them chronologically and omitted any references that are explained well enough within the text itself. Here we go!

Chapter 1:

🜂 I was buying an eroge this time.

“Eroge” is a piece of Japanese slang that’s been fairly widely adopted by the English fanbase for the works it refers to! They are, simply put, pornographic video games. Most often (but not exclusively) the term refers to visual novels, which is another term that’s somewhat disputed. Broadly speaking, visual novels are games with an unusually high amount of story and an unusually small amount of gameplay. In any case, we made the call to keep the term as-is, largely because even if Sagami were a native English speaker, he would absolutely still be the sort of person to lean into niche jargon and call them eroge.

As a side note, an interesting tidbit about this line is that in the anime adaptation of this scene, Sagami claims to have bought a “galge” instead (galge being a term for the same general sort of game, only without the explicitly pornographic connotations). This is just one of many tweaks the adaptation made to the little particulars of the story, which I’ll probably be writing about in more detail in a later TL note section!

🜂 ...he’d raise his hands in the air, shout “People of Earth! Let me give you my hottie energy!” and pull a reverse Spirit Bomb...

This is a reference to the final, climactic fight in the original run of Dragon Ball. The Spirit Bomb is a technique that lets the user gather up the energy of other people to use in a single, massive attack, and the final blow of that final fight is struck with an enormous Spirit Bomb powered by all the people of the Earth at once.

🜂 I’m nothing like that moé-swilling, waifu-wrangling creeper!

“Moé” is a slang term that originated in Japan and made its way into popular use among the English-speaking anime fandom at some point in the late 2000s/early 2010s. The term is notoriously hard to pin down in much the same way as chuuni, but digging into the particulars would be way too ambitious a topic for a single TL note, so I’ll narrow things down to just the most relevant info: in the context Andou is using it here, moé refers to both a character archetype and a genre of media.

The character archetype is probably best described as a sort of complicated form of cuteness. It’s really broad, and characters that aren’t cute in any sort of traditional sense can still be described as moé under the right circumstances, but the sort of moé characters that Sagami is into are almost certainly the sort of characters that populate the casts of eroge (see the first note for this chapter) and slice-of-life anime focusing on exclusively female casts.

That brings us to the genre side of the equation, moé anime! Moé shows are usually slice-of-life adjacent, usually star a cast of exclusively female and predominantly young characters, and tend to focus more on the characters being cute than on any sort of plot progression. The moé genre experienced a massive surge of popularity around the time the term made its way overseas, thanks in no small part to a sequence of mega-popular, moé-heavy anime by Kyoto Animation (K-On being a genre-defining example). Having come out in 2012, this particular volume was released pretty much right at the height of the moé boom, and Sagami being into the genre is entirely unsurprising.

🜂 You’d best watch yourself, Andou, or I’ll Pretty your Cure!

Pretty Cure is a long-running and extremely popular series of magical girl anime. The franchise has a lot of similarities to the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai franchises we discussed last volume, actually—each season is a year long and features an entirely new story with a totally new cast of characters that transform into super-forms to fight monsters.

Though ostensibly targeted toward young girls, Pretty Cure (or Precure, as it’s known to its fans) has a massive fanbase of older viewers, many of whom are male. Sagami being into the show definitely tells us something about him, but it’s more of a “he’s this specific sort of nerd” revelation than anything else. “Male Precure fan” isn’t necessarily a negative archetype in and of itself, although as we’ll see later on in this volume, there are caveats to that claim.

🜂 ...Kiva had this ridiculously cool super-kick called the Darkness Moon Break...

This attack’s name is hilariously edgy for a reason: Kamen Rider Kiva’s theme was horror, and vampires in particular. “Kiva” itself is a somewhat strained pun—it’s both a play on the Japanese word for “fang” and also an abbreviation of, and I’m quoting this directly, “King of Vampire.”

🜂 So, I’ve been thinking it’s about time I take up this wooden sword with ‘Lake Toya’ written on it and learn a special move of my own.

This line plays into and expands upon Andou’s Gintama reference in his previous line! To make a very long story short, Gintama is an extremely long-running action/gag manga with an unusually anarchic sense of humor. The main character, Gintoki, uses a wooden sword with the words “Lake Toya” written on it as his weapon of choice, and a running gag in the series involves a spirit that possesses said sword attempting to force Gintoki to learn a fighting game-style special move.

🜂 If you parody people, they’ll parody you back.

This is very close to a line from Shaman King—“If you hurt people, they’ll hurt you back,” in the original.

🜂 Just like a certain Bankai that had an effective range of up to thirteen kilometers...

This is in reference to Gen Ichimaru’s Bankai, specifically (Bankai being the magic sword superpowers from Bleach).

🜂 I’d put on an act so terrifying nobody would dare to approach me, no matter how badly they wanted to kick my ass!

Yup, it’s another JoJo reference! This one’s a little different, though, in that it’s actually an adapted JoJo reference. In the original text, Andou actually quotes Polnareff—a character from JoJo Part 3—as he describes DIO’s power to stop time. The quote in question has become a meme among the Japanese JoJo fandom, but the English-speaking fandom didn’t make much of anything of the scene at all.

As such, a direct translation would’ve lost the “Andou is being a memelord” aspect of the exchange, and we decided that subbing in a JoJo meme that’s still appropriate to the situation which our readers would be more likely to understand was the way to go. Under those conditions, DIO’s “Oh? You’re approaching me?” seemed to be the perfect fit!

🜂 Now I know how it feels to be the one member of your crew who actually bothers working out...

Andou is most likely referring to Roronoa Zoro, a swordsman from One Piece who takes working out to comical extremes (and is, as Andou notes, the only member of his pirate crew who really ever works out at all).

🜂 Oh, that was a From the Northern Country reference, wasn’t it?

From the Northern Country (or Kita no Kuni Kara) was a Japanese TV drama that aired primarily in the early 1980s. The show revolves around a man who moves from Tokyo to his home prefecture of Hokkaido with his two children following a nasty divorce. The show is reportedly quite the tearjerker, and the scene Andou inadvertently half quotes involves the main character snapping at a waitress in a ramen restaurant (“The kid hasn’t finished eating yet!”) and knocking a bowl out of her hands.

Although this is an incredibly obscure piece of media by the standards of anyone outside of Japan, hilariously, it might very well be one of the most accessible references in the book for the average Japanese person. This is very much mainstream pop culture rather than otaku niche pop culture, which would explain why Sayumi of all people was the one to call out Andou’s non-quote.

Chapter 2:

🜂 You think you can hide from the power of Pesquisa?

Pesquisa is a supernatural power that features in Bleach. The specifics vary from character to character, but long story short, it gives the user the ability to supernaturally sense the area around them.

🜂 She’s not Haizaki Shogo!

Haizaki Shogo is a character from Kuroko’s Basketball, a sports manga by Fujimaki Tadatoshi that ran in Shonen Jump. The manga is notable for being one of those sports stories that goes pretty over the top with its anime silliness, and many of its characters have battle manga-style special skills and powers. Haizaki’s power allows him to steal other characters’ special moves in much the same way that Grateful Robber allows Kudou to steal powers, but the one exception to his ability is that it doesn’t work on the members of the main character’s former team, who are collectively known as the Generation of Miracles.

Chapter 3:

🜂 What are you, a second-generation Pokémon protagonist?

In second-generation Pokémon games (that is, Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal), the player character whites out when all their Pokémon fall unconscious. Contrast with the first-gen games, in which you black out instead.

🜂 As best as I could tell, she was aiming to sound like some kind of gangster.

The entire sequence revolving around Chifuyu’s not-so-successful attempt at putting on a silly accent took some pretty heavy tweaking to make the joke land in English! In Japanese, Chifuyu is not just cycling through accents with genre-fiction connotations, she’s also going through hyperspecific regional accents associated with particular regions of Japan, with the punchline being that Andou can only identify them thanks to having heard them in a specific anime (Sgt. Frog).

The thing is, that joke only lands if the accents themselves are identifiable and if the reader is aware of all the different regional accents that the characters from Sgt. Frog speak with. Lacking that context, the scene comes across as “Chifuyu does an ambiguous accent, then Andou turns around and explains to the reader what part of Japan the accent is supposed to represent.” In short, all humor is lost. Since the core of the joke is “Chifuyu does accents poorly and Andou relates them to media he knows,” tweaking the sources of the accents themselves seemed like an appropriate measure to take!

🜂 Hunter takes manga and movie titles, barely changes them, and puts them in as power names all the time.

Like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Hunter x Hunter is indeed full of this stuff. Examples include superpowers with names that can be read as “Jailhouse Rock” (an Elvis song) and “Shotgun Blues” (A Guns N’ Roses song).

Chapter 4

🜂 Gear...Two!

This, and the pose that Andou references a line later, are both references to a famous moment in One Piece where the main character, Luffy, unveils a powerful new technique.

🜂 Our friggin’ floor knows how to use its Haki!

Another One Piece reference! Haki is a power in that series that, among other things, is the only consistent means of harming people who have eaten Devil Fruits (one of which gave Luffy his rubber powers).

🜂 Hatoko’s a great card! You don’t even have to Tribute any other monsters to summon her.

Machi’s specifically treating Hatoko like a Yu-Gi-Oh card in this line. In Yu-Gi-Oh, higher-level monsters require you to sacrifice one or more monsters to summon them—hence Andou’s retort about her treating Hatoko like a weakling.

🜂 We’ll simply think up stories on the fly to pass the time, like indolent nobles in the Heian era.”

The Heian era was a period of Japanese history lasting from the late eighth century to the late twelfth century. It’s notable for having been an exceptionally active era for the arts, and it was fairly common for the upper classes to engage in the sort of word games that Sayumi’s alluding to. Poetry was especially prominent in those gatherings, and some of the poems that were written at them are still read and studied to this day.

🜂 Or a fork...but I guess that one’s hero-on-heroine violence, so it’s sorta different.

Andou’s referencing a light novel series called Nyaruko: Crawling with Love in this line. The series, written by Aisora Manta, is an over-the-top parody of the works of H.P. Lovecraft in which all the eldritch abominations from Lovecraft’s stories are portrayed as cute anime waifus who constantly harass the main character. A running gag involves said main character punishing them by sticking them with a fork—hence Andou’s line.

🜂 It’s been a prominent technique as far back as City Hunter.

City Hunter is a classic Jump manga by Hojo Tsukasa that dates back to 1985. The series stars Saeba Ryo, a skilled gunman who works as a sort of mercenary in Tokyo, and Makimura Kaori, the sister of Ryo’s late partner (who was murdered near the beginning of the series). As far as this reference goes, the series’ most noteworthy trait is the running gag of Kaori pulling comically enormous hammers out of nowhere to bludgeon Ryo with whenever he does something perverted. It is, in fact, one of the earliest instances of hammerspace being used as a running gag in the manga world! I can’t say with confidence that it’s the origin of the trope in Japanese media, but there’s no denying that its use was incredibly influential.

🜂 ...or stories with characters who aren’t even human but have powers with names in Spanish or Italian...

While Andou’s first point about people speaking Japanese in other worlds but having English titles is applicable to so many series it’s impossible to pin down any single specific title, the inclusion of Spanish in this line feels pretty targeted at Bleach in specific. The series was well known for pulling the names of its powers from a variety of languages, with Spanish being a clear favorite of the author’s. We’ve actually already seen an example of this in this very volume—see the reference to a power called Pesquisa back in chapter two.

🜂 Is it supposed to be the Gurongi language? Or maybe they’re just mumbling through their lines like the lead actor in Kamen Rider: Blade? Come on, people, we speak Rinto here!

Okay, this is a pretty elaborate one. Andou is referencing two distinct Kamen Rider series—Kamen Rider Kuuga and Kamen Rider Blade—and two distinct Japanese internet memes that revolve around the Kamen Rider franchise.

First off, the references: the Gurongi language is a fictional language spoken by the monsters that serve as Kuuga’s villains. The series took the somewhat cheeky move of having its villains discuss late-game plot elements and twists in that fictional language very early on in the series, trusting that nobody would be able to decipher it until all the reveals had already happened.

The next reference, on the other hand, is also the first of our two internet memes: the “fictional language” spoken by the main character of Kamen Rider Blade. If we’d translated Andou’s second sentence in this block literally, it would’ve come out as simply “Or maybe it’s Ondouru?” This, of course, would have been completely incomprehensible to English readers—not only is “Ondouru” not a commonly known aspect of the series, even among English-speaking Kamen Rider fans, it’s not actually a real aspect of the series at all!

“Ondouru,” as it turns out, is an in-joke within the Japanese Blade fandom. The actor who portrayed the main character in the series was somewhat notorious for his questionable enunciation, and the fandom eventually started acting as if he was speaking an entirely different language. The name “Ondouru” came from a particularly infamous and incomprehensible line of his in an early episode. None of this information is readily available in English online, so not only is it a Kamen Rider deep cut, it’s one that’s impossible to look up without a functional grasp of Japanese. As such, we decided to support the joke with an explanation rather than leave it as is.

Finally, “we speak Rinto here” takes the sequence all the way back to Kuuga again. In Kuuga’s backstory, the Rinto people are an ancient ancestor to humanity who were almost wiped out by the Gurongi. “We speak Rinto here” is a line from the series that Japanese fans ended up using to mean something along the lines of a sarcastic “Say that again, but in English this time.” Unlike Ondouru, the whole Rinto backstory is a known factor to the English Kamen Rider fandom, so we decided to leave it unaltered as a nod to how obsessively detailed Andou’s Kamen Rider deep cuts can get.

🜂 As for my story’s theme...I chose ‘Dazai Osamu’!

Dazai Osamu was an author who lived in the mid-twentieth century. Though not incredibly well-known in the English-speaking world, his works are extremely famous and oft read in Japan. By global standards, No Longer Human is probably his most famous story.

🜂 Y’know how you sometimes see characters in original fiction who are supposed to be the descendants of other people’s famous characters, like Sherlock Holmes or Arsène Lupin?

Trivia time: the original Arsène Lupin stories actually fell victim to copyright issues on account of featuring Sherlock Holmes himself in a cameo appearance! Unfortunately for Maurice Leblanc, he and Arthur Conan Doyle were contemporaries, and Doyle took the appropriation of his most famous character rather poorly. Leblanc’s solution, hysterically, was to continue featuring a suspiciously familiar private detective in his Arsène stories by the name of “Herlock Sholmes.” In short: the hilarity of copyright technicalities hasn’t changed in well over a century, at the absolute least.

🜂 More like watching you from the afterlife and muttering ‘his has been a life of much shame’!

In this line, Tomoyo is quoting a very slightly adapted version of the first line of No Longer Human.

🜂 The most repulsive form of chuuni is to force innocent people who don’t know better to read your cringey backstories, and to use others merely for your own satisfaction!

Tomoyo’s loosely quoting Bruno Bucciarati, a character from JoJo Part 5. The original line occurs after Bucciarati realizes the depths of the part’s primary villain’s depravity (though of course when he says it, he talks about the villain’s evil rather than his chuuni).

Chapter 5

🜂 ...repeating an internal mantra of I mustn’t run away, I mustn’t run away, I mustn’t run away!

Andou’s pulling a Shinji here—by which I mean, he’s quoting the internal mantra of Shinji Ikari, the protagonist of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Chapter 6

🜂 I’m spending the afternoon in the arcade playing the Precure card machines...

As previously noted back in chapter 1, Precure has an expansive fanbase that reaches far beyond the elementary school girl demographic the show’s theoretically targeted yet. That said, the arcade game that Sagami’s talking about here is very much aimed at the elementary school market, to the point that the machines are conspicuously child-sized. I mentioned that while Sagami being a Precure fan tells the reader that he’s one of those nerds, it’s not necessarily in a judgmental way, but him spending his time monopolizing the arcade game tells us that he’s also one of those Precure fans, which is a lot less neutral of a tidbit to learn about him.

Epilogue

🜂 Makes me wish I had that ointment that Rukawa Kaede used to get rid of his swelling overnight before the big match with Sannoh High.

Kiryuu’s referencing Slam Dunk, a basketball manga by Inoue Takehiko. Rukawa Kaede is a member of the main characters’ team who ends up taking a nasty blow to the eye in a match, leading to major swelling, only to recover overnight after a member of the team responsible for his injury gives him a seemingly sketchy but incredibly effective ointment in an effort to apologize.

Afterword

🜂 Draw! Big Brother Card!

This title is a reference to a notorious scene from Yu-Gi-Oh! in which the main character absolutely brutalizes a bit villain in a children’s card game, drawing monster card after monster card until one of his friends has to run in and physically stop him. Interestingly enough, this is an instance of a meme that made the jump pretty directly from the Japanese-speaking side of the internet to the English-speaking side. You can find the scene in question by searching for “Draw! Monster card!” and I highly recommend doing so, since it’s absolutely hilarious.

And, that’s all the reference humor we have to unpack this time! Once again, I leave you with the author and illustrator’s comments from the inside cover of the original release, which you’ll find below. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope to see you again in the next volume!

-Tristan Hill

Author: Kota Nozomi

Kota Nozomi’s Cringe Chronicles: Part 2

When I was a student, I somehow got it into my head that wearing a T-shirt with a skinny necktie on top was the height of fashion. That is to say, I tied the tie directly around my neck. And to top it all off, both the T-shirt and the tie were black.

I cannot possibly thank my mother enough for refusing to let me go out in public in that getup.

Illustrator: 029 (Oniku)

Illustrator for The Devil is a Part Timer! (Published by ASCII Media Works) and Dragon Lies (Published by Shogakukan).

V1: \ Thunk! /

V2: \ Boing! /