Finally Sakia's story is finished! I'd have finished him a little sooner but I needed to wait until I could get the missing dialogue from the Moon Route choices.
I had a couple difficulties with Sakia's story. The first, though arguably least difficult of the two, was Sakia's references to plants. Sakia is a researcher, so it makes sense that he'd use specialized vocabulary related to his field. Of course, these are words I don't know, so I had to rely more heavily on my dictionary for his translations than I have for some of the other stories.
In Ch. 2 of the story, Sakia mentions a plant called ドクミズキ. I did some looking, but this isn't a real plant. ミズキ is the Japanese word for a dogwood plant, specifically Cornus controversa, but the ドク at the beginning just translates as 'poison', which is why my translation of the plant is 'poison dogwood'. I could have also left it untranslated, but I chose not to.
The other plants that Sakia mentions, in Ch. 4, are アセビ, クララ, and スズラン. Thankfully these are real plants: アセビ is the Japanese andromeda flower, クララ is sophora flavescens which doesn't seem to have a more mundane name, and スズラン is lily-of-the-valley. And from a brief search on the internet, these three plants are indeed poisonous! Why the story writers chose
The other problem I had with Sakia is his broken speech pattern:
「 ……言い忘れてたけどそれ、猛毒…ドクミズキ…… 素手で触ると…かぶれるよ…… …食べたら…死んじゃうし…… 」
Basically, I had to remove all those speech breaks and create a coherent sentence, then translate it, then interpret it, then re-insert the breaks. Because Japanese grammatical structure is different from English, the breaks I put in the translation don't technically fall in the same places as in the Japanese, but it wouldn't make much sense if I left it in the same order!
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