blin1{BARRET}
「チッ……!
すっかりかこまれてやがる」{NEW}
「オレひとりならともかく
このメンツじゃ……」
actually "mentsu/メンツ" usually just means "group" but it CAN mean "face" but i doubt thats what Barrett is talking about here.
i think hes either talking about his group as in barrett, aeris, etc. or hes talking about the group outside(shinra soldiers).
i believe hes talking about his group which would be along the lines of
"if it was just myself, i could get by, but with the members of this group, i wont be able to protect all of you"
I would like to see a dictionairy reference to this, as I've never heard of the term mentsu being used that way.
A word that sounds similar that would be used in such a context is 人数, but that is clearly not the case.
as for the other translations, i think its fine and it gets the point across. of course if u want a REALLY DIRECT translation that would be something else... like for the maid
There is no such thing as a "really direct" translation when dealing with two languages as different as Japanese and English, seeing as many of the concepts and terms don't have equals in the other language.
The fact of the matter is that you'll have to leave those parts to personal interpretation, or try your best to establish a similar term by playing around with words of similar meaning.
For examples, the translation you provide here:
“I'm a beautiful maid,
but I buy and sell
accessories on the side.”{NEW}
“You wont be ashamed wearing any of these anywhere…
only goods of the finest quality here.
So, how about it? would you like one?"
which lacks expression for several parts of the dialogue - In particular:
"あたしゃ", "だけどね", "してるのさ", and "ばっか", which in total makes it quite different from the what it would actually have said
in Japanese if it was meant to be taken as straight forward as the way you translate it here - In which case it would probably look like this:
あたし/私は美人のメイドだけど、ないしょくで、アクセサリーの売り買いもしてるよ。
どこに顔を出してもはずかしくない極上の品ばっかりだよ。どう?ひとつは?
Simply saying that in translation work, there is no such thing as direct translation when dealing completely different langauges, especially if what is being expressed is expressed with area-specific dialects and/or sociolects, and entail terms expressing culture-specific phenomenon(which the part you highlighted does).
Source:Im Japanese
Do you have any schooling in Japanese or linguistics, or spendt any prolonged period in Japan?
Do you have any experience with translation?
Source: I live in Japan, my wife is Japanese, and I have a BA in East Asian studies. Cheers.
Possibly, I'll look into it
In other news.... Gust is goin back to Gusto. Gusto is very very likely to be correct. For anyone not in the know, Gast Faremis is named after 2 restaurants / food places. Faremis comes from an anagram of Famires (Family Restaurant), and Gusto from
http://www.thefoodpursuit.com/cafe-restaurant-gusto-tokyo-japan/
Gast is a mistranslation.
To be fair though, the restaurants name is written with the katakana ガスと, which in romaji spells out "GASUTO".
So I can see how that error might happen - Still we can't know for sure whether the creators where going for a name based on the Katakana reading of ガスと, rather than the western reading of it.
I'm all for Gusto though. It's not like it's a big change from Gast.