#rackaaam

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Episode 1468: Joy Fulfills Its Role

Translation Notes:

“Ravening” is a neat word that the English localizers pulled out for this event, which I had previously never heard of.  It’s something they invented; his Japanese name was just Gouyoku Raizou, or “Greedy Raizo”.

One thing that’s nice about Japanese, and which causes problems when translating into English, is that Japanese is a very pictographic language, meaning that when you’re displaying labels, a warning message, or something like that, you can often cut corners and just display the general concept you want to display without needing to spell out a full phrase or sentence.  In the case of this comic, what I translated into “100%” in the fourth panel was 限界 (genkai - “limit” or “bounds”), while what I translated into “Explosion Imminent” in the last panel was literally just 爆 (the kanji for “bursting/splitting open”, and the first kanji in bakuhatsu, or “explosion”).

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Episode 1377: Tahar Island - Sandstorm Warning!

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Episode 1300: Commemorating Episode 1300

Translator Notes:

The word that I’ve translated usually as “beauty” is bikei, which can mean beauty as the concept, or can mean a beautiful thing.  Vyrn’s title in the second panel in the Japanese comic was Biikei, a pun on this word and Bii, Vyrn’s Japanese name.  There was really no way I could think of to make an equivalent English pun, unfortunately, so I just transcribed it instead.

“See you next episode!!” is a very rough translation of the Japanese, which was Korekara mo yoroshiku onegai itashimasu!! - extremely literally translated, this could be rendered as, “From now on, like before, we sincerely hope that you treat us well!!”, but this would ignore the fact yoroshiku onegai itashimasu (or its less formal, more well-known cousin, yoroshiku onegai shimasu) is a Japanese idiom that doesn’t really have a concrete meaning so much as just being a thing you say to express positive feelings towards someone, especially seen commonly when first meeting someone.

Korekara (”from now on”) and korekara mo (”from now on, also”, or “in the future, as before”) are similarly difficult phrases to translate literally due to the different connotations in English of the literal translation.  In English, “from now on” has a distinct implication that you’re expressing some dramatic departure from how things have been, whereas in Japanese, korekara just expresses that you’re talking about the future, with no implied commentary about the past or your disdain thereto.

At any rate, I figured that since this was basically just a bundle of Japanese idomatic appreciation and well-wishing, it would be OK for me to replace that with a more natural sounding bit of English appreciation and well-wishing.

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Episode 1024: Threo and the Meteor

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Episode 1018: Rebooted Robomi

Translator Notes:

If anyone is curious, “Spinny Stabby Drill” is called “Bore Gore Bit” in Japanese.  Yup - Hallessena gives things silly names there, too!  The English name is actually fairly clever - it’s nicely alliterative, uses more natural-sounding language, and also maintains the same threatening connotations of “it creates holes in both walls and organic things”.

Also, since Japanese kanji characters are ideographic, meaning that the characters represent an idea rather than a syllable, her weapon also has a Japanese written name that would be pronounced differently from “Bore Gore Bit”, which is 廻天拳.  This would likely be pronounced kaiten-ken, which requires some explanation.  By itself, this means “world-changing fist”, but the term kaiten has some extra connotations in Japanese culture - it was the name given to manned suicide torpedos used by the Japanese navy in World War II, similar to kamikaze, which literally means “divine wind” but has extra connotations of “suicide craft”.  There’s really no way to meaningfully translate this into English without giving a treatise in Japanese linguistics and cultural history, so I can understand why the localizers didn’t bother attempting to bring this to the English script.

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Episode 1011: Anissida and the Cannon

Translator Notes:

There actually are two different words used here to mean “cannon”.  Anissida’s is an 大筒 (oodzutsu), whereas Jessica’s is a 大砲 (taihou).  The characters in the first word mean “big pipe”, whereas the characters in the second word mean “big gun”.  As you might imagine from that fact, an oodzutsu is more of an old-timey style of cannon, whereas a taihou is a more modern model.  You can see this in their different designs - Anissida’s is wider, more primitive, and looks more like just a cylinder with an opening at one end that one might find in use in feudal Japan, whereas Jessica’s looks more like a proper, more modern, finely-engineered cannon.  That’s not relevant to the translation, but it’s an interesting point I thought I’d note.

I translated Anissida’s lines in the last panel quite loosely.  Her initial exclamation that I translated into “What the heck!?” was Bakana!?, which is always a bit difficult to translate into English.  By itself, the term means “idiot” or “stupid”, but it can also be used figuratively to describe the situation at large, as though to say what’s happening is absurd, or ought to be impossible.  It’s a phrase you often hear from cocky villains, and is heard in animes like Fist of the North Star quite regularly.

Her comment after that could be more literally translated as something along the lines of, “How do you have so many bullets like that!?”, or something thereabouts.  Every English variant of that more literal translation sounded kinda stilted and weird, though, so I opted to translate more the spirit of the comment than its specific word choice.  The idea behind it that I saw was more or less her wondering what the heck is up with these weirdo opponents, so I came up with an alternate way to express this that sounded like more natural English.  Hopefully it came out all right.

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Episode 968: The Dark Assassin Showdown