Apis' story is finished, and just before Golden Week! I started out liking the idea of Apis, and his hair, and his voice. Then when he shows up in the first chapter amidst a flurry of flower petals (very Ouran High School vibe there) I figured he’d just be some kind of drama queen. Well, that’s not really the case. He’s ... kind of a jerk. To be fair he gets better by the end of the story, but still. Apis basically has two faces: the formal princely one and the casual, darker one. His speech switches as his personality does, and I don’t know if I was able to get that across in the English, but I tried.
A couple notes on translation, the first one being from Ch. 4. The main character is addressing Apis' mother:
「……お母様、実はアピスさんの体調が……」
The main character literally addresses her as お母様, 'Mother'. While this is not unusual in Japanese where a name or title is almost always used in a formal situation as opposed to a secondary personal pronoun like 'you', it sounds strange to an English speaker. We'd only use 'mother' to address someone who isn't actually our own mother if the woman in question was a mother-in-law or the mother of someone we were very close with. And I don't think Apis and the main character have become that close over the span of 1 day. Initially I wanted to translate it as 'Your Majesty' but I realized the text never actually states she's a queen. I assume she is, given her son is a prince, but I don't quite get the hierarchy in the Land of Poison so I didn't want to make assumptions. That's why I translated it as 'Ma'am', which is actually the formal way of addressing the British Royal Family. It's not perfect, but it works.
The second note I have is on the kanji 鉢. This character is used to mean bees, wasps, and hornets, which are pretty different in the minds of English speakers. So I wanted to try and distinguish the two instances where a 鉢 is encountered in the story. In Ch. 1, I’ve translated it as ‘bee’. The insect doesn’t do anything, just flies around, and Apis says it isn’t poisonous. So to me, that’s a pretty harmless bee. But then in Ch. 5 of both the Moon and Sun route, I translated 鉢 as ‘hornet’. Technically the Japanese is the same, but in the story this thing flies out of the bushes and just randomly stings someone for no apparent reason then flies off. So since hornets are jerks, and that was a jerk move, I figured ‘hornet’ was a more accurate translation in this situation.
As a side note, sometimes I like to try and figure out the reasoning behind a character's name. Sometimes there isn't one that I can see, but I tried to figure out Apis. Turns out Apis is the name of the sacred bull in Egyptian mythology. I don't really think that's where this character's name came from as this particular prince deals with bees instead of bulls...but now I know the name of the Egyptian sacred bull!
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