Honorifics translation notes

As noted in Amitie and the Girl of Love!?, the manzai gags had to be tweaked in order to make sense in English. Were there any other times changes had to be made in that regard?

There are other times, though we do our best to preserve meaning if it’s simply pun wordplay. 

For example, in Chronicle, there’s a section where Raffina mentions the phrase “two flies in one sap”. In Japanese she actually uses an idiom that translates exactly to “two birds in one stone”, which means the same thing in English, but we had to change the nouns to keep up with Amitie’s mishearing of her phrase.

Raffina: (…) いっせきにちょう isseki nichou (1 stone, 2 birds)

Amitie: いっせ……きに　ちょう？　ちょうちょが　いっせいに　木にとまった！？ isse…ki ni chou? chouchou ga isseki ni ki ni tomatta?!

Here Amitie mishears Raffina’s words to be the adverb isse “at once”, and for ki to be separate as the noun “tree” instead of seki as “rock”. Then, taking the ni which actually means “two” to be the location particle ni, and chou (how the kanji for bird is read in this case) to mean chouchou, “butterfly”, she comes up with: All at once…butterflies on trees? All the butterflies landed on the tree at once?!

There was no way to keep this wordplay in English if we used birds, so we did the next best thing and used flies.

Raffina: In any case, if we find the stone and Ms. Rulue, it’ll be but two flies in one slap.

Amitie: Butterflies in one sap…? All the butterflies landed on a single tree sap?!

Another example with Yu’s puns:

Yu: つごうが　いいから　レッつごう～！　目指すはだいざだ　いざ～！

This has 2 puns: tsugou (condition) and rettsugou (”let’s go” said in English); daiza (pedestal) and the copula that ends the first sentence da combined with iza (now), which makes it sound like she repeated daiza twice. Literally translated, it would be something like The conditions are good, so let’s go~! Our goal is the pedestal! Come now~!

Our pun version: We’re in high spirits, so let’s gho-st to the pedestal~! No more pede-stalling~!

Here we use ghost puns for the first part instead of trying to make “condition” sound like “let’s go”, while the second part preserves the pedestal wordplay.

When it comes to jokes that strictly have to do with Japanese culture, however, we have no choice but to change them. The most glaring example comes from Witch’s route in 20th Anniversary, when she reveals what potion she was trying to make. 

The Japanese says “a potion that will make someone not afraid of manjuu”. This is a reference to a famous Rakugo routine which tells the story of a man who pretends to be afraid of manjuu (a Japanese confection) to get free food out of his prankster friends (who purposefully bring him manjuu to scare him). We went with a reference to a fairytale for our translation, rendering it “a potion that will make a goose stop laying golden eggs”.