Considering the current event, I thought it would be nice to do Haku! (plus he was a request from a while back.) As I was translating Haku's story, I realized I was getting through it faster than usual. I got really excited, thinking I was getting better at this whole translation thing. Then I went through and proofread the translation and realized a lot of the lines are like this: Haku: "..." OO: "..." So yeah, not as much dialogue as I'm used to. Not that that's a bad thing! As such I didn't have much trouble with this translation. Haku speaks very short and quiet, which wasn't always easy to translate when there are lines like: Haku: "... 怖かったか？" Which literally translates to "...scared?" Just that doesn't work in English. So we need to stretch it out and add some more words to get: Haku: "...were you scared?" To make it sound better. That happened more than once, but I did my best to preserve Haku's manner of speaking. His tone does however change in the MOON route, which by the way is a little ... intense. There was actually one line that made me pause in my translation: Haku: "それに、さっきの感情は…… " さっき when written like this means 'just now' or 'a moment ago'. That's the translation I went with, but the pause came from what was going on and the fact that another way to translate さっき is 'blood lust' and...that could have fit. But I'll stick with my initial translation as that reading is more used when we see it written like 殺気 in kanji, not in hiragana. Take from that what you will! The one problem I had was with this line in the final chapter of the MOON Route: ハクさんの表情は、怖いくらいにせいせいとしていて…… I could get everything from this line except for the せいせい throwing me off. It's not written in kanji, which makes it harder to pin down an accurate translation. I thought maybe it was a new grammar thing I'd not encountered, but that wasn't the case either. The first part basically translates like this: 'His expression was so scary that-...-' But the せいせい is something I usually translate as 'relief'. Pretty sure we're not relieved that his facial expression is so scary. So I dug around the dictionary I use and played with different interpretations. The one I finally settled on was this: 'Haku's expression was so scary; something new had been created…' I don't know if this is the right translation, but it kind of made sense, so that's what I went with. I also wanted to make a certain distinction in the SUN and MOON route emotional situations. It's easy to get in Japanese, but when we translate it, word choice is important. In MOON route Haku uses the word 好き. In English we often translate this as 'love' as that's basically what it means. But it's more of a kid love, or puppy love. It's what you hear students use when confessing to each other, or when they say how much they like their friends. However I used 'like' in order to differentiate it from the SUN route where he uses 愛する, which is more closely translated as 'love'. This is the more romantic love, the love between partners and married couples. I think it's a very important distinction to note that Haku's personality is different enough in the two routes that he uses these two different words to express his feelings. And with that said, go enjoy his story!