This was a nightmare episode to work on that’s finally dethroned Sebastian’s intro episode (19) for the worst SEVENS episode ever to translate and time.
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Please make sure to read the FAQ if you have any questions.
Below are extended translation notes, so spoilers ahead.
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“Watchful eyes” & animal vs human eyes joke
Gakuto keeps saying this episode that everything within the “whites of his eyes” will be subject to regulation or something like that, and while this can be translated, the joke Umiko makes in response to this can’t.
She says something like “humans have more sclera ratio to other animals” (either more sclera or more pupil, I don’t quite remember) which is just incomprehensible to an English speaker. Getting to this line felt like I was listening to complete gibberish.
The joke was changed to be about humans having worse eyesight than animals (which isn’t true) and the earlier Gakuto phrase switched to “watchful eyes” so it makes sense in English.
Shomumu
Umiko’s entire existence this episode is a reference to a 90s TV drama called Shomuni (or Power Office Girls). It’s a show about office ladies who have committed some form of “grave mistake” that leads to them being demoted to the “general affairs” section and has them perform menial tasks like changing the light bulbs or other maintenance work in order to get them to quit the job (because firing someone in Japan is expensive). Their office in the drama is also a little room in the basement tucked behind something else.
I teetered between keeping it as “Shomumu” or localizing it to “Power Office Gill” so the joke carried in English, but I realize the entire joke relied on having previous knowledge of Shomuni in the first place, so I kept it as-is.
Department of Redundancy Department
You’ll notice a lot of the department names this episode seem to be repeated or entirely redundant - that’s part of the joke since this is satire on Japanese office life and company structures.
This is just a note in case anyone thinks we made a mistake or left something in that we shouldn’t have. The departments were redundant on purpose.
Fiendish Commander Yameruler -> Yamiruler the Dark Delayer
I already wrote something similar in my BD translation notes for Dragias, so I will just redirect you there.
TL;DR This is the official TCG name of Yameruler, so I’ll be using it in subs from now on.
Yameterasu summoning chant
The summoning chant is a reference to the stone cave legend, about how the god Amaterasu locked themself in a cave with a giant rock and had to be enticed back out or else there would be no more light in the world.
As Gakuto was pretty heavy-handed with the theatre and performance references this episode (as is usual), especially with his chant, I chose to translate it in a way that carried the same feeling—in this case, quoting Shakespeare.
But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Which was extremely apt considering Romeo was using this line to describe the appearance of Juliet, whom he compared to the sun. And Amaterasu is a sun god.
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All in all, this episode was a veritable hell to translate and also time. So sorry about the lateness without warning - it required a little more TLC than I initially thought, and there were numerous other things in this episode that I poured over a lot in order to find the best way to phrase or translate it, especially when divorced from its original Japanese context.
If I made a translation note for everything I had trouble with, this post would probably be 10x its current length.
