About

About me:

Not much to say here, just a normal guy from Canada. Japanese productions have had me entranced ever since I was just a child, my first real anime being the localized Inuyasha. It was something really unique to me at the time, as I had never experienced any show with its kind of flow before, and I was captured, tuning in every week to see what would happen next. The opening music was what hooked and reeled me in though, otherwise I’d never have even noticed the show. There was just something different about Japanese music that I loved.

Later on, when I was 15, I started to self-teach myself Japanese, and found it to be a whole new world of fun. It was unfathomable to me that I was actually learning it! I couldn’t believe myself when I was finally able to read hiragana, and deciphering my first sentence outside of a lesson felt like bliss. I’ve never taken any formal lessons in Japanese, and my feedback received has been very lacking, so don’t think of me as some sort of professional.

About this site:

Having taken plenty from the touhou community, I felt I should give back some way. The idea to translate songs came to me when looking up English lyrics to a song one day only to find there wasn’t anything! It blew my mind that in this vast world, there are still so many things left undone. It would also prove to be great practice to my Japanese, helping out my vocabulary and challenging me with obscure sentence structures.

I originally started uploading to my youtube channel, until I decided it’d be in my best interest to make a wordpress, for more easy access to translations, as well as giving me freedom to translate anime songs that I take interest in, instead of making a subtitled video that would be eventually taken down.

If you’re a video-maker for youtube, and want to use any translations, go right ahead, just give me credit and send a link on back here! Your video might even get featured on the lyrics page.

About my translations:

I figured I should say this here, but I’m very picky about my translations. They say there are different ways to interpret a song, and oftentimes I’ll end up going back to a recent post and modifying it slightly after either realizing something, or finding a way to word it better. Some lines tend to sound real strange if you slap it straight into English, so I also make minimal edits to make the lines “flow” a little better. Originally, I began as a heavily conservative translator, taking things almost word for word by the books, but later on, I started taking a (slightly) more liberal approach, finding that it worked much nicer.

On a related note, I also tend to try to somewhat strike a balance between the Japanese and English lines. By that I mean length. I try to fix this by adding in a few words which don’t necessarily make any difference. One example of this length difference is the line “貴方のために此処にいるわ” from Dolls. It’d be really unfitting in my opinion to translate that as  simply “I’m here for you,” when the Japanese says it in 13 syllables. Of course, I’m not going to add excessive words, especially in a case like that example where there’s such a massive discrepancy, or I’d be straying way too far from keeping true to original meanings.

My goals are to help as many people as I can to find the translations they desire, as well as to spread the music I love. I hope you enjoy the ride together with me on this adventure through these uncharted seas.