Story - Sky

Sky's story is now ready for reading! The translation of Sky’s story was done at the request of one of my readers, and I am so glad they sent in that request! I love Sky so much! I would never have known how much I liked him if I hadn’t done his story, and now he has joined the ranks of my top favorite princes. It makes me even happier that I was able to grab two of him from the last event (yes, I only got 2, and I didn’t even get Camilo. I’d bad at this game ><) Anyway, although I love Sky’s story, he was…an adventure in translation. Sky’s country is basically an alternate version of Tokyo I believe. It’s a modern city with cars, motorcycles, neon lights, etc. But it’s also a pretty rough and potentially dangerous place. I mean, Sky walks around with a gun so…that gives you an idea of what kind of place it is.

With that setting in mind, Sky talks like a tough street thug. Or at least a really, really masculine guy. That can make it really difficult to understand him because he uses all sorts of different contractions and grammatical forms that aren’t taught to you when you study ‘standard Kanto-area Japanese’. I had to look up information on translating yakuza dialogue for him. But of course that leads to a lot of accent information. Just like other countries, Japan has accents depending on where you’re from. I even hear it where I live, and I’m only 3 hours north of Tokyo. Yakuza stereotypically speak some kind of rougher sounding Japanese, maybe Hiroshima-ben or Kansai-ben, or Osaka-ben. But Sky wasn’t quite yakuza-level roughness, just…rougher. Like this line from the first chapter:

「危ねぇだろ！ぼーっと突っ立ってんな！誘拐されるとこだったぞ！！」

Ending sentences with the だろ (daro) and ぞ (zo) are very hyper-masculine ways of speaking. And he says危ねぇ (abunee), which is a shorter form of the standard危ない (abunai). He also says くそ (kuso) a few times, which roughly translates to ‘damn’ or ‘shit’ depending on context. And he refers to the main character as オマエ (omae) which is a very casual and masculine way of saying ‘you’. His accent comes across even stronger when reading it because he will use words like ヤツ (yatsu), a derogatory way of saying ‘him’. Traditionally the word would be written in hiragana or kanji, やつ or 奴, but the fact that Sky’s dialogue is written with it in katakana makes it sound even rougher.

Apart from just reading Sky’s dialogue, his accent was difficult to translate into English, and that’s why I used a lot more conjugations like ‘gonna’ and dropping the ‘g’ off of the end of words. Thankfully only his spoken lines are written that way. If the whole story had been written in that kind of speech I think I may have gotten a migraine…