2 Professional BL Manga Editors Answer YOUR Pressing Questions (Bonus Q&A from Citrus Con)

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I was already living in Japan and working as an English teacher, but my true dream was always to work in the manga industry. When I decided it was time to leave teaching, I saw Renta!’s job listing and thought it might be right up my alley. I was open to working on just about any type of content, but when I saw that Renta! specialized in “women-oriented” manga including BL, I was like “aw, hell yea.” I had no prior professional editing experience, but my majors in college were art and Japanese, so I was basically a Super Weeb — and my passion for manga was definitely a plus when applying for the job.

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Admittedly, as someone in a leadership position it would be considered パワハラ (power harassments, or using your work status to lord over those who work under you) if I did too much of this lol

However, I think we have a good camaraderie in-house so we’re often joking around

 (much to the dismay of the departments around us)

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Hmm how about top 5 we’ve discovered in the past year? Regardless of whether we found them through Renta! or not!

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I think the ever-expanding Verses within BL is an ongoing challenge to translate, simply because they’re so new. For something as long-standing and established as Omegaverse, we’re finally at a point where we’ve more or less standardized the terms (“heat,” “rut,” “fated pair,” etc.) we’d prefer to use — just to have consistency across our translations. But, it wasn’t always that way — back when the concept was pretty new, both our freelancers and in-house staff were struggling to find their footing in a constantly growing world of “α&β.” Our official Omegaverse Style Guide was completed just about a year and a half ago, but in the years we spent solidifying our rules for Omegaverse, Sub/Domverse emerged, bringing with it a whole new set of jargon — so we kind of had to play it by ear, using our BL experience as best we could. Most recently, as Cakeverse has become more popular in BL, we’ve acquired the licenses to a few series with the trope, and have been tasked with making a world where people are split into “cakes” and “forks” (with the the former smelling and tasting irresistible to the latter) sound convincing — but also as fantastical and slightly vore-y as it was originally intended. Cakeverse itself is undeniably a bit ridiculous (in a good way!), after all. Screw your gender roles, people are cake now

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Slang is tricky in general, but I feel like dirty talk especially deserves its own category in “wtf am I reading and how can I convey it in English in a way that still sounds ‘right’??”

Sometimes a phrase will have a pretty close approximation in English that seems like it’ll work fine in a scene, which saves us time (I’ll never forget the first time I saw 喉マ〇, or nodo-man — lit. “throat pussy” — used in a BL, and knew it was my chance to slip a “thrussy” in. The Straight Cop’s… Euphoric Undercover Investigation, Ch. 1, page 14, to be exact [Ames’ note: why is this the first time I’m hearing about this…?]), but other times it’s not so simple. You have to keep in mind the personality, age, etc. of the character speaking, their feelings in that moment (context is everything!) and, sometimes, just whether the author actually meant for the dialogue to sound ridiculous no matter what language it’s presented in (looking at you, Harada-sensei…)

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On one of our team member’s first day on the job, a discussion about our site’s regulations regarding genitalia censorship (this was in the days before Uncensored BL became available on Renta!) was taking place, and one of our colleagues from Sales came over to Takochan’s desk and had him pull up an image of a graphic (but perhaps not too graphic…) 2-D dong on his huge monitor for everyone within a 10 meter radius to see clearly so that they could get his opinion on whether it passed our litmus check of peen visibility. The Sales team member seemed embarrassed having our newbie (who was seated right next to Takochan) see such a thing on their very first day and apologized, but the rest of us on the Localization team were like, “Well, they’ll be seeing this sorta stuff on a daily basis from here on, so better to get ’em used to it now, right? lol”

We’re pretty upfront with prospective new employees about the type of content we work on during the interview process, but those first few weeks of gauging their reactions to actually doing the job are crucial. Thankfully, nobody’s run screaming from our office! Yet…

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There’s been a meeting or two where I’ve had to say “Mpreg” and explain the concept in Japanese to our CEO and other members of the Japanese side of staff while pitching a BLog post or brainstorming special articles for the site (yes, the topic has come up more than once). Basically any time we have to share our personal preferences for “work” purposes and in the process out ourselves as huge perverts to the rest of the people working with us (that is, the ones who didn’t already know)

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Hard (): In a recent chapter of Kisara’s What Happens When a Handsome Gangster Starts Keeping a Straight Man on a Short Leash, there’s a scene where the characters are playing a game of baseball, complete with play-by-play commentary and a character parodying an IRL baseball icon in the Japanese league. When working in localization for a medium as diverse and creative as manga, having to do research about various topics you’re personally unfamiliar with to make sure your translation is accurate just comes with the territory… but for someone like me, who has very little experience either playing or watching sports of any kind, it felt like I was writing a thesis with how many tabs of baseball websites and diagrams I had to pull up for reference in order to write a convincing scene — on a tight deadline, too! It was definitely a Struggle, but I think I managed to put something together that might be passable to the average baseball fan… and understandable to the general manga fan population as well.

Fun: Every chapter of Yuzuhi’s Sugar Spot. Wasabi Ochazuke is a whacky and hilarious author in general, so trying to translate their works to be equally as funny and unhinged in English is always an exciting challenge. In this series in particular, there were lots of terms and phrases that have possibly never been said in English, such as “male womb,” so translating them in a way that sounded natural but also just as “??” as the author originally intended it was a fun process (yes, the word “mangina” came up in discussion but was ultimately scrapped). Also, since the main characters are streamers, I got to use my terminally online YouTuber/Twitch streamer brainrot-level knowledge of how people in these spaces interact with each other (streamer→audience, audience→streamer, streamer→streamer, etc.) in English. I’m pretty proud of the final product!

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According to Dictionary.com, “In casual usage, ope is an interjection used to express surprise or to alert someone, as in Ope, didn’t mean to bump into you! The word ope is considered a Midwestern slang term that’s closely related to oops or whoops.”

In my personal experience though, you can use it whenever you or someone around you experience any sort of minor inconvenience (similar to how “Oof!” is used among memers) — which makes it an attractive option when translating various situations in manga. However, we have to keep in mind that not everyone is well-acquainted with “Ope,” and thus we strictly reserve its use for our work chat whenever something goes wrong.

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Here’s a couple you can read in English on Renta! to get you started:

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