Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 5 - Chapter SS4

Chapter 4

? Does Hajime have an absolute territory fetish?!

Absolute territory—or zettai ryouiki, if you’re talking to a Japanese person or a particular sort of anime fan—refers to the patch of visible thigh found between the tops of high socks and the bottom of one’s skirt/shorts. People have some very strong and passionate opinions about this one, none of which I’ll be addressing in any capacity beyond acknowledging their existence. I will, however, note that the term itself is actually a Neon Genesis Evangelion reference, alluding to the Japanese term for what was rendered in English as “A.T. Field.”

? Sinner’s Sanction ⪧

While this attack name isn’t technically a reference, the sheer madness of it all is easily deserving of its own write-up regardless, so here goes! There’s a lot to unpack here—normally I’d start by writing out the Japanese term and explaining its meaning, but unfortunately, I can’t do that this time around because I am incapable of typing the first character. The kanji for the term, you see, is “罪罰,” with a ruby text reading of ミツバチ (“mitsubachi”), except the “罪” is upside-down. If you’re curious how Kota Nozomi managed to type that, well, he didn’t—in the Japanese ebook for this volume, the upside-down 罪 is actually a midline image.

Let’s start by ignoring that whole upside-down thing and look at the characters in isolation. Some of 罪’s most prominent meanings are crime and sin, while 罰’s most prominent meaning is punishment. If those words feel like they sort of go together somehow, that would be because the Japanese name for Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is 罪と罰 (“tsumi to batsu”). The allusion, of course, breaks down the moment you factor in the whole upside-down thing, but it’s at least present in a background capacity.

A reasonable attempt at reading 罪罰 while ignoring the upside-down aspect would be ツミバチ (“tsumibachi”), where the 罪 is “tsumi” and the 罰 is “bachi.” So, then, what’s the rationale for reading the upside-down 罪 as “mitsu” to get “mitsubachi”? Well, when you reverse the “tsu” and “mi” characters, you end up with the “mitsu” reading. And, of course, the way you reverse text that’s written from top to bottom is to flip it upside-down!.

But where is all of this going? It all comes down to that final bit of ruby text, since “mitsubachi” is Japanese for “honey bee.” The description of the power uses a fair bit of stinger imagery, so it’s pretty easy to see how that meaning plays into its theme. Taken all together, the power’s name is made up of two characters that obliquely allude to Crime and Punishment, only they’ve been abused in a manner that makes them look obviously, immediately wrong in such a way as to twist their ruby text reading into a totally different word that plays into the mechanical effects of the power itself. Phew.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this was sort of a lot to try to carry over into English! We spent a lot—and I do mean a lot—of time playing around with various options and methods of approximating the effect before finally settling on the rendition we went with. This is one of those translation puzzles where there is no objectively correct answer, and there are indefinite equally valid manners in which this attack name could’ve been translated, but we were working with a few limiting factors that restricted our options—unlike Kota Nozomi, we can’t freely drop images into the middle of text lines, for a variety of very complicated technical and business-related reasons I won’t dig into here—and we ended up deciding to get a little creative and nail the effect of the Japanese, rather than obsessing over pulling a similar upside-down letter stunt.

So, how did we end up with Sinner’s Sanction ⪧? To make a long story short, it was a process of identifying the most important components of the Japanese’s effect and coming up with something that ticked all the same boxes. We figured that the English term would have to A: have a similarly indirect association with the concepts of crime and punishment, B: include some aspect that lets us work the skill name into the description of its effects, C: have some sort of text-based nonsense that prompts an immediate reaction of “wait, can you do that?” (an equivalent for the upside-down character), and D: be chuuni as heck. The use of the words “sinner’s sanction” was our attempt to fulfill component A, while B-C were all accomplished with text formatting and a single special character. In short: the one thing we could do that felt like it’d be as chuuni as flipping half the name upside-down to make a new word was running the whole name through with a spear.