Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 4 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translation Notes: On Ruby Text

There’s an elephant in the room. It’s been here this whole time, starting on literally the first page of volume one, and it will be present through to the very end of the series. That elephant’s identity? Ruby text, a peculiarity of the Japanese writing system that is not directly replicable in English in any practical form.

Before I dig into what exactly I mean by all that, though, I have to establish a bit of linguistic context! First off, the Japanese writing system utilizes two phonetic lettering systems and one massive selection of characters more or less lifted wholesale from Chinese. The former are called hiragana and katakana, while the latter are called kanji. There are 46 characters in hiragana and katakana—48 if you count a couple archaic ones—and while it’s not entirely clear how many kanji there are, the list of characters one needs to know to achieve basic functional literacy clocks in at a little over two thousand.

Further complicating matters is the fact that kanji’s readings are context-dependent! The same kanji can be read in wildly different ways depending on what other characters are present around it. The end result of all this is that sometimes, either for the sake of contextual clarity or for the sake of providing a reading to a kanji you can’t be sure your audience will be familiar with, it becomes necessary for Japanese writing to include clarification on how a particular kanji should be read.

Enter ruby text! This refers to small text placed parallel to the primary text that, in theory, would inform a reader of the phonetic pronunciation of the text it stands parallel to. (Imagine superscript-size text, but it lies above words instead of after them.)

As you may have guessed, Japanese literature has done plenty of experimentation with this feature of its writing. Indeed, ruby text is frequently used and abused as part of the chuuni aesthetic, and Supernatural Battles’s original Japanese text plays with it to humorous effect. Like, a lot.

The first and clearest example I can give happens to also be a good example of how chuuni fiction tends to use ruby text on the whole: the names of the main cast’s powers! Dark and Dark, for instance, is written in Japanese using two kanji, “黒焔,” meaning “black” and “flame” respectively. The ruby text written above those kanji reads “ダークアンドダーク,” which is “dark and dark” in English, spelled out phonetically using katakana.

While the power names that Andou comes up with are certainly intended as parody to an extent, they’re also really not that far off from the sort of thing you see in completely unironic chuuni fiction. The series A Certain Magical Index, for instance, features a power written as “幻想殺し” in kanji (meaning “fantasy killer,” roughly) with the ruby text “イマジンブレイカー” (“Imagine Breaker”) clarifying how it’s meant to be read. Andou’s naming style is very clearly intended to be directly inspired by the sort of fiction he consumes, and even if he weren’t name-dropping the series he likes absolutely all the time, the way he uses ruby text would give some pretty clear hints!

That’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Supernatural Battles’s use of ruby text, though—it also uses it to tell so, so many stupid jokes. The classic example of those that always springs to mind for me is a gag from volume 1 that you might remember: after Tomoyo impresses Andou with the chuuni-tastic nature of the title she thought up for herself, Andou calls her “師匠” (“master”). Tomoyo tells him to stop it, and he then calls her “師匠” again, only this time with the ruby text “マスター “ (literally “master,” the English word, in katakana) written over it. Tomoyo snaps at him, telling him to not “put ruby text on the word.” That joke epitomizes the translator’s dilemma: how on earth do you localize jokes that rely on a writing system quirk that your target language doesn’t even have?

To address a different, smaller elephant that shuffled into the room over the course of the last couple paragraphs: I do not believe that including the ruby text as-is, with both the kanji and the reading translated into English and formatted like they were in the Japanese, is a good solution to this issue. The biggest and most important reason why I don’t think that works is a matter of making sure the English version of the story delivers an equivalent experience to the Japanese. Carrying the ruby text over just wouldn’t accomplish that, in my opinion. English doesn’t do ruby text, so including it wouldn’t come across as clever or referential in the way it does in Japanese—it would just be weird and confusing, especially for a reader not already familiar with all this linguistic context.

There’s also the very simple fact that when you use ruby text with English writing, it looks, well, awful. I was going to work a joke into this section where I’d write “this” and then put “awful” above it in ruby text, and while I promise you it would have looked awful, there was the other issue of English word processors just not being built to format text like that. Successfully putting ruby text into the word processor I’m currently writing these notes in would be an ordeal, to say the least, and even if I did succeed, the odds of it making it into whatever e-reader you’re currently viewing this book on intact are next to none. English ruby text is just deeply, deeply impractical on a technical level, and even if I didn’t believe that carrying it over as-is would be unfaithful to the intent of the source material, it still just wouldn’t be an option. My managers would kill me if I tried, and I would deserve it.

So, how have we been handling the ruby text in this series so far? By focusing on the same factor that rules out leaving it as-is: the text’s intended effect! This can take a number of forms depending on context, so let’s revisit those two examples that I gave back in the first half of this section.

First up, Dark and Dark and the rest of the power names! The intent is pretty clear for these: they’re meant to evoke the sort of names that get used in chuuni fiction, and also to be comically over the top and a little bit off in that distinctly Andou sort of way. Our approach to these was twofold. First, in terms of the actual names that get thrown about on a regular basis, we decided to keep the ruby text readings as-is. This is a pretty common decision for chuuni novels in translation, and it definitely nails the slight awkwardness of Andou’s naming style since his English is just off enough to come across as charmingly wonky.

What that doesn’t cover, though, is the sheer over-the-top geekiness of the kanji that Andou chooses for his names, and that brings us to the second aspect of how we’ve been handling them: by expanding upon them and adding prefixes and descriptive phrases that capture the effect of the kanji whenever context requires them to have that certain extra-ness. You may have noticed that Andou sometimes refers to Dark and Dark with descriptors like “the stygian flames of Purgatory,” and those are often—though not always!—instances of us working the meaning and tone of a term’s kanji into the text in as smooth and natural of a manner as we can manage.

The jokes, of course, require a different sort of touch, and a very case-by-case one at that. Essentially, handling them is a process of figuring out what makes the joke funny, how the ruby text contributes to that humor, and then finding something else you can do that has an equivalent effect. In the case of the “master” joke, for instance, what really makes the punchline in my opinion is the slightly fourth-wall-breaking nature of Tomoyo’s retort. There would be no way for her to tell that Andou was using ruby text in the way he does because spoken language just doesn’t do that, so her calling it out comes across as comically absurd. Amusingly enough, the Supernatural Battles anime does include that gag, and gets around it by having the relevant text pop up in the background to keep the joke exactly as it is in the novel.

In that particular instance, our solution was to swap in a bit of fanciness that written English allows for and Japanese actually lacks: italicization! By italicizing the second “master,” we not only carried over the aspect of the joke where Andou makes the word slightly fancier in a kind of silly and unnecessary way the second time he says it, but we also gave Tomoyo something to call out that she’d never realistically be able to hear if they were having a real, out loud conversation, preserving the fourth wall break as well. It certainly wasn’t the only way we could’ve approached the gag, but it’s a solution that I feel worked pretty well in that particular context!

And that’s about all I have to say about the ruby elephant for now! We’ve had to deal with more silly names and clever wordplay than I can remember, and I’m very confident that won’t be changing any time soon—in fact, it’s about to get even sillier in the next volume. I hope you’re as excited about that as I am, but for now, we’ve got a boatload of references to contextualize!