Piano no Mori – Stick Figures with Boobs

Kids in the US drawing stick figures usually distinguish women by their long hair, but that was not the strategy employed when developing this character. If you really squint at 女, you can see that there’s arms, legs, a head, and a kind of bulge in the middle of the body. What is that bulge? (It’s a boob).

Piano no Mori – Sassy Children are the Best Children

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. 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. And I feel like I’m getting to know (and falling in love with) these characters all over again.