translation tricks. part 1 ~ from 'maid-sama'

reading manga in the original has been my dream for a long time. 'twas 'unaffordable' for me who knew only a few kanji to read 'fluently' (haha) and was too lazy to search them up in the dictionary every time. to be honest, this has not changed since those times, but now I am lucky to have manga where almost all the kanji have furigana... so my dream has finally come true

and I must say there is much more pleasure in doing so because of the widespread language tricks. the first time I noticed them was while watching Di Gi Charat, and since then I have been a huge fan of such tricks. this time I am fascinated by their use in KwMs, of course

'foolish couple'

a tag name Aoi gave to Misa and Usui consists of the word 'baka' meaning 'fools' and 'kappuru' which comes from English 'couple'. joining them together, he made this - 'bakappuru' which was never rendered in the translations (either in manga scanlations or in anime subtitles). this time I feel I must not complain or blame the translators because this is a really hard point, and I doubt any English equivalent can be found. therefore, it only increases the value of reading the original for me

'perverted tiger'

'twas Usui who called Igarashi a 'perverted big bro', but do not forget that his name - Tora - is written as 'tiger'. combining the words 'pervert' - 'hentai' - and another variant of 'tiger' - 'taiga-', Fujiwara-sensei makes a new alias for Igarashi - 'hentaiga-'. nice, Fujiwara-sensei!

this page is a 'readers request' from the manga volume, in other words - not published in LaLa. well, as far as I understand...? therefore, translators did not use it. however, if they did - I wonder what could they do? what could I do if I had to cope with it? probably nothing apart from the explanation I did in the previous paragraph

'a failure of a maid'
ダメイド　in Japanese - a combination of 'dame' - 'useless' - and 'meido' - 'maid'. nice, Fujiwara-sensei! ^.^

'Three Idiots Cafe'

no, the sign does not say this. it says 'Sun Vaca cafe'... but do not forget the peculiarities of the Japanese phonetic system. 'sun' would be pronounced as 'san', 'vaca' as 'baka'. what we get finally is 'sanbaka'. yeah, 'three idiots'