Amitie and the Girl of Love Translation Notes
Chapter 2, regarding Ally’s Honorifics
Ally addresses everyone with ~sama (様) before Amitie gets her to stop, which is much more polite than ~san (usually translated to Mister or Miss) and very unusual outside of customer-service or addressing-royalty situations. To convey that speaking quirk, we opted to use “Noble” before character names. In the case of Amitie, since she is who Ally perceives as the Hero of love in this situation, we decided to use “Lady”.
The Japanese simply uses ~sama for both. Ally also uses ~sama after Hero, which is where the “Great” of “Great Hero” comes from.
Chapter 3: What’s Love?
Klug cleared his throat. “Far more importantly, what was all that about?! Are you really so incognizant of your own glaring shortcomings that you think it makes sense to introduce me to others as a ‘jerk’…?!”
“Cogs and ants? You mean the things that spin and crawl around?”
Ignorance = 無知 (muchi)
Amitie takes this to mean whip (鞭), which shares the same sound, and tries to describe it with a sound effect ぴしっぴしっ (pishi-pishi)
Amitie: Whip? The thing that goes ‘crack crack’?
This wordplay is impossible in English, so we chose incognizant, which you might hear as cogs and ants if you didn’t know what the word was.
“….That said. Love… Love, huh… What a complex topic,” Klug began, his eyebrows scrunched. “It is a simple word to use, but its definition is wide-reaching, from friendship to filial love…and it also encompasses, erm…r-romance, of course, along with a myriad of other possible subjects… ” “Mirror? What do mirrors have to do with this? ” I wondered aloud, but… “Amitie… I’m not even going to bother to correct you.” Klug glared at me.
To be wide-ranging = 多岐にわたる (taki ni wataru)
Amitie is unable to process this formal phrase and takes taki to mean waterfall (滝), which shares the same sound.
Amitie: Waterfalls? How are waterfalls related?
We chose “mirror”, since it shares the beginning sound as “myriad”. Maybe Amitie needs hearing aids?
Klug kept talking, quickly and in one breath, “The definition of “Loving each other”! An action that displays mutually held affections and expresses your personal grace towards the other party!” “Grace? Who is Grace?” And now it felt like he was just talking in circles. Yup, still not getting a single thing!
Klug kept fidgeting about, but still gave me a proper answer. “By grace, I mean… That you like something, and… Look, holding something in your ‘grace’ just means that you are happy when that something is around, all right?!“
In the definition Klug gives in Japanese, he uses the word 好意 (koui) which basically means goodwill. Amitie repeats this word in katakana (コウイ?) which indicates that she’s sounding it out because she doesn’t understand what it means. Hence we repeated “grace” here, and had Amitie ask who “Grace” was.
Chapter 6: Still Looking for Love
“Speaking of that, I tried asking Ecolo about love too,” I mentioned.
“Hm? Now I wonder what they had to say on that topic. I have no frame of reference,” Ringo said.
I tried my hardest to remember the conversation we’d had… “Love is…an… opinion? Or wait, maybe it was an ‘open onion’!” THUD. Everyone besides me fell over at once.
Wrong impression = 思い込み (omoikomi)
Amitie: omoi…komi? omoi nikomi!
重い omoi 煮込み*** nikomi*** = serious stew
This wordplay is impossible in English, so we went with “opinion” and “open onion”.
That’s all for the first half! Thanks for reading!
(Updated 02/18/2022)
