Juriiiiii, why….
Alrighty, so Juri was his own little bundle of troubles. The text in general wasn’t anything too complicated, however Juri speaks with a sort-of accent that needs some explaining. In Juri’s profile, he is described using the term 江戸っ子 (edokko). At its base, this translates as ‘a true Tokyoite’ or ‘Edoite’, so someone who completely embodies the Tokyo/Edo demeanor. But… what exactly does this mean for us non-Japanese people? We don’t have the cultural context needed to fully understand this term as it applies to Juri. This is why in his profile, I have not described him using the direct translation of this term. A deeper analysis of the term reveals that, when someone is called an edokko, they are believed to embody certain traits, primarily ones that are inherently different from the native Japanese population. These people are assertive, straightforward, and very cheerful. The assertiveness and straightforwardness are definitely terms that I could see as being against the ‘norm’ of Japanese culture. So I’ve chosen those descriptors for Juri’s profile.
Of course, this isn’t all! Juri does speak with an accent, but given the cultural context of what edokko means, I’ve attempted to translate him using speech patterns that are more modern, incorporating words like ‘crazy’ and ‘you guys’ in an attempt to get that across. Honestly though, Juri doesn’t read all that different in English, but the changes in the Japanese that reflect this edokko personality threw me a couple times. Aside from using different grammatical endings, he also uses the term おめさん (omesan) when referring to our protagonist. This is approximately the dialectic equivalent of あなた (anata), which means ‘you’, so I’ve translated it that way. Another example is his use of おめぇら (omeera) which is a slight variation of おまえら (omaera), translated to ‘you’ (plural), so he uses this when talking about his brothers. I’ve also gone back to his Memory Pieces and adjusted his speech to match.
SPEAKING OF BROTHERS! We don’t get all the names for Juri’s six younger brothers, but we do get three of them: 苺 (ichigo), みぞれ (mizore), and 檸檬 (remon). If you’re at all familiar with Japanese, you likely recognize ichigo as meaning ‘strawberry’. But this isn’t even a clever play on the term like Kurosaki Ichigo in Bleach (don’t judge me, I’ve been binge watching it to get hyped for the new season). Ichigo in Bleach writes his name 一護 which still reads ‘ichigo’ but the kanji used mean ‘one’ and ‘protect’, so there’s more meaning to his name. But not Juri’s brother. 苺 is literally the fruit. So his name is literally Strawberry. Mizore’s name is the word that refers to shaved ice topped with honey. It’s not a play on the term, it is literally ‘shaved ice topped with honey.’ And finally we have little Lemon. There is no other way to read his kanji, it’s just straight-up ‘lemon’. So… that’s what he gets. You may have noticed the theme here that all of Juri’s brothers are named for toppings that typically go with shaved ice, so I can only imagine what names his other brothers have…
And finally (wow this is a long translator’s note) I wanted to mention the word 甘える (amaeru) which comes up in Juri’s MOON route story. Juri is talking to the protagonist about how he wants her to treat him amaeru. The word can be translated a couple different ways, but honestly it was hard for me to really get it into a concise form. Literally it can be translated as ‘treat like a spoiled child’ or ‘depend on’ but those didn’t sound quite right. From the context I could tell that Juri was wanting the protagonist to take care of him, and for her to be someone that he could lean on for support because he’s tired of always being the strong one given that he’s the eldest (mood). So it’s not quite that he wants to be treated like a child, but that he wants to be allowed to be weak at times. Rather than going for the dictionary terms, which didn’t quite fit with what I interpreted Juri to mean, I used the term ‘dote/doting’ instead to try and get that interpreted meaning across, so I hope that worked.