Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 9 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translation Notes: On Profanity

Boy, the characters in this volume sure fuckin’ swear a lot, don’t they?

Okay, I’ll admit it: I just wanted to see if I could get away with opening this section by dropping a contextually appropriate F-bomb. In all seriousness, though, you really may have noticed that the dialogue in this volume goes notably heavier on the profanity than most of the other volumes in the series (with the sole exception of volume five—put a pin in that, we’ll come back to it in just a minute). There are good reasons for that, but those reasons are a little less straightforward than you might assume, and for that matter, the use of profanity in Japanese to English translation is a kind of complicated topic across the board. As such, I thought it would be an interesting subject to discuss this time around!

Now, let’s start off with a simple question: what sort of curse words are present in the Japanese language?

...Psych! I lied! That’s not a simple question at all, and is in fact the subject of no small amount of debate! Some people are prone to asserting that there is no such thing as profanity in Japanese, at least in the manner that most Americans conceptualize the concept (i.e., “words that you’re not allowed to say on TV”), and while there’s a glimmer of truth to that, I personally think it’s both reductive and factually incorrect.

I mean it’s reductive in the sense that while some words may be perfectly okay to air on TV, those same words can be extremely offensive when used in the right—or wrong—context. While many words may lack the inherently offensive nature that many English-speakers ascribe to, say, “fuck,” they can still absolutely carry the same weight that it does as a result of how they’re used.

As for the factual inaccuracy, let’s just say that there are absolutely some words you can’t say on Japanese TV! It goes a little weirder and deeper than that, though—for instance, it’s very common for certain words corresponding to human reproductive anatomy to be bleeped out when they come up in the sort of video games that Sagami’s a huge fan of. In some cases, it’s safe to conclude that the censorship’s for the sake of humor, but in others, it just seems downright inexplicable—why would those games’ creators feel obligated to bleep out a dirty word when it’s being used in literal hardcore pornography?

Is it a legal thing? Maybe contractual on the part of the voice actors? I wish I had an answer for this, but preliminary attempts at research turned up very few good results and a whole lot of links that I did not feel safe clicking, and honestly it’s kind of beside the point anyway. The point that I’m trying to make here is that there are definitely words in the Japanese language that are considered inherently dirty—they’re just not the sort of words that come up super often in popular media.

So that was a bit of a tangent, but hopefully it got across the idea that profanity in Japanese and profanity in English are both things, but are two very different beasts! That, in no small part, is what makes the use of profanity in translation a topic that’s both complicated and very much not a solved problem. If you were to ask ten different translators how, when, and why they use profanity in their work, you’d likely get ten different answers. Because of that, I can’t tell you with any degree of authority how profanity should be used in translation, but I can tell you how I personally choose to do so using this series as a case study, so let’s take a trip into the Subjective Zone!

First things first, there’s one immediate question that I ask myself about every project I work on, the answer to which dictates—among other things—the degree of profanity that I may choose to incorporate into the text: who is the target audience for this piece of media? The importance of that question, I feel, kinda goes without saying. No matter how much of a rough-and-tumble loudmouth a character may be, you can’t have them drop four-letter words every other sentence if you’re translating for a game that’s shooting to get a T rating from the ESRB.

The question of audience demographics is a little fuzzier for media that doesn’t have a built-in age recommendation, of course, but it’s still very much a factor in how I choose to use profanity. I would be much more hesitant to break out the big swears in a number of the other series I translate with J-Novel Club, for instance, because they’re clearly shooting for a wider age demographic than Supernatural Battles is.

What is the age demographic that Supernatural Battles is shooting for? That’s actually another question that I can’t necessarily offer a definitive answer to, but what I can say for sure is that Sagami’s presence in the novel immediately rules out anything even remotely low on the scale. There’s a reason the anime toned him down so much—some of the things he says are just so shockingly, egregiously filthy that it’s hard to believe they were meant to be read by anyone younger than their late teens at the bare minimum. That fact has very much informed my perspective on the appropriateness of profanity in the series: if you’re mature enough to read Sagami describing imaginary sex acts in appalling detail, you’re mature enough to handle an F-word or two.

That leads us to a natural follow-up question: why haven’t we used profanity more liberally throughout the majority of the series? The answer, to put it simply, is that it’s a matter of tone. Although Supernatural Battles includes themes, concepts, and Sagamicizms that peg it pretty firmly as a series aimed at a relatively mature audience, the tones it usually adopts just don’t feel conducive to heavy use of profanity to me. This series tends to veer between moments of lighthearted comedy, in which swears could sometimes work when they enhance the comedy but otherwise would feel jarring, and moments of rather intense seriousness and introspection, in which swears could sometimes work to drive home a character’s mental state but otherwise would feel gratuitous. For the most part, heavy profanity just doesn’t suit the vibe of the series, and as such I’ve chosen to be quite sparing with my use of it.

There’s one last question that determines how much profanity I tend to use, though, and it’s twofold: what are the personalities of the characters who are speaking, and what sort of word choice do they use in the original text? This is related to the tone question, of course, considering that the word choice characters lean toward has a very distinct effect on the tone of the work, but I consider it distinct enough to list separately because there are times when a character’s personality and word choice is askew enough from the work’s usual tone to make me consider breaking my usual policy and mixing a bit of profanity in.

Volume one of Supernatural Battles presents a perfect case study for how this can go down. The very first hard swear in the whole series was said by Kiryuu “Heldkaiser Luci-First” Hajime himself during his conversation in the diner, when he referred to Gatotsu Zeroshiki as “the coolest shit.” Having him let the genie out of the swear jar like that was a very deliberate choice that was made in order to communicate distinct differences between his character and Andou’s.

In Japanese, Andou’s tone throughout that conversation is enthusiastic and friendly, but also distinctly polite, using the formal forms of verbs and phrasings in the way you’d expect a young person to talk with their seniors. Kiryuu, in contrast, is as casual as could be, not to mention indifferent to his surroundings. Having him use casual profanity in the conversation was intended to both highlight the fact that the two of them were talking on distinctly different levels of politeness as well as establish a little of Kiryuu’s character early on—namely, that he’s the sort of college kid who would absolutely pepper his speech with random curse words if given half an excuse to do so, largely for the sake of making himself look like a badass.

Speaking of characters who we let swear because it seemed in-character for them to do so, and also characters associated with Kiryuu Hajime, Leatia is noteworthy both for being a very profanity-prone character and for having the honor of dropping the series’ very first F-bomb. As to why we ended up writing her that way, it was actually a very simple choice since the narrative very specifically and explicitly calls out the fact that she has a shockingly foul mouth when she’s upset (i.e., whenever she and Kiryuu are in a room together). It would have been difficult to make that description come across as natural without working some profanity into her dialogue, and it seemed like an extremely natural, if not necessary, opportunity to do so.

And now, it’s finally time to circle back to the beginning of this ramble, and also time to pluck out that pin I mentioned back when I brought up volume five: why do volumes five and nine in particular use so much more profanity than the rest of the series? By now, you can probably put the pieces together yourself: they use more profanity because it’s appropriate for the target audience they’re aimed at, feels natural for the personalities and speech patterns of the characters in question, and is well-suited to the jarringly different tone that those two volumes have when compared to the rest of the series.

I probably don’t need to explain this too deeply since you just finished reading the book and all, but volume nine (like volume five) represents a dramatic tonal shift compared to everything that came before it (except for volume five). Suddenly we get actual battles, real stakes, and no high school drama whatsoever! Kiryuu shoves his arm through a man’s torso in one of volume five’s early chapters, for crying out loud! The level of drama and violence portrayed in the Fallen Black volumes is like nothing seen in the rest of the series, and the tone that the narrative is written in represents just as distinct of a shift. Even the comedic elements of the story take on a different tone, with those two volumes leaning notably less heavily on reference humor (as you’ll be made very aware of when you get to the glossary half of this notes section).

Then there’s the characters themselves. While some of Andou’s crew would totally drop a swear or two if put in the right circumstances (let’s be real, it’d probably be Tomoyo), everyone in Fallen Black is a distinct flavor of likely-to-curse...as long as you roll all the Yusanos together into a single package, anyway. The use of profanity fits both who they are as people and the circumstances they’ve been thrust into, given, y’know, the constant threat of horrible, painful death they have to put up with. These characters live in a completely different world than Andou and friends—or, rather, in a completely different genre.

(Please don’t ask me what genre this series falls into, it’s a much more involved question than you might think and would take, like, half a notes section to cover on its own. Maybe some other time.)

I believe that just about covers it! I hope that reading this has given some context to why Kiryuu’s band and the foes they face are such potty mouths when compared to the rest of this series’ recurring cast. A different translator and/or editor may have chosen to use profanity in a distinctly different way than we have, but personally, I think we’ve struck a pretty good balance when it comes to staying faithful to the original Japanese’s tone and use of language. But, I mean, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Now then—it’s time to get to the notes part of this TL notes section...which is actually going to be notably shorter than most of the previous volumes’ because, well, there just weren’t nearly as many random obscurities worked into the story this time around! It turns out that when the narrative is predominantly centered around the perspectives of two characters who aren’t nearly as nerdy as the rest of the cast, you get a lot less reference humor worked into the text on the whole. There’s still a decent chunk of stuff to go over, though (mostly courtesy of Hitomi’s sections), so let’s get to it!