Sup, friends. It’s your friendly neighborhood Kazoo, here to announce the next game we at Operation Bellflower plan on working on. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for… Yui no Kotonoha! Title translation currently undecided. The titular “kotonoha” only appears twice in the text, but it’s a royal pain in the butt when it does.

This is a short little game, only a few hours long, about a zashiki-warashi who visits a sleepy rural town. I quite liked it, and I wanna bring it to a language near you. Or rather, I already did. I spent the month of April hacking away at it in my down time at work (I have a lot of down time at work), and before I knew it, my translation pass was done.

Now, the fact that I was working on this at work means I obviously didn’t have the game open. I shouldn’t have to tell you why that’s no bueno. So, I’m going to edit this myself, this time at home with the game open side by side with the script. While Lonesome is taking a very interventionist approach with Senmomo, he’s said he wants to be more hands-off with Yui, doing maybe the final five to ten percent of the work. Which is great, since it means he’ll mostly be focusing on Senmomo.

But why am I even bothering to announce this at all? I already have all the team members I need. It would make no difference if I just worked on it in secret and dropped a full patch out of the blue one day. Well, the answer’s simple. As a budding translation scholar, I want to promote critical thinking and analysis of translations. I’ve done that in the past by writing extremely wordy blog posts for this very website. Now, I want to show how the theory is put into practice: as I go through Yui again, I’m going to make blog posts about it with excerpts from the script to show a bit of how the sausage is made, what we translators think about in our work, and what mindsets lead to fruitful and meaningful discussions of what makes a translation good or bad. I’m excited to take another look at my work from half a year ago; Lonesome even says I’ve leveled up since Senmomo.

What’s that? If I finished the translation in April, why am I only getting to the editing now? Haha, funny story, that. It turns out that when Japanese light novels are readily accessible to you, and for a mere 700 yen each, you tend to get a wee bit distracted. Even now, my LN backlog is far from empty, but real-life considerations are urging me to say fuck it, I’ll set aside some time each week to work on Yui.

My first Yui blog post will be this weekend. I’m excited to see what you all think of it! Until then, peace.