I think my first attempt at translyrics for personal use was around 3 years back. Possibly 4. The first one posted online was done in 2024, the rest are somewhere on local drives to be revisited some day.1 That first one is also the only time we’ve posted translyrics to date, since the state of the world and stuff has us busy elsewhere, but it’s worth talking about here! Mostly because it’s relevant to the other translation project ongoing, as well as this topic as a whole.
We’ve probably read a lot more translated content than most people do, and that might even be considering what auto-TL is like on social media in recent years. Wuxia/xianxia and other Chinese-written webnovels (I’m certain there are many works in those genres that are written in other languages, we’ve just never kept up with the space after high school), the occasional Japanese webnovel and light novel, a smattering of online content,
and of course, wayyyyy too much manga that we should have put down earlier.
“Slop”2 can be enriching, but to be perfectly honest, it was filling a niche that has since been claimed by being creative (after a lot of mental health fixups and just escaping academia). Did give a lot of experience with various methods of translation, though, in a way that was similar to the 4kids era and ensuing debacle of disagreements online.
Never really watched all that much anime as a kid, for the record. Or anything on the TV. Downsides to not having good reception or channels.
Anyway, where was I? Seeing how people approach language and translation from different avenues and to different levels of being-anything-at-all has been pretty fascinating, but it’s less fascinating when there’s so much to learn from and there are still so many instances where a translation makes something worse. And I don’t particularly mean in the context of corporate sanatization in licensing, that’s something entirely different.
I’ve also had to drop so many series projects just because they’re impossible for me to read well.
MTL is one of the oldest techniques of the sect of online translators, and for good reason—it’s a lot easier to parse a language if you can easily fracture it into pieces, at least theoretically. The main issue is that so many projects don’t really have any meaningful understanding of either language they’re working with (and that’s without even getting into the issues that happen when you obtain your sources from another language’s translation and run that through the machine), so of course the result is a mess.
Strictly speaking, this is inevitable, and expected. Nobody can be an expert without a lot of failing forward, and failing in other directions too. However, there’s a definite portion of the translation ecosystem online that, while not exactly walking in time with the people who hate the word “localization”3, end up doing the same thing because there’s a very wide-spread misunderstanding of the entire point of translating.
Translation is about being gay.
Full stop.
”What?”
I meant what I said, but I guess I can also explain it.
Exhibit A (Igaku / イガク - 重音テト by 原口沙輔)
There are two existing translations of Igaku that we’ve done, both in concert with another friend to discuss things and work out rhythming and framing-ing. They’re a little bit out-dated by way of our becoming a lot better at doing all this, but they will be largely taken from the old document and just cleaned up one more time for this example.
Igaku, as a song, could be about any number of things, depending on how far you dig into it. In this way it’s a lot like 重ねトマト缶, which has some sort of vertical alignment alternative meaning going on in the lyrics that is sort of at odds with it being a song about stacking cans of tomato sauce to a fun rhythm. I don’t understand that enough to explain it more, nor translate it in a way that I find acceptable.
So, lots of things in the world aren’t ever going to to be 1:1, but one:1. Or in this case, it’s 一:1. You can say words and phrases are equivalent, but in context, that all starts to be less and less true.
| ドクター・キドリです |
|---|
| 愛･爆破ッテロ |
| 簡単になれば |
| 埋まった マター マター |
Alright. Haraguchi Sasuke (Haraguchi here, as I refuse to pepper this with hundreds of “Saskue”s) has some visible interest in more dour or mature subjects under their peppy lyrics, at least at this time.
How do we translate any of that? We can’t. What can be done? Our best.
The first way to translate something is to look at the text, and figure out what the words are.
| Original | ”Literal” |
|---|---|
| ドクター・キドリです | (I’m/it’s/that’s Dr. Kidori) |
| 愛･爆破ッテロ | Love・terrorist |
| 簡単になれば | If it becomes simple |
| 埋まった マター マター | Buried matter matter |
Oh no! It’s boring. Let’s add some flair now. We want to see if we can fit things to the same rhythm and cadence of the original, since it’s a song! This isn’t always possible without twisting some things, but hey, we’re here to sing. Also, this is where you start piecing together the sentences to start saying something.
With this one, we’ve chosen to play this as a doctor introducing themself as if they’re a media personality, or at the start of a TV show. The energy is over-the-top, and ideally, reassuring to the patient, to get them to open up.
| Original | Boring | Gay |
|---|---|---|
| ドクター・キドリです | (I’m/it’s/that’s Dr. Kidori) | Doctor Wannabe’s in! |
| 愛･爆破ッテロ | Love・terrorist | Here to bomb with love |
| 簡単になれば | If it becomes simple | Any worries I can |
| 埋まった マター マター | Buried matter matter | To matter; What’s the matter? |
The additional difficulty here (as if we aren’t already under enough constraints! damn!) is preserving wordplay whenever possible. This is present in the characterization, but the last line here and in some following lines are sort of a distorted echo of the last word. There’s probably something more to that, if we wanted to keep digging, but for now, let’s go down the list!
| Original | Boring | ”Gay” |
|---|---|---|
| ドクター・キドリです | (I’m/it’s/that’s Dr. Kidori) | Doctor Wannabe’s here! |
| 愛想良いかも | (Special treatment/Amicability) might be good | ”Friendship” might be nice? |
| 朦朧 オオトも | Vague/unclear Friend/??? | I see you aren’t quite here, |
| 埋めた | Buried | You’re buried, |
| メタ | meta | deep down |
| メタ | meta | inside. |
Am I allowed to say this is the hardest part of the entire song? オオトも is entirely confounding. It could be “friend”, but I’ve seen another translation use “Auto-mode” while I was doing some more research on these Haraguchi’s songs, and with that context this paragraph gets rewritten for probably the 7th time. Old wordplay gives way to new.
Let’s pick up the pace a bit, we’re almost at the refrain!
| Original | Gay |
|---|---|
| 何処にも無いから寝ていたら | When I’m not around, you fall back into your dreams, |
| 壊れて泣いてるユメを診たんだよ | though it’s plain to see how you’re torn awake by screams, my dear. |
| 次期 | With time, |
| には | I’ll patch |
| 嘘に診えてクルゥ | you up, in body and in mind! |
クルゥ is real interesting, and real important here, since it’s basically the phrase for “going crazy” in various connotations slipped right into the end of an otherwise rather normal line. I still wonder if it’s possible to go harder with the translation here, but alas. My limits.
| Original | Gay |
|---|---|
| カオが→鈍器になっちゃうヨ | Carve my way → in there with a love ly face, |
| 偽が→権利を取ったんだ | Once you show → results, who cares (if) I’m Fake? |
| 無くなってほしい煩悩が | Those base desires that you wish away |
| ドウヤラ 生き延びてしまった | seem to have risen up once again, |
| 生き延びてしまったんだ!! | rising up once again, aren’t they? |
| 足が→タガメになっちゃうヨ | Legs will both → morph into a pincer’s grasp |
| 嘘が→動機になったんだ | Lying has → become my motive to act |
| 疑ってほしい本能を | Your instincts I had thought might give you pause |
| ドウヤラ本心だと思った | seems like you really do trust me well, |
| 本心だと思ったんだ!! | really rely on me here, |
| クチョォ | don’t you? |
タガメ is what initially had me approaching this as the Rorschach test, cut and dry, and while that symbolism is still there to some extent, one meaning has to win out or else the translation is confused about itself. And so, Implications™ win out here, with the test existing in inspiration and the visuals. It really is obvious in the MV, isn’t it? Is that really Teto, Dr. Kidori, or just a shape that happens to look like her?
To the end!
| Original | |
|---|---|
| ドクター・キドリです | Doctor Kidori here~! |
| 全部辞めろよ | To finish you off~. |
| アティチュードが | This attitude’ll get |
| 感動物に届く猛毒 | sopped up by your cortex; there’s no way to escape it, |
| 損得の得の方ダケ | goodbye to the wheel of fortune only look at my upside |
| 回った | we are |
| 割った | going |
| 割った | for broke! |
| カオが→鈍器になっちゃうヨ | Visage allowed → for such a blunt approach |
| 偽が→権利を取ったんだ | This success → places me beyond reproach! |
| 無くなってほしい煩悩が | These base desires we all dearly loathe |
| ドウヤラ生き延びてしまった | seem to have risen up once again, |
| 生き延びてしまったんだ!! | rising up once again, aren’t they? |
| 音が→機能になってしまう | This click impels you → to seem functional, |
| 人が→偽りに集まる | My lies will comfort → just follow my call, |
| 塞がってしまえよ耳 | Ignore those voices calling from outside- |
| ドウヤラ届いてない診たい | Oh but you weren’t focusing on them, |
| 届いてない診たいネ゛ | weren’t focusing on them, now |
| クチョォ | were you? |
This translation is not final, and may never be. It’s just too much fun to poke at and try out different things. But it is gay, and will remain that way. There are ways to translate this that are less gay, and they are more boring for it. They aren’t saying anything with the song the way the first one is, and they aren’t vague in ways that leave room for interpretation, moreso confusion.
There’s so much to dig into for translations, and it’s almost guaranteed to give you a better understanding of both languages in play! So, a request for all the people out there: please try just a little bit harder with each one. You might learn something.
Now, I need to get back to translating かませ役♂. I hope to have the first volume translated in a couple months so I can show people what the story feels like to read.4
Footnotes
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The original conceit was to start doing song covers. Personal priorities and the state of YouTube and getting very disconnected from social media culture all collaboratively killed that very dead, but the songs themselves are still worth translating just for the fun of it whenever we have some more time on our hands. ↩
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With as much respect as I can possibly give to the authors who make anything that is at all interesting. I am just so very tired of specific clichés, so the rest of the story has to do more heavy lifting. And usually it doesn’t. But that’s more to the point of general competence than any author’s personal experience as a writer here. ↩
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Oh, how I hate the grift. ↩
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An MTL exists, as does a secondary “blunt” TL somewhere on Ao3. I can technically recommend the one on Ao3 insofar as it is being done by people who do care about translating it and is hosted on a site that doesn’t make me want to delete the internet, but even still, I have to do my own translation just to provide a better baseline for introducing people to the series. ↩