Puns – whether you find them groan-inducing or great, they can pop up basically anywhere and you can break the rules of translation with them. That’s why I love them.

I love pun write-ups and by the look of the metrics I get, you guys love puns too. There’s no right or wrong way to approach them, like with any translation, but it gets a little easier if you have tell-tale signs to point the way.

Sidenote: Way back when, I used to have a humour blog called LOL Yeah, Shinichi! (a variant of the F*** Yeah, [insert subject here]! blogs that were popular in the past). It’s since been shut down because running 3 Tumblr blogs is a damn chore, but in retrospect, it was trying too hard to capitalise on virality as traffic.

Sources of Puns

Is it just one character that spouts puns? Or does the entire series have a theme in its translation that might also be present in its puns?

For example, in the case of anime and manga, obviously comedy series have them and Osakan characters have a tendency to spout puns because it’s a stereotype that comedians come from that area.

Understanding Context

Do characters play off each other to create overarching “pun-chains”? Is there something you need to know about this character to understand this pun?

If “no man is an island”, then so too are puns. They don’t typically come in isolation – you need to have context to figure out why this character has said this thing. In the case of Osakan characters, they typically come in pairs because you have the straight man (tsukkomi) and the funny man (boke). On the flip side, rakugo, as a comedic form of storytelling, is precisely so difficult because there is no one to play off during a performance – the storyteller embodies every character.

Putting Puns in Practice

With those in mind, let’s take a look at a pun write-up I did for the Hypnosis Mic server. This is something said in chapter 7, first half, of Side DH & BAT+:

よっしゃー！今日も舌好調や！

If you don’t have time, here’s the frame in question (top right bubble):

It’s a bit small, but notice how the 舌 has a dot on its right? That’s for emphasis, like italics in English. よっしゃー！is fine to translate (fairly) literally, so let’s focus on this dot.

The reading given says zekkouchou (ぜっこうちょう), so you might find out 絶好調 (zekkouchou, note the different first character) means something like “in perfect form” or “going swimmingly”. 舌, the character being emphasised, is “tongue” – it’s usually read shita by itself, but if you find out how to read it, you’ll find it can also be read zetsu in combination (e.g. 毒舌 dokuzetsu, meaning “abusive language”). Zetsu + kou = zekkou, because in Japanese, a tsu in combination with another syllable becomes part of the next syllable (for the fancy term, it’s known as a “geminate consonant” in linguistics).

At this point in the story, Sasara (the character who’s providing this dialogue…and if you’re wondering why I mentioned it earlier, yes, he’s a manzai comedian from Osaka…) has just spouted a bunch of puns and, this being a Hypnosis Mic series, it was to “warm up” for a rap battle. So to translate this, you would need to reverse-engineer the process to produce an English equivalent which conveys the same ideas – the “tongue”, the fact a pun exists in this spot and the “warming up” parts. With everything I’ve explained, “Yeah! I’m ready to give a tongue-lashing!” works well here.

Now, keep in mind – and this is something anime and manga fans forget a lot! – there is no such thing as a “single best translation”. So even if you followed my explanation and came to a different conclusion with the same clues, you may very well still have a legitimate translation, even if you translated by depending more on the context and/or substituted out the “tongue” pun.

Of course, each pun may well require its own approach depending on the level of research required or the context you’re missing out on, but this kind of wordplay is the easiest to explain in a blog post format…Figuring out how the pieces fit together is one of the joys and pains of translation, really.

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So that’s just an insight into how I make puns work for me, as opposed to the other way around. Over to you now – what’s your favourite pun you encountered in an anime or manga?