![visual novel reader still showing japanese text visual novel reader still showing japanese text](https://i.imgur.com/8HstqkE.png)
This is may be a dialect difference where British-er English-es won’t find as much of a problem with emphatically ending a sentence in a noun or demonstrative pronoun as my American ears. But still, I think the author perhaps overused such filler to further the construction of the deredere archetype mentioned before. As an English-original work, Kill or Love isn’t so bad in that sense. あの~ねĪ lot of fan-translated Japanese works fill up with sentence starters and enders to imitate the Japanese “ne’s” and “na’s” and “yo’s” that simply don’t exist in English. Um, Don, you can switch with me, all right? You can go help Susie. It has a direct translation in komatte iru - 困っている though. I think of old Appalachian mountain talk and bluegrass folk, or the language my great grandparents might have used. “I’m troubled” alone, without any explanatory “by X” is such an odd phrase to hear in modern English. I’m starting to think that Jack is not pretending 困っている To see it so often then in Love or Kill caught me off guard… sometimes the dialogue in the novel read more like anime subtitles than a book!ĭear diary. Colloquially, it almost always sounds better as a simple “oh” or “ah, right” in casual English.
![visual novel reader still showing japanese text visual novel reader still showing japanese text](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/414paWSkG4L._SX376_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)
In context of the visual novel world though, I suppose it works to establish the character Grace as a sweet deredere anime girl archetype in the same way a Japanese work would do, even if I could hardly imagine an American shelf-stocker ever saying it in earnest.Īnother of those ubiquitous translations of a ubiquitous Japanese phrase, I often think that “I see” feels bizarrely formal and out of date, like it’s still coming out occupation-era US Army phrasebooks. Tellingly, a Google search for “let’s give it our all” brings up dictionary references for foreign languages, including Japanese, but few examples of the phrase used natively in English beyond bland motivational announcements for charities. So many natural English alternatives exist here, like “pft” “tsk” “tsh” or, always my favorite, “ugh.” Why rely on the trope?įrom the picture above, this seem inspired that ubiquitous Japanese word ganbatte - do your best! But though it sounds like common enough English, thinking it through, I never hear the phrase spoken that way outside of an animanga context. “Tch” is a sound I only ever hear in the animanga sphere (and it’s not even common in spoken Japanese because it’s pretty rude!), making me think that the writer inserted it in imitation of Japanese visual novels without considering the flow of the conversation. This single sound prompted me to look for other ‘pseudo-translated’ lines because it felt so out of place in English dialogue, especially when spoken by a well-kept young woman rather than some sulky shounen action hero. So, let’s start off with a fan-favorite onomatopoeia: I’m not going to pretend to be rigorous or even generous – I’ll just note some of the lines that interested me and give a probable Japanese inspiration.
VISUAL NOVEL READER STILL SHOWING JAPANESE TEXT FREE
Today I’ll be picking on Kill or Love, a free visual novel on Steam by Andy Church about “obsession, loneliness, and, based on your choices, varying amounts of murder,” not because it’s good or bad but because it has so many examples of such odd pseudo-translated writing (and because it has Yandere, yum yum). Or in other words, instead of simply borrowing the visual novel medium to produce fresh English-language works, some visual novel writers seem intent on imitating both the tropes and the language of their Japanese inspirations, resulting in a hodgepodge of stodgy prose that doesn’t quite sound translated Japanese… and doesn’t quite sound fluent English either. Instead, I just want to observe a personal point of interest: so many English-language visual novels, even those originally written in English, read like translated Japanese. I know that I don’t have a fair sample for careful commentary. I’m not here to complain or put down the visual novel medium because, again, I only ever really read the free ones put out by hobbyists that take advantage of Steam’s lax store policy.
![visual novel reader still showing japanese text visual novel reader still showing japanese text](https://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/images/img1_13.png)
Not much otome seems to make it onto Steam), most have weak art (4 original character designs and 5 backgrounds is not a selling point!), and, most of all, so many of them have terrible, terrible writing. They often run the same anime girl archetypes (and it’s almost always girls. I’ll occasionally pick up a free or cheap one on Steam because Steam’s awful recommendation algorithm won’t stop suggesting them.
![visual novel reader still showing japanese text visual novel reader still showing japanese text](https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/xlarge/public/field/image/2021/05/famicom-detective-club-tgwsb-mirror.jpg)
I don’t read many visual novels because they’re almost all uh… pretty bad.