Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 3 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translation Notes: On Accents

Five pages’ worth of this volume’s text took almost as much consideration to translate as the rest of the volume combined.

Okay, yes, that’s some pretty extreme hyperbole on my part, but it certainly felt that way at the time. Figuring out how we’d be rendering Tamaki’s accent was an enormous decision, and the nature of said accent gave us a very limited set of options to choose from! As such, for this volume’s TL notes, I figured I’d walk you through our decision-making process for the accent and explain a little of the logic behind how we finally chose to render it.

To begin with, the problem: Tamaki’s accent is extremely specific, and this specificity is discussed directly within the text. As Kota Nozomi himself noted in the afterword, Tamaki speaks an extremely particular form of the Fukushima dialect. It’s not incredibly hard to understand if you can understand Japanese on the whole, but it is very distinctive relative to other regional Japanese dialects and has a lot of idiosyncrasies.

The fact that the accent’s origins are brought up within the story immediately rules out the option of simply swapping in a real-world English dialect and calling it a day. If we were to, say, make Tamaki speak with a Geordie accent, it would come across as incredibly strange when the text later goes on to describe the accent as being both Fukushima-specific and hard to place. That second point in particular was an issue: if we chose to give Tamaki an accent that a reader could potentially identify on their own as coming from anywhere other than Fukushima, the whole logic behind Tomoyo’s thoughts on the subject would crumble to pieces.

Speaking of Tomoyo’s musings, they also imposed a pretty strict set of limitations upon our options for Tamaki’s accent. Whatever we chose had to mesh with Tomoyo’s comments regarding the nature of the dialect. We could, admittedly, have tweaked the specifics of Tomoyo’s observations to match up with whatever we chose, but that’s the sort of liberty with the original text that you have to be really careful with, particularly when it comes to a distinctive character trait for the most mysterious member of a thirteen volume long series’ cast. There are an infinite number of ways in which a single careless alteration to Tamaki’s accent could come back to bite us in a future volume.

So, appropriating a real-world dialect was out of the picture. That left us with just one good option: make something up ourselves! Making up a dialect, however, is a lot easier said than done, and there are a number of ways in which you can approach the challenge.

One technique that we went out of our way not to use: writing common words with deliberate misspellings in order to reflect the fact that they’re being said in unusual ways. I didn’t actually know that there’s a specific term for that technique going into this volume, but as my editor explained to me, that sort of thing is called an eye dialect.

We chose to avoid using that technique for a number of reasons. To begin with, even if we had tried to keep the misspellings we chose unique, it would have been very easy to accidentally slip into something resembling a stereotypical real-world accent using this technique. Even worse, it would be very easy to accidentally slip into something resembling a pejorative caricature of a real-world accent! The fact that eye dialects have commonly been used historically as a tool to portray characters in a rather derogatory light made that danger all the more pressing. Needless to say, accidentally going down that road would be the absolute worst-case scenario for our portrayal of Tamaki!

As such, we decided to render the words that Tamaki says in exactly the same way we handled the rest of the characters in the series’ dialogue. Instead, we turned to the words themselves for our solution: we’d portray Tamaki’s dialect by way of her vocabulary!

This mitigated the danger of accidentally stumbling into a real-world dialect quite handily. The sheer size of the English lexicon means that there’s almost always a word that’s slightly unusual for any given situation that will still be totally comprehensible to your readers, and the odds of accidentally combining those non-standard words into an actual extant dialect are incredibly low.

The one aspect of her accent that this technique doesn’t allow us to portray are the more auditory components of her dialect—its tonal flatness and the speed at which she talks, for instance—but for one thing, Tomoyo’s observations on the subject give the reader ample context to understand those aspects of her speech, and for another, they’re not actually portrayed in the Japanese rendition of her dialogue either!

Personally, I believe that our portrayal of Tamaki’s dialect is about as faithful to how she speaks in the original text as we could get. Now we just have to keep her word choice consistent and coherent for the next ten volumes! Which, uhh, might be easier said than done! I’ve already started compiling a glossary, I assure you.

As a side note, if you want an example of an accent that didn’t require anywhere even close to this much thought and attention, look no further than Squirrely’s mess of a speech style. Though his accent is also directly addressed by the text, the fact that it’s used for expressly comedic purposes and the fact that it’s very specifically stated to be a failed attempt at doing a decently convincing accent means we could more or less go to town on it, so long as the end result sounded sufficiently silly. Not all accents require a small essay’s worth of thought and planning to render decently!

That brings me to the last point I’d like to bring up in this section: the planning that was put into Tamaki’s accent, and the fact that I by no means did all of that on my own. My editor was heavily involved in the decision-making process for this particular issue, and frankly, most of the good ideas were his. I’m basically pulling an Andou-explaining-how-guitar-amps-work here, to be completely honest, and I’d be loath to not give credit where it’s due!

And, that’s just about all the space I have! I hope this section has given you some context on how a disproportionately tiny portion of a project can end up requiring way more thought than you’d ever imagine. Anyway, we’ve got a metric ton of media references to cover this volume, so here we go!