#shapeshifter vyrn

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Episode 1467: Vikala’s Debut

Translator Notes:

Oh boy, this is a great episode!  There’s a lot of clever and neat stuff in here that deserves to be unpacked, a lot of which were somewhat lost in translation.

First, one interesting thing is that, in the Japanese script, Vikala’s personality change between yin and yang is even more explicit - she actually changes which pronoun she uses.  When she’s in bubbly yang mode, she uses boku, which is most commonly a male pronoun, but which is also often used in Japanese media by somewhat tomboyish, energetic girls.  When she slips into sullen yin mode, however, she uses atashi, which is a much more girly pronoun.  This isn’t really something you can translate into English, aside from having her be generally more tomboyish when in yang mode, but it’s a neat thing to note.

Second, there’s a triple pun in the final panel that is just marvelous, but which I unfortunately can’t translate in the slightest into English.  Vikala’s yang-mode name is Vicky, or Bikki in Japanese (the Japanese language has no V sound, so a B sound is used in its place).  The sound effect used here to indicate Vyrn’s brain stimulation is bikibiki, so in a very literal way Vyrn is “Vickying” Vikala to turn her back to yang mode.  In addition to that, Vyrn’s Japanese name is Bii, so in her final line, Vikala comments that she is being Biikibiki’d, thereby adding Vyrn’s name to the pun mixture as well.  It’s really silly and clever, and I’m sad that I more or less had to just remove it all while translating to English.

Third, for reasons completely and totally lost to me, the Joya is speaking Japanese using Latin letters in the second panel.  I don’t have any idea what this is meant to represent, but my best guess it that it’s meant to establish that the Joya is acting very off, so I did my best to give an English approximation of what I think the intended effect is.

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Episode 1471: Another Grand Battle

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Episode 1417: You’s Assault

Translator Notes:

Hey, I’m back!  Work’s finally begun to settle down, so I’m itching to get back to translation. :)

The specific “rough language” that both You and Fenrir are using in the Japanese is the pronoun temee, a second-person pronoun similar to kisama in tone, in terms of there being obvious contempt for the listener implied in the word.  In English, there didn’t seem to be a single word that I could use that would accurately capture both You and Fenrir’s state of mind, so instead I just used two different insults to approximate the idea in the original Japanese.

You’s name is one of those unfortunate Japanese names that reaaaally doesn’t translate well into English when one uses a literal character for character translation (her Japanese name is ヨウ, for which “You” is a one-for-one translation of the characters).  It’s supposed to be pronounced “yoh”, rhyming with “toe”, but it obviously looks like the English word “you”, the pronunciation of which is going to be the pronunciation an English speaker is likely to default to. 

In the abstract, I probably would’ve considered translating it instead as “Yoh” or “Yoe” to make the pronunciation more clear, but since Kou’s name had already been translated in the previous chapter of this series, and You’s name is explicitly said in the story to be a substitute for Kou’s, I can’t blame the localizers here - they were kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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Episode 1460: Christmas Eve Darkness

Translator Notes:

There is actually a fairly common tradition of Christmas folklore surrounding monsters who “get” the bad kids, rather than just Santa giving them coal.  For example, I imagine most have already heard of Krampus.  Icelandic folklore similarly has the story of Gryla, a giant woman who eats the flesh of naughty kids.  I imagine that the authors of this episode may have been intending to riff off of that trope.  I’m pretty sure that the Christmas Katalina is not a piece of folklore, however, and is just something that they made up. :)

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Episode 1397: Lobelia’s Debut

Translator Notes:

Ah, and here we are!  Last episode introduced everyone’s favorite yandere killer, and now we’re on to the one who’s just, uh... yan.

...

...why is this guy on our crew, again?

Fun fact: tsundere and yandere, as one might expect, share similar derivations.  Tsuntsun means “stuck-up” or “standoffish”, while deredere means “lovestruck” or “fawning”.  So, a tsundere is someone who’s both of those at once.  Meanwhile, yandere is a portmanteau of deredere and the yande conjugation of the verb yamu, “to be ill”.  So, one who is yandere isn’t necessarily out-and-out axe-crazy; the word more generally refers to someone who is unhealthily infatuated by a romantic obsession.

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Episode 1406: Mirin Powers Up!

Translator Notes:

I think I’ve commented on this before, but Mirin has a funny vocal tic in that rather than desu (”is”, short for de arimasu), she uses the archaic-sounding de gozaru.  Gozaru isn’t used in modern Japanese except in its conjugated form gozaimasu as a more polite form of arimasu (to be), so it isn’t really any different than using old-timey English to make someone sound either ancient or like someone trying to sound ancient.

The English localizers for Granblue Fantasy kinda just threw up their hands on this one and just had English Mirin literally say “gozaru” in her English script rather than trying to give her old-timey-sounding English, or something similar to that.  I... have to be honest; I find this a dubious decision on the part of the localizers and feel like there were much better options available, but that’s the precedent that they’ve established, so I’ve followed suit in the interest of having as much as possible a unified voice for the GBF characters.

One final note: catching a blade between your hands is a common Japanese trope, called shirahadori, lit. “taking an unsheathed blade”.  It can be found in many forms of Japanese media - for example, in the strategy RPG “Final Fantasy Tactics”, the Samurai class has the ability “Blade Grasp”, which is that game’s translation of shirahadori.  It’s... not really something you can do in reality, at least not reliably enough to actually be practical for real-world usage.  It’s mostly just a thing used to make someone look cool in media.

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Episode 1383: Tabina the Indispensible

Translator Notes:

I don’t speak a word of Arabic, but I did my best to do enough research to have at least somewhat of an idea regarding what’s being sung in the second and third panel.  The Japanese version in the second panel contains the katakana for Saada Taaro, Saada Taaro, while the third panel reads Taaro Masiiru, Taaro Masiiru.  Taaro is the Japanese name for Tahar Island, but I believe it may also be a transliteration of the Arabic word tahir, which means “perfect”.  My best guesses for the other words are that saada is meant to be the Arabic word sa’ada, or “happiness”, and that masiiru is meant to be masir, or “destiny”.  Put together, this would make the two phrases translate as “perfect happiness” and “a perfect destiny”.

...Again, though, I don’t speak a word of Arabic, so this is all guesswork on my part.  Similar to the comic involving Shiva’s battle theme, though, it seemed like it’d be better to do my best to come up with the actual intended text in the intended language, rather than just transcribing a blind transliteration.

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Episode 1342: The Locked-Room Mystery

Translator Notes:

The concept of a locked-room mystery is a sufficiently common trope that it has its own Wikipedia entry.  They usually don’t involve factors like these, though!

Translated by request.