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I enjoy answering questions about my translation choices, character analysis/meta, and general franchise thoughts! I don't like to talk about shipping or make predictions, though.
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Just wanna start off with a big thank you for all the hardwork you put in your tls!! You're truly a lifesaver🙏💕
The recent cozmez interview mentions that kanata has a "core memory of santa saving them" do you know the source for where was this first mentioned? I vaguely remember that it was in an old magazine interview or smth but I can't remember which www
It's from the What's Up? Pararai feature in the December 2020 issue of Animedia, I believe. :V
Animedia is one of those holdouts who don't release ebook copies, so they're frustrating to get a hold of back issues, on top of making translating stuff from them a little annoying since I have to rely on being able to find hard copies most of the time, but if you give me a proverbial minute I may be able to finagle my way into it.
(... full disclosure, I'd just translate the short interviews, I don't want to translate a bunch of four year old magazine copy, lol)
do you know where I can find a clear version of the cozmez logo that nayuta wears on his jacket? (The drawing of both snakes intertwined). I swear I found a clear PNG before but I just can't find it now. Sorry for making a gallery-related question btw.
If what you are referring to is the cozmez logo from early materials (the one on the breast of Nayuta's jacket and it's also used in some early places like, e.g., the fanbook), then I'll drop my copy of it in the replies to this tweet. If this isn't what you're asking for then I may not be able to help haha. :'D
hiii say that i want to cite something from your translations e.g for a character analysis how would you prefer i go about it? i don’t really know the policy around translations for media like this all i know is not to link it anywhere the company can see it but if it is a personal post am i allowed to mention “translations sources from username” / link your site?
Yeah, that's fine! I don't really mind as long as you're not literally uploading large parts of my translations anywhere else. I don't strictly require credit if you're just referencing but if you want to say something like "I'm using translations from phanto.moe for a lot of this" then that's more than enough!
hi ive been binging all of your translations recently so really interesting to hear that youre going to document some of your process but anyways in the tl for scarface kenta has the line "stop whining and nut the fuck up" which is so??? i love it but im curious abt where thats from/derivative of if you could share
Kenta is always a series of decisions because while you can literally translate his words, you have to do a bit of juggling to convey the way they come across.
What he literally says is:
能書きばっか締め直せよふんどし
Which you could literally translate as "all you do is talk yourself up; tighten up your fundoshi back up"
the important word that makes this hard to directly translate while keeping the meaning clear to an english speaker is fundoshi, which is traditional Japanese underwear, and specifically the idiomatic phrase ふんどしを締めてかかる -- literally "[tie/fasten] one's fundoshi", meaning to stop messing around and get to serious work. I read this, coming from Kenta, as being deliberately a bit crass.
So in order to kind of get across that level of childish provocation, that's why I translate it in this context as 'nut the fuck up', lol.
The problem is that this then kind of makes "all you do is talk yourself up" kind of feel like a weird precedent (it sounds fine in Japanese, I just think a direct translation kind of parses weirdly in English) so I scooted it around to refocus the translation of the line being about running your mouth instead of doing the work, especially in the context of being @ cozmez. Coming back to it a week later I do feel like I could probably find a better phrasing, but there was a logic to my twiddling, lol.
(But the "nut up" is staying, i stand by that one ww)
Hi there. I don't know if I missed it somewhere on your website but I was wondering if it's okay to link to phanto.moe on social media (in a tweet, youtube video description etc.) or would that be considered snitching?
That's fine!
When I say "don't snitch", I mean things like... do not (for example) post links to phanto.moe in the replies of official tweets or on other OFFICIAL social medias (e.x. commenting on a post on the official English facebook, or their Bilibili account, or on an official YouTube video). And hopefully this goes without saying, but don't like, write in to ask Gcrest or Avex's official emails to ask if it's okay to translate this that or the next thing (which... if you know why that's not a hypothetical and is a thing I've really seen happen in a fandom, you know).
Just don't put me in a position where Gcrest or Avex don't have plausible deniability to look the other way.
hello! would it be possible for you to post what characters are included [similar to the magazine-exclusive stories that have been coming out recently] for the new FC-locked episodes of the characters daily life thing? im thinking of buying the membership for it, but i'm really only here for kenta, so i dont want to keep paying for episodes of characters i dont care about LOL
helloo bit of a random question but, does kenta's energy drinks he likes have an official name? i see everyone calling it 'mad dog' but i cant for the life of me find the source for that 😭 is it a fan made thing that spread or is it canon from somewhere?
hiiii I don't know if it's my imagination but I think I remember that in an interview Anne mentioned that she had a parakeet or a little bird, although I think nothing else was mentioned about it, I want to know if this is true or if it's just something I read somewhere maybe ;v;
I believe it was (first?) mentioned in the Animate pamphlets from 2020*, but Anne's pet bird also came up again in the character trivia shorts they posted in the leadup to REVOLUTION! It's a Java sparrow named Tamago.
(*I had to piece translations for profile stuff of out a bunch of apparently-now-deleted tweets, photos, and privatters, so the part that mentions Anne's sparrow never made the cut because I could never personally verify the phrasing.
I'd love to eventually revise my translations of this material but I don't feel like paying $4 per pamphlet for five year old sheets of paper that mostly says stuff I already know, lol.)
this might be a really silly thing to point out, but in the Hokusai post mentioning the “hachiware“ cat the proper english term would be bicolor! the term bicolor is used to refer to any cat with white spots/patches on it, including the tuxedo pattern. it is also used to refer to any color of their fur (black, chocolate, cinnamon, red, or their dilute forms blue, lilac, fawn, and cream). again, it’s probably mot even big enough of a deal for me to point it out because the way you phrased it makes sense anyways.
hey there! thanks for the detailed write up on what's the deal with chisei! i was reading it again and something else occurred to me - haruomi's character sounds older/more mature (?) in the buraikan songs and just in general compared to chisei (assuming that all the buraikan songs we know are made in the present and not from buraikan's heyday) could this be a hint at the fact that haruomi has aged and chisei has not aged since the moment haruomi 'preserved' him in his illusion? they might have designed haruomi to have a naturally deeper voice just to contrast with chisei as a character but the contrast is so stark that i feel like it's trying to tell us something else
I think it's definitely possible. I do imagine there is probably some degree of intentionality in the casting with Ono Kensho's voice generally sounding quite youthful especially when compared to Suwabe.
But then again there's always a sort of chicken and the egg situation where, like, if you're going to hire Suwabe Junichi, you'd better let him Suwabe all over all of his lines else why are you even hiring him, www
It was said Nayuta's latest Obsession is skating.Does he mean his rollerblades or does he use a skateboard too?
Hi, just a heads up: I think Shion's part is missing from your translation of Scarface?
I feel like I don't have a good enough eye for this thing so I hope you don't mind me asking for your opinion: are the BoU 'official' English lyrics machine TL?
I am going to lead with the fact that this is alleged, based on vibes, and 100% conjecture, and I am not trying to cast any aspersions.
But yes, the impression I get is of machine translation that is lightly overseen or edited by a human, probably by an in-house Japanese L1/English L2 speaker. This is (fairly verifiably) what they use on the site for profiles et al, so I feel pretty confident that it's probably what's going on with the official lyric subtitles.
Song lyrics inherently force you to infer a lot of context and struggle with line-to-line cohesion, which they sometimes struggle with, and you sometimes get lines that read very awkwardly (a few of Kanata's lines in Instinct really stand out to me and are fresh in the mind, but Akan Yatsura are always a nightmare).
I don't love that it's there, as a renowned MTL disliker, but I'm also not super pressed that a primarily-Japanese-facing company is going with the least labor-intensive option when it comes to things they have to handle purely in-house for a niche and tertiary market.
But that's part of why I retranslate the songs, lol. (And because I enjoy it.)
(Interestingly, I think that the official translations of videos that they post on Facebook -- e.g. drama track previews and the birthday videos from last year -- smack definitely more of "a human got properly paid to do this", and this makes me a little more generous about the fact that the song lyrics that go up on the Japanese-facing channel are wonky, since when they're actually English-facing they do seem to have more QC.)
Really appreciate you sharing your translations! Legit, it’s nice to see someone enjoy a franchise and share that hype with others. Regardless of how long your tls may last, I hope you yourself keep having a good time.
Speaking of, I wanted to ask if you ever finished the spoon character interviews from a couple months ago? Was there anything interesting in it
First of all, thank you! It's still a lot of fun for me to do what I do just about two years+ deep into this being a full-time hobby, so unless something really catastrophically stupid happens, I can't imagine I'm going to stop anytime soon. I'm gonna keep doing it until it stops being fun and all signs point to me enjoying this for the long haul, lol.
And second off: I was going to get around to the spoon interviews and then put them off because I was being lazy about reading the seiyuu interviews, but the character interviews are pretty short, so actually let me take a minute now and I'll whip those up. :V
do you think the pararai seiyuus are actually playing the video games or was it prerecorded by staff and they only do the voice over (same question to autumn team but I feel like the seiyuus are actually the ones drawing)
I can't be sure but I feel like it's staff playing and deliberately roleplaying while they do (like "some characters should be playing badly"), the voiceover is written to match the gameplay, and the scripts are given to the seiyuu, but unless they actually say one way or the other, we'll never know for sure.
Generally I err on the side of there being a degree of distance between the seiyuu and their roles, because I think it'd be too convenient if everyone's skill at games(/drawing) just happened to be character-appropriate to their own character, haha.
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