Criticism

Context

The Hypnosis Mic manga is currently being fan translated by Slug Translation.

Content Hosting

When the HypMic manga was still publicly available, the scanlation group handling the project hosted each chapter on Tumblr. At the time, Tumblr had a limit of around ~10 images per post. This made reading and navigating chapters tedious, especially because a new reader would have future chapters spoiled for them when scrolling through the blog. Current chapters are hosted on a private, invite-only Discord and DropBox. This is discouraging for new readers trying to find a starting point.

Rosho

The character of Tsutsujimori Rosho makes jokes that others don’t seem to understand. This is because he uses double entendre in his act. A double entendre is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, of which one is typically obvious, whereas the other often conveys a message that would be too socially awkward, sexually suggestive, or offensive to state directly.

An example of Rosho’s double entendre is as follows.

「ウチのおばちゃんイビキだけはアイドルと同じ…　ウチのおばちゃんイビキだけはアイドルと同じ…」

On the surface, this reads as: “My aunt snores like an idol. My aunt snores like an idol.” This is a joke that doesn’t translate well in writing, but when given the context that Rosho is giving a spoken performance, the reader can infer that he’s putting emphasis on certain words to differentiate between the two phrases.

After giving the joke some more thought, it can be read as: “My aunt snoring is the same as being idle (lazy)” then “My aunt snores the same as an idol.” The emphasis here is put on the word アイドル, which has a different meaning (idol or idle) depending on the way it is spoken. A similar example is the word クラブ, which can mean club (for after school activities) or club (as in nightclub).

Slug is aware of this but has yet to correct their scanlation (as of 2022).

Character Name Romanization

The HypMic cast has been given official name romanizations.The Slug team romanizes some character names (Jyushi and Kuko in this example) differently for a reason I can’t pinpoint other than “it looks cool”.

Romanizing Jyushi’s name into “Jushi” degrades the meaning of the Kanji「十四」. 十 is read as “jyu”. When written with the character 四 (shi), the name becomes “Jyushi”, which is read as the number 14. The number is significant to his character because of his MC name, “14th Moon”. There’s no reason to erase the consonant “jyu” if it breaks down the meaning of the original Kanji.

All romanizations are available on the official HypMic website.

The Lack of Honorifics

This is a matter of personal preference. I prefer honorifics to remain in translations because they hold a bit of weight in terms of character dynamic. They don't quite flow when trying to translate them, so it's best to just leave them as is. Especially when it comes to the Buster Bros; reading "Brother Ichiro", "big bro", "bro" over and over again gets annoying when "Ichi-nii", "niisan", "niichan" was fine to begin with.

Miscellaneous Translation Discrepancies

「やれやれ、だいぶ気に人られてしまったみたいですね」

I personally would have read this as, “Goodness, I’m suddenly well-liked.” It seems a bit stiff, but Jyuto isn’t a very goofy guy so it’s a bit OOC for him to spout “Good lord, seems like I’m becoming quite the popular guy!”.

Disclaimer

The purpose of this site is not to compete with Slug Translation. They have every right to withhold their content from public viewing. I’m just a humble DH BAT fan that was annoyed with the secrecy of the content and displeased with the accuracy of their work, so I’m filling in the gaps for those that wish to read a more accessible version of Hypnosis Mic.