I'm guessing that RELAX <-> ILUVU misunderstanding is something completely untranslatable so I feel like I shouldn't complain too much... but it felt really clunky nonetheless.
Yes and no. On one hand, the misunderstanding is actually completely implausible even in japanese (ochitsuite <-> aishiteru). The only thing that matches is the number of syllables, which we tried to match using the number of letters.
But what is more natural in japanese, of course, is that one character = one syllable so the written language does a better job representing the whole "mouthing each syllable one at a time" and "trying to identify each syllable from her mouthing it" thing. We also considered writing out individual syllables in each of the bubbles, which is closer to the intended effect, but I thought writing out separated syllables in english looked weird. (also the most natural translations were like, 2 or 3 syllables, not 5...)
The high effort move would have been to erase two of the five bubbles in the first panel and find a 3 syllable translation ("calm your tits"? :P ) so that it could be mistaken for "I love you". Maybe I should have done that.
last edited at Oct 30, 2022 7:28PM