Lost in Translation

Today is going entirely to pot, so… a post about names!

I’ve been working on a good name for the isekai book for several days and not finding anything to my precise liking. I want something with a light novel feel to it, which means that it should more or less give you the basic concept on the cover. For some reason, it’s a thing for light novels (a Japanese literature form and the basis for a lot of manga and anime these days) to have really long titles.  That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime,  A Certain Magical Index,  In Another World With My Smartphone, and A Blessing To This Wonderful World. Wordy.

Now, that last one may not be known to many, but that’s because it got slightly retitled for the western market:  KonoSuba: God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World. The shortened form, ‘KonoSuba,’ is taken from the first two words in Japanese: Kono Subarashii and this is where we get back to me thinking about names for a book. I thought I’d come up with a good one: Not the Right Hero for this Fantastic New World. Wordy, descriptive, and evocative of the isekai theme. Cool, I thought. But when I stuffed it into Google Translate to see what it looked like in Japanese, I got: Kono subarashī shin sekai ni fusawashī hīrōde wanai. It’s Google Translate, so I reversed the translation to check it was working meaningfully and it was… close enough for jazz. Why would I translate it into Japanese, you ask. Well, I had this idea for the cover to try to emulate light novel and manga covers, so I’d put the title on there in Japanese characters in the background or something. But not if it looks nearly identical to KonoSuba (and it looks even more like it if you write it in Japanese). Turns out ‘fantastic’ and ‘wonderful’ translate the same (at least in Google Translate).

So, I’m not using that one. Not the Right Hero for this Magical World is better; that starts out ‘kono mahō.’ Still a little similar, but it turns out that anything with the phrase ‘this adjective world’ in it is going to start with ‘kono adjective no sekai,’ so I’d have to come up with some entirely different, and likely convoluted, phrasing to avoid it. Still working on it.

It all reminds me of those funny product name videos that do the rounds at times. Someone in thinks that Jizz! would be a great name for their creamy cleaning product because it means Clean! in their language. And we laugh, and laugh. Translating things from one language to another is an absolute minefield. If big corporations can mess it up entirely, I guess I can at least feel less of an idiot when I have problems. (So, why is it I always feel like such an idiot?)

PS. KonoSuba is awesome. I did go find it on Crunchyroll, and I think I’ve watched both series three times in the last week. It has my kind of sense of humour. Mostly anyway. It also has to be one of the few isekai where the writer realised that you could have a relatable protagonist without surgically removing all vestiges of a personality. And Megumin is awesome. Explosion is the only way to go.