Today on the blog, we have a translator’s corner for Clockup’s How to Live a Healthy Hentai Lifestyle from Roseheart!
This is part two of a three-part series! You can read part 1 here.
Hi, everyone! It’s Roseheart again, your translator for How to Live a Healthy Hentai Lifestyle!
Today I thought I’d talk to you a little about puns. This game is chock full of them, and Japanese is a language that lends itself very nicely to creating puns. With each kanji character having certain readings, putting them together can create a homophone for something totally separate from what the kanji themselves mean.
For example, many of the locations in Hentai Lifestyle are made out of seemingly innocent kanji, but read as hilarious words such as manko (pussy) or chinpo (penis). Personally, I find that translating puns like this is either super easy, or super difficult, but I tend to approach them all in the same way to start with.
When translating puns, the most important thing is to make sure it works, of course. After that, you want to make sure it’s funny (or as funny as puns can get…). Only after that do you want to make sure it’s as close to the Japanese as you can make it because that’s not always possible. (Note that this is how I go about things, and all translators are different! How you approach these things also very much depends on what you’re translating).
When I get a pun to translate, I try and see how it works in Japanese first and foremost. Let’s take the city of the protagonist’s college first. In Japanese, it is: 錦珠市, (Kintama-shi, or Kintama city). As any Gintama fan will know, “kintama” means balls (as in, pee is stored in the balls), and though the kanji used to write it here is different, it is similar to the actual word for balls, which is written as “gold” and “balls” (Kintama-shi is written as “fine/beautiful” and “jewels”).
For me, the most important thing was that this was a place name, so it should sound like a place name. I could just go ahead and call it Crown Jewel City or something that follows the Japanese naming sense, but that felt a little too fantastical. I wanted it to sound like a place that could feasibly exist, but that would also make you smirk. In the end, I went with Cockerton, for that mix of “realism” and the word cock. Only later did I find out there’s actually a place called Cockerton in real life in the UK… (which is a great place for funny place names, by the way, if you’re into that kind of thing…)
I could go on and on about the puns in Hentai Lifestyle, but I’d rather leave you to discover the rest yourself!
Have fun out there and stay pervy!
