The Text:
Characters: Ichinose Kai, Kinpira, Random Kid 1, Amamiya Shuhei
Ichinose: あははは… (ahahaha…)
Kinpira: カイ！てっめ—ブッ飛ばすぞ！(Kai! temme-bu ttobasuzo!)
Ichinose: なんでだよぉ！(nandedayo!)
Ichinose: 俺はおまえらがスッゲバカ丸出しで熱演してっから効果音を入れてやったんだぜ！わざわざ～ (ore wa omaera ga sugge baka marudashi de netsuenshite kkara koukaon wo irete yatta n daze! wazawaza~)
Kinpira: くそぉ (kuso)
RK1: 金ちゃん (Kin chan)
RK1: カイの野郎後でキッチリシメた方がいいよ (Kai no yatsu atode kicchirishime ta houga iiyo)
Amamiya: 彼の名前はカイ… (kareno namae wa Kai…)
My translation:
Ichinose: Ahahaha!
Kinpira: Kai! You want a beating?
Ichinose: Why?
Ichinose: I was just adding some sound effects to the incredibly stupid performance you guys were putting on. Jeez~
Kinpira: Crap
RK1: Kinpira
RK1: You gotta get that bastard later.
Amamiya: His name is Kai…
Thoughts on loving the text
Going through this part, I was just completely overwhelmed. Humor me for a bit as I go on a short aside. (Reading through page 13 in the English translation might help you follow along – link in the References.)
First of all, I love this story. That’s why I picked it for this project. It has the kind of beauty that sticks in your chest and makes you want to become a better person. And a big part of that is the characters, especially the main character that we’re meeting for the first time here, Ichinose Kai. Kai has so much personality, but the way I’ve gotten to know that personality before now has always been through the English translation. No shade on the English translators – translation is extremely difficult and the fans who did this translation, all volunteering their time, by the way, did a fabulous job – but the nature of translation is that nuance will be lost. You want the text to be understood by people who live within a different cultural context and in a language with different sentence structures, idioms, and that sometimes just cannot convey all of the nuances and connotations in the original text. It is impossible to convey in English that differences between different ways of referring to oneself in Japanese – the fact that some ways are more formal than others, or that some are primarily used by men and using them as a woman means something – because in English we really only have one word for it: “I”. It’s even harder to show that “I” is often implied and left out of a sentence entirely in Japanese, because what is an English sentence without a subject?
What I’m trying to say is that reading this text in its original language, however clumsily and slowly I’m doing it, is shedding light on all of the color and connotation I’ve been missing out on. And I feel like I’m getting to know (and falling in love with) these characters all over again.
To that end, I really only want to focus on the fat, juicy sentence here spoken by Kai.
俺はおまえらがスッゲバカ丸出しで熱演してっから効果音を入れてやったんだぜ！わざわざ～
The English translation online is given as “I was adding ambiance to your stupid act.” Let’s see if we can add some nuance back in by breaking this thing down.
俺(ore) is a form of “I” primarily used by men. Historically it was also used as “you”. In Chinese, the character is pronounced “an3” and is still used in certain dialects to mean “I” or “me”.
おまえら(omaera) is a casual way to say “you”.
スッゲ(sugge) means unbelievable. This is left off the English translation, and I’ve tried to convey this emphasis with italics in my attempt.
バカ(baka, meaning stupid or ridiculous) is probably one of the Japanese words that people1 are most familiar with. Because it’s usually written in kana, you might not know that the associated kanji, 馬鹿, literally means “horse deer”. In Chinese, 馬鹿(ma3lu4) still refers to a species of deer, but in Japanese, it seems to have lost any wildlife connotations. Baka meaning “stupid” likely came from the Sanskrit “moha”, which was a slang term used by monks. Funnily enough, the Japanese “baka” has migrated back into Chinese, now with new associated characters: 八嘎(ba1ga).
丸出し(marudashi) means “complete exposure”. I’m interpreting this as “shamelessly” in this context. It’s a word that I wouldn’t expect an elementary-school age kid to use in English, but to me, this just makes Kai’s speech more performative and sassy.
熱演(netsuen) means “passionate performance”. The literal translation is “hot performance”.
効果音(koukaon) means “sound effects”. Notice that 音(on) has a different pronunciation than it did earlier when Kinpira was saying that the piano doesn’t make a 音(oto) sound, even though the meaning is the same.
入れて(irete) means to “insert”.
ぜ(ze) – Jisho tells me that ぜ(ze) is a particle that can be put at the end of the sentence to make it threatening or ironic, but only by men. There’s no way to translate this into English. It would totally be dependent on your tone.
わざわざ~ (wazawaza) means “doing something especially rather than incidentally.” Again, this is left off the English translation entirely. I tried to convey this with “Jeez~”, as in “I did this all for you and you don’t appreciate me.” It’s not great.
Online translation: “I was adding ambiance to your stupid act.”
My translation: “I was just adding some sound effects to the incredibly stupid performance you guys were putting on. Jeez~”
Obviously, my version doesn’t have to fit into a pre-drawn speech bubble, and the flow could be a lot better. But hopefully I’ve shown here a little bit of the nuance and personality that was lost in translation, and what you might gain by learning a new language.
References:
Jisho is Japanese dictionary I am using here.
MDBG is my all-time favorite Chinese dictionary.
Wiktionary is where all my etymology info is coming from.
An English translation of Piano no Mori can be found here, and I use this to check my work.
This IPA Chart helps me guess what words sounded like historically
Etymology Adventures 