About Me and Q&A

Hi, I go by the translation name yuNS and welcome to this blog! I’m currently an international college student in upstate New York, near Albany. I started translating in March 2016 as a hobby under skythewood translations, and my first series was ‘Consulting with this Masked Devil!’ spin-off of KonoSuba (Gifting). Although I’m quite experienced now, feel free to leave any advice or criticism!

My email is: re.yun.NS@gmail.com

Feel free to ask me anything in the comments!

Q: Why yuNS?
A: I originally intended to go under the translation name NS, as those are the initials of my name, but I figured I needed to change it since it was impossible to pronounce. The ‘y’ portion of my name stands for ‘why’, and is meant to highlight the strangeness of the rest of the TL name. The ‘u’ portion of my name stands for ‘you’, is meant to characterize the ‘NS’ portion of the name as human. It also happens to spell ‘yuNS’ which sounds nice and happens to match up to…

Q:Best girl?
A: Yunyun. What should I say? Cute is justice!? Her presence in the strange world of KonoSuba is appreciated, and her interactions with rest of the cast are simply hilarious and fairly engaging. Iris, Eris, Megumin are all close seconds I guess… to be honest, the KonoSuba cast is really colorful~ Its hard to not like anyone.

Q:Best guy?
A: Vanir. He’s technically genderless(, but by common sense, he’s male). He used to be second to our main character Kazuma, but after reading and translating ‘Consulting with this Masked Devil’, I can’t help but feel that he’s a fantastically dynamic and exciting character.

Q: Best volume? (KonoSuba)
A: Main Series, Volume 6, but I daresay that Akatsuki Natsume (the author of KonoSuba) has been on a roll ever since volume 5. The growth in her writing has been considerable since her starting days, and she has imminently mastered how to craft a narrative. To be honest, I could only hope that I could convey the lighthearted depth of her writing.

Q: Best chapter?
A: Consulting with this Masked Devil, chapter 5 (final), ‘Today as a Lich’. The titles for all the volume chapters are actually ambiguous, and should be formally translated to ‘Today, I became a Lich’. Anyway, I won’t spoil it for anyone, do read it if you are an avid fan of KonoSuba! Open your eyes to the best guy Vanir!

Q: Favorite LN author(s)?
A: This would be the time to say Akatsuki Natsume, but to be honest, I’ve recently enjoyed Natsuki Mamiya’s ‘Gekkou'(mystery) oneshot, and Takehaya’s ‘Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!?'(comedy/romance) series. Both series have been translated, so do give them a try. In particular, I think that ‘Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!?”s anime production quality and consistency is what all anime studios should aspire to achieve. Silver Link is fairly underrated…
Note: Rokujouma no Shinryakusha does eventually devolve in a kinda harem-like tease relationship status quo, but the character interactions are still fairly enjoyable. I do think volume 7.5/8.5/10 bring a pretty well-planned twist.

Q: Favorite LN artist?
A: There’s no doubt that my favorite LN artist is none other than white-haired girl fetishist and KonoSuba’s LN artist Mishima Kurone. Her(?) art has been an inspiration a fair bit as well.
Fun fact: Her site and various books have ‘shirokami’ (white hair) in the name.

Q: Can you tell me how much time did it take you to master Japanese to this level? (by Zaidk, 10/19/2016)
A: It’s hard to say, but I suppose it would be around 2-3 months of studying 1-2 hours a day, and a fairly extensive background of watching anime. That’s about how much experience I had when I first started translating publicly (Consulting with this Masked Devil).

My action plan for learning Japanese had been:
1. Memorize all the hiragana and katakana; to the point where I could draw both tables through memory.
– I did this at home; Learn the columns one by one, and at the end of learning each column (a-i-u-e-o), I found a blank piece of paper, and wrote them all out in order. Rinse and repeat until I was done with all of them.

2. Learn as much basic vocabulary as possible, such as times of day, common objects, directional statements.
– During a summer vacation, I attended an 2-week introductory-level course at a language school in Japan for two weeks. Being forced to use a language is extremely helpful for learning, as it forced me to synthesize the language both ways to get my meaning across to the teacher. This wasn’t a crucial component however, it just accelerated my learning of basic vocabulary by comparison, as I was forced to apply them in order to converse with my teacher.
– After that, I learned Japanese through a mostly Japanese-only textbook. I tried to read what I could out loud, as sometimes a phrase/sentence isn’t intuitive until you hear it in it’s entirety. If I really couldn’t understand some part of a sentence, I used google translate

3. Go through an entire fairly simple novel/manga/anime of choice in Japanese, and learn all the vocabulary used.
– I did this using KonoSuba Volume 8. Using google translate for everything I didn’t understand. It’s also nice that Sky was translating Vol 8 when I was doing this, as I could go through a chapter and check myself the week after. Once I got through it, my reading pace went up by a lot, and I only ever needed to use a dictionary or translator once or twice a page by the time I got Volume 9 of KonoSuba (After I translated ‘Consulting with this Masked Devil’).

In all honesty, once I learned all the hiragana and katakana, a lot of the text that I was reading came together naturally, since a lot of the dialogue in anime is similar to what you might see in a novel. Also, for most people at that stage, kanji becomes a difficult hurdle, but given that Chinese is my second language (with Japanese being my third), I had essentially learned a lot of the common kanji already.