I Translated a Light Novel!

I mention light novels every so often here on the Spellbook, so it was a bit of a stroke of fortune that I ended up signing a contract to translate one: I Kissed My Girlfriend’s Little Sister?! volume 2. I hinted at it in a previous post, but by the time this post goes out, this translation should be well on its way to you if no extra mishaps have occurred, so I can finally reveal the title.

Full disclosure: I’ll be blunt – if you buy my work to check out what I’m on about here, I may get your money.

Meta edit at the last moment: The person who controls the contracts hasn’t said anything since paying me last week – no feedback/referrals, no giving my proofreader a contract, nothing – so you can expect to see my work in the future, but I don’t know how long it will really take. It seems said person has a lot going on on their end and since they control everything, it’s hard to do work without them giving us contracts and such.

…but why?

1. I need to get my foot in the translation industry somehow.
2. At the time I signed on to do it, I didn’t have a portfolio set up on this blog. I figured the best way to get portfolio material was to get (paid) experience, but now I’ve got what I can salvage from my (free) experience…the stuff that isn’t morally ambiguous…archived on the Spellbook as well.
3. It was the freelance contract most compatible with my anime-and-manga-filled resume floating around Upwork at the time.

How I Translated This LN

Mot of the time, I translated into a Word doc with the Japanese text converted from a PDF, submitting a chapter at a time. (The “chapter at a time” thing was imposed on me by the company, or else I would’ve jumped back and forth from the afterword more.)

I would translate rather literally at first, converting the Japanese from vertical to horizontal (the original was vertical) and going sentence by sentence/a few sentences at a time. I put the English under the Japanese and bolded anything I felt I hadn’t quite nailed – for example, I occasionally skipped sentences and the bit I was up to related to a bit I’d skipped. Italics was used for occasional emphasis. I removed bolding of anything I thought was fixed and remove any weird stuff, like page numbers left over from the PDF conversion process.

I would then go over the text a few times, making sure the translation became as natural as possible. Once I was happy with most of the translation of the chapter, I put the finished translation and its source into a new Word doc. I would then remove the original text for anything I was happy with, keep proofreading for natural English/style guide adherence/any bits of meaning that hadn’t transferred properly (sometimes simultaneously with the previous step) and finally change the font to Calibri because ellipses in the source text came out the Japanese way as a way to “finalise” what I’d done.

The major exceptions to this process was the afterword, which I started translating during chapters 1 and 2 for some variety, and the chapter titles, which were images. As a way to navigate more easily, I changed chapter titles to Title formatting, which created bookmarks through the Search function of Word.

There were times where I printed out pages so I could work on them during my “day job” at a restaurant – I found I could maxmimse my productivity by using any spare time around/during my shifts to focus on my translation (there was usually a dead half an hour or two before the shift got into high gear). I would circle anything I wasn’t sure of the meaning of and draw a line (I started with squiggly lines, but changed them to straight lines during ch. 2) to the right of anything that I was sure of the meaning of but thought was a bit sus otherwise. I also annotated each page with a line number for reference (pages from my PDF reading program always printed with a significant border around them for some reason, so I wrote into the borders) and transcribed this translation into the draft document once I got home.

Metaphors and Other Textual Stuff

…because the more you know, the more you appreciate translation as an art. (source)

• The actor Shinichi Kataoka (ch. 2) is the author breaking the 4th wall a bit, because his name looks a bit like the word for “one-sided love” (片思い, read kataomoi). This becomes foreshadowing for later on.
• There is an extended metaphor in chapter 2 which gave me no end of agony for about half a day. It started with a term for a man with fair and delicate features (塩顔, literally “salt face”). The text then talks about a hypothetical man in relation to the (male) protagonist to diss him, then the metaphor gets deconstructed by having seaweed salt mentioned (since seaweed salt = salt + bits of seaweed – it’s impure, but deliberately so) and ends with a comment that the one who brought up the extended metaphor should be taken out to a ramen place as a date. To localise this – since it mentions muscle training along the way – I made the hypothetical dude “toned” rather than “slim, handsome and stylish” (because the word used for the latter phrase suggests being thin and muscular) and “with a chiselled face”. I then swapped the ramen place with a gym, since “chiselled” and “toned” both suggest an obsession with muscles, while the former can be used to describe an attractive male face. (Although this also might cause problems later down the track, if Takeshi gets more involved in romantic shenanigans…)

Sidenote: Yes, if you’re wondering, there is also “sauce face” and “soy sauce face” in Japanese, meaning “a typically Caucasian face” and “a typically Japanese face” respectively.

• The conflation worked with me for the extended metaphor in ch. 16, but in ch. 17, there is a mention of “chance visiting the protagonist”. This is not quite natural English, so I used “Lady Luck”. The problem with that is…when you’re talking about two different girls and a (female) personification of luck, references to “she” and “her” get a bit confusing…
• I had to dumb the register (the overall level of the writing) down a lot to match the already-released volume 1. Admit it – not many people throw out the word “magnanimous” without thinking the way I do, haha…
• There was a term (性差) literally meaning “difference between the sexes”. I stuck the word “biological” into the explanation, due to present generally-accepted US attitudes around trans people (since I was told to translate for an American audience). That said, there were places I would’ve translated 恋人/彼氏/彼女 as “partner” or, literally (in the case of the first term), as “lover” to match the current attitudes, but the first volume had that stuff separated by (binary) gender, so I had to default to that instead. In fact, that came in handy when Shigure started telling the audience about biological impulses, because she is talking about a concept of sex which is binary there.
• Shibazuke comes up in the text as a plot point. Not many would be familiar with shiso leaves in America, let alone the fact that is meant to be “Kyoto-style pickles in salt” (“where’s Kyoto?”, they might even ask), so I had to explain – as per the style guide as much as it was for myself – Shibazuke are pickled vegetables made purple through the pickling process. Similarly, Americans probably aren’t familiar with koji.
• In ch. 18, Hiromichi has a seal as part of the package picking-up process. I substituted this out with a pen. In my experience receiving parcels, these days you can even sign for packages digitally using a special device with a stylus which is provided by the delivery person/post office, but 1) this would’ve created a bit of a plot hole if I’d used this method and 2) more Americans would be familiar with the paper version instead.
• Ch. 19’s title was originally denoted with “MTG” for “meeting”. To me, those 3 letters always stand for “Magic the Gathering“, so I was bracing myself to translate a barrage of fantasy-style text and change a bunch of trademarks (another quirk of the style guide). Then it turned out the game they were playing at the start of the chapter was actually Splat 2, which was mentioned briefly in volume 1 of this series. Note I’m not 100% “cold” on Splatoon lingo, because there was a Splatoon 3 parody in HypMic ARB at one point. “Hey, you! Yeah, you! Wanna be the freshest squid on the block?” still haunts my dreams /jk.

Second sidenote: Originally, I was given World Teacher volume 3 on my contract by mistake, so I guess this was my comeuppance for dodging that bullet, huh? *sweatdrops*

• …I really got into deep s*** when I found a line which offhandedly said something to the effect of “anyone can play [Splat 2] (except cripples)”. Please don’t shoot the messenger for that if it makes it through the editing process!
• Localising for an American audience even means explaining the so-called “guts pose”…If you know the Success Kid meme, it’s that pose.
• There was a line in ch. 21 which I literally described (to myself) as “not an oh s**t moment”, haha. It was あちゃぁ (an abbreviation of ああ、しまった, probably), so I translated that line as “oh no”.
• 奥手 appears a few times. In context, it means Haruka is shy when it comes to romance. However, it also means “late bloomer”, as in “a person who’s late in puberty”!
• There’s a bit in ch. 21 where Haruka refers to the fact they’ve been referring to each other without honorifics. I had to cut that, since the English volume 1 (which I didn’t translate) didn’t do that.
• Yuyake Koyake is a song that plays on wireless disaster systems in Japan.
• The extended metaphor about a lion on the prowl is very faithful to the original. The original is how the word for “vigilant” in Japanese is about a tiger and the prey is showing their white, soft belly.
• The bit about “messing around” near the end of the volume was due to the word 遊び, which can mean a variety of different verbs, such as “to hang out”, “to mess around” or “to play”.
• I wrote out a reference to Takao-san in Hachioji, a reference to Zen dialogue (like a koan) and an offhanded reference to gacha games (well, the specific wording was “S grade”).
• “Condoms for the Real Deal” is literally “Condoms [for When] It’s Not a Performance”.
• Riku Misora goes on about the first state of emergency quite a bit, so the comments backdate the afterword to about early April 2020.

Personal Stuff/Reactions

• As a demiromantic asexual, you don’t necessarily need romantic experience to translate romantic content, it turns out (at least in my experience, even though the process of translation typically involved rewriting to the extent you need quality writing skills). You just need enough life experience to know what things are called and comparable experiences/enough understanding of references to describe what’s going on. That said, I’m very easily influenced by the things around me so when I translate stuff about kissing, I get the desire to smooch an invisible person in front of me…heh.
• That said, me not being a dude, I was internally facepalming while I was translating the bra scene in ch. 22, plus there were a few other Shigure scenes which veered into that territory. It’s just the bra scene was the most notable annoyance.
• The reason I bring up my romantic/sexual orientation is because when the story turns to proper sex talk at the end of the volume, that was the hardest part for me. People differ in their reactions when they identify as “sex-adverse”, but mine manifests like this: 1) not being able to imagine people doing the do without mentally censoring at least one participant’s face and 2) being squeamish when talk of pregnancy is involved. 2) was tripped here, but as a point of comparison, I’ve heard of really sex-repulsed people barfing from being involved in sexual stuff. Note I’m fine with dirty jokes, so clearly there is a threshold which can be crossed/avoided.
• While I’m at it, I kinda read Takeshi as asexual to some degree. He’s only obsessed with his muscles, but it’s possible he overfocuses on them because like most students, he doesn’t really have anything else in his life to be passionate about – just school stuff, his job and friends.
• Speaking of Takeshi, he uses the pronoun washi, which is normally used by older men, as opposed to ore (macho male, used by Hiromichi and Tomoe) or boku (still male, but also suggests youthfulness or naivete). I thus made him stand out by unabbreviating/artificially elongating his speech where possible and using the occasional archaic word (“methinks”, which I use humorously, was the catalyst for this).
• There’s a scene which protagonist Hiromichi describes as being “like waking from a drunken dream” in ch. 21. At that point, I had been working non-stop for about an hour and a half when I got to it, so I too felt I was waking from a drunken dream.
• Aside from not playing Splatoon, I also don’t play Mario Kart. I do have access and the opportunity to do so, since a close family member owns a Switch after an extremely loaded friend decided to buy them one for my whole family to play, but like the Splatoon thing, I had to cobble together what I knew for the scene.
• As a disgruntled customer service person myself (although I’ve quit my restaurant job at this point, since I no longer have to pay off my student debt and I think one hard-earned freelancing dollar is better than a dollar earnt through short shifts under the supervision of a boss), I feel like you can feel my salt coming through when Hiromichi starts to describe his part-time job in ch. 24.
• As the translator, I have to find my own reasons to keep going with the task of translating, because focussing on a bunch of words for a long period of time is tough (and focussing on deadlines wears me out). That’s why I ended up audibly cheering for Hiromichi and Haruka near the end of the volume…and then I audibly commented, “Well, Hiromichi really f**ked up this time” when the twist happened.
• As a person who defaults to British English, writing with American spelling was slightly difficult.
• I have a bit of a problem with run-on sentences – of which Japanese has many – and Riku Misora’s sentences run on so much, they’re difficult to decipher in the afterword, but I rose to the challenge.