I’m back!

Since I’m currently in Japan doing a Japanese learning time skip of sorts, I haven’t been dedicating too much time to translating Lesson 3. I’ve been drowning in daily homework, study and tests ever since I arrived. So therefore I thought I should give myself a little break and finally take the time to explain some of the decisions I made in translating Lesson 2. Some of the decisions I made in this chapter have been some of the boldest I’ve made thus far in translating this novel.

Despite the much shorter length of this chapter, it felt like it contained more obscure references and tricky wordplays than chapter 1, some of which I had to change almost completely in order to make sure the translation would meet the goals I established in the first translator’s notes. So in order to make sure that this post won’t suck up time that I need to spend on studying Japanese, I’m only going to be talking about the major decisions which’ll still give plenty to talk about.

First off:

That Airplane! reference

This was my solution to a bizarre wordplay that I eventually decided was completely untranslatable. The original wordplay relied on using different readings of the two kanji 本 (normally ほん hon) and 気(normally き ki) which form the word 本気 meaning serious. After Kagura suggests that they should go and uncover the remaining mysteries, Shinpachi asks her “are you seriously (本気 ほんき) saying this?” To which she replies “I am serious, yeah. And I write “serious (本気)” as “motoke (もとけ)”, yeah”.

As you can immediately tell, this can’t be translated directly so I had to spend quite a bit of time coming up with a suitable translation. I first tried to see if I could make the joke about different pronunciations of the word “serious” but I kept getting stuck. The original joke itself is fairly random but the feeling I got from it is that Kagura thinks her spelling of “serious” sounds cooler, especially since she starts her line by confirming that yes, she is serious.

I spent a lot of time trying to make this idea work, but I just couldn’t think of a pronunciation that could get across the right feeling of her sounding both serious and stupid. After thinking of different ways to translate Shinpachi’s line, I eventually thought up “Surely you can’t be serious”, and that’s when inspiration struck.

For those of you who don’t know, Airplane! is an absolutely classic comedy film from the early 80’s which spoofs old disaster movies. It’s hysterical and I highly suggest that you watch it immediately. Anyway, there’s an classic moment in the movie that goes like this and is one of most quoted jokes in movie history. In fact, I can bet that a lot of you already knew that joke even if you hadn’t watched the movie. Initially I was quite worried about making the reference, especially since I hadn’t made such a big change in the translation thus far, but the more I thought about it, the more it started making sense for a number of reasons.

As fans of Gintama should know by now, the series is chock full of references at seemingly every turn, so putting in another reference doesn’t really go against what people expect of the series. It felt appropriate for Kagura to make the reference. Throughout the series, she tends to act like the funny man in the comedic bits, acting every bit like the randomly energetic, violent young girl that she is, and this chapter is no exception. As you will see throughout this post, she makes a number of random references and jokes in this chapter so having her make another reference felt in line with what readers would expect having gotten through lesson 1. It felt right. Like I mentioned previously because Kagura likes to change mood randomly, having her change from her excited lines about wanting to uncover the mysteries to suddenly being dead-serious like Leslie Nielsen in Airplane! amused me.

In the upcoming chapters of Ginpachi, I hope that if I come across another untranslatable joke like this one, I’ll be able to come with a solution that doesn’t involve a pop culture reference. Variety is the spice of life after all and if this was another series, a reference might not have worked too well, so it’s important to be flexible in how you approach situations like this one.

The references:

Kenzo Kitakata

In the beginning of the chapter when Shinpachi meets up with Kagura and mentions that he came back to the school to pick up something he forgot, she suddenly turns all hard boiled detective on him, which Shinpachi comments on. In the original novel, Shinpachi actually asks why she suddenly went all Kenzo Kitakata, who in Japan is a famous author of hard boiled cop fiction. This was an obvious change to make, so there isn’t really anything else to say here.

Yutaka Ozaki

When Ginpachi finally appears, he asks Shinpachi and Kagura if they are having an illicit sexual relationship, and follows up by saying that this would put Yutaka Ozaki in tears. Yutaka Ozaki is a legend in Japanese pop. His songs mainly address themes of adolescence like love and coming of age, but can tackle some rather heavy topics such as teenage prostitution. To see if I could make a more subtle reference to Yutaka Ozaki, I spent some time listening to his songs. Considering the earlier line about illicit sexual relationships, I wasn’t too surprised to find that Ozaki tackled heavy themes in his songs (which you should listen to by the way, they’re really good). However, I was struggling to think up a way to reference him subtly that wouldn’t make the line too long and mess up the flow.

Eventually I came up with the idea that instead of Ozaki being in tears, it would be Otae, Shinpachi’s older sister. This makes complete sense in the Gintama-verse, and can be immediately understood by anyone, even to those who know nothing about the series, which again is the main goal for the translation of this novel.

Taiyo ni Hoero!

Here’s a link to a parody of this show’s op which features a theme tune that some Gintama anime fans may recognise. This is a highly referenced show in Japanese pop culture (like how Airplane! is highly referenced in western pop culture) that you have probably already seen references to other anime and manga. In the Japanese, Kagura tells Ginpachi that she wants to listen to Shinpachi’s story about the seven mysteries, to which Ginpachi makes a reference to Nanamagari station (七曲署) where the show’s cast of detectives is based at, rather than to the seven mysteries (七不思議 nanafushigi) which in Japanese starts on the same kanji. Because I wanted to make a more subtle reference to the show if at all possible, I did some research into it just like I did with Ozaki, eventually discovering that the show initially started off with seven main characters at Nanamagari station. Working off that, I changed Ginpachi’s line to this:

Well then, Shinpachi. How about you tell us the story of the seven hard-boiled cops fighting for freedom and justice, Shinpachi?

Ramo Nakajima

When walking through the corridor, Kagura says that she notices a gorilla. This is one of the updated jokes in the redone translation. In the Japanese, Kagura says that she notices Ramo Nakajima, who was a respected writer of novels, rakugo, essays, scripts, and short stories. I changed this line to make it what I would consider more Gintama-ish as I mentioned in my translator’s notes for lesson one.

Other interesting stuff:

The raps:

During their journey to solve the mystery of the rap sound, Kagura comes up with a rap in Japanese that was a right pain to translate. I had to not only come with up a rap that maintains the same meaning as the original, but also make sure that each line of the rap rhymed one after the other, requiring a significant amount of retooling. After spending quite a while on rhyme sites trying out different combinations of rhymes I eventually settled on this.

♪It’s fair, we got our own affairs, we’re devil may care, so go get yo ass right in there!

I don’t consider myself a master on the mic spitting rhymes anytime, but I felt I did alright on this one. Because the original Japanese rap itself is improvised pretty much on the spot (Shinpachi does call them pseudo-rappers after all), it didn’t have to be too masterful thankfully. Interestingly the last line of the original rap included the term “let’s go” which in rap sounds pretty cliché, so in order get that feeling across while also making sure the rap rhymed, I put in “yo ass” to not only rhyme but also help give the rap just the right amount of cliché-ness. Tell me what you think in the comments.

The chants:

Now this is a pretty interesting situation which I approached in an almost completely opposite way compared to the other parts of the chapter. Instead of making changes, I pretty much kept it the same. In this part of the chapter the trio enter the staffroom being scared for their lives, shouting these chants

“Begone evil spirit!” “ACCHONBURIKE!” “JUGEMU JUGEMU GO KO NO SURIKIRE!”

So let’s explain the references first. “Acchonburike” is a catchphrase used by the character Pinoko in Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga Black Jack. Although it’s really a nonsense phrase, it would translate to something like “oh my goodness” or “I don’t believe it”. Interestingly, a fansub translated the phrase to “omigewdness” to try and reflect its silly nature. Now those who watched the Gintama anime in full or have seen the excellent anime Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju should recognise where “JUGEMU JUGEMU GO KO NO SURIKIRE” comes from. It’s a reference to possibly the most famous Rakugo story of all time called Jugemu about a boy with a ridiculously long name.

At first I tried to translate the phrases but since Jugemu is a name and acchonburike is ultimately a nonsense word, I was a bit stuck. However, considering that they say them like chants that ward off evil spirits, translating them wouldn’t have made them sound like chants at all, so I thought that it was probably better to leave them as is. Especially since the line after the chants reiterates that they were chanting whatever they felt like so what the terms actually meant didn’t really matter. To better drive home the fact that they’re chants, I decided to translate the first chant which in Japanese is 悪霊退散 (akuryo taisan) because although they ultimately chanting nonsense, having the first chant start off more normally allows for the escalation to be more prominent which made it funnier to me.

P.S. Only now in this year of our lord 2020 has it occurred to me that 悪霊退散 could be a reference to an early Nico-Nico Douga video from like 2006. It’s a intro cutscene to a game called “Shin Goketsuji Ichizoku: Bonnou Kaihou” with a song called “Let’s go! Onmyouji.” I may be completely wrong here, but honestly, it’s funnier to think that I’m right. Since the novel was being serialized in Jump Square around the time this video came out, there’s a good chance that 悪霊退散 could be referencing this song.

Housekeeping:

I did mention this on twitter a while back but after I’ve finished translating novel 1 and before posting the final chapter, I’m going to do a big edit of the whole translation. This is because when I look back at the chapters I’ve translated thus far, I keep noticing little things that bother me, particularly the over abundance of commas which only serve to break up the flow. They’re an artefact from when I still figuring out how closely I should be following Japanese sentence structure, to which I’m increasingly feeling that the answer is to not too closely.

Another reason why I’m going to do this is because while I’ve been translating chapter 3, I’ve noticed that there have been call-backs to jokes from previous chapters (another Gintama staple), so I want to make sure that when the whole novel is fully translated, those call-backs hit as hard as they should.

Also as I become better at Japanese and consequently understand my own language better, I look at some of the lines in my translations and can’t help but feel that they could be more natural and flow better with the right tweaks. In this chapter alone there’re several parts in which I felt like I had to go beyond what my initial translation gave me in order to get across the feeling I got from those sections in Japanese, whether it was to make a section funnier or to make it more emotionally impactful.

And that’s the translator’s notes finished! If there are any other sections of the chapter that you found interesting and want me to explain then leave a comment in the comment section below. I hope this has been informative about how the translation process works (at least how it works for me) and that you enjoy my future work. See you all on chapter 3 (whenever it comes out).

Looking back:

Compared to lesson one, I thought this chapter would be considerably easier to retranslate, due to its much shorter length, and it certainly felt like that at first. Though in the process of updating these translator’s notes and cross-checking it with the translation, it turned out that just like lesson one, it was going to take more than a few readthroughs to catch the mistakes I made the first time round.

In retrospect, I might have have been better off doing a new translation from scratch rather than fixing the old one, but what stopped me from doing that is that there were parts of the old translation, especially the raps, that still held up pretty well in my eyes at least, so I didn’t want to get rid of those. It’s curious to see that even the younger, stupider me knew there were major problems with lesson one back in 2018, along with realising that following Japanese sentence structure wasn’t a particularly good idea. The line about going beyond the initial translation and the approach I took to the Ozaki line also proved to be a sign of how I’d go about the retranslation two and a half years later.

Onwards to lesson three!