Chapter 525
(Twitter Omake)
(Twitter Omake)
Disclaimer
I am a casual using hacks and amateur knowledge to translate.
There's at least one line here I'm not 100% sure on. If it sounds weird / doesn't flow, that's on me. Sorry!
Please refer to Hetascanlation's work (when they get there) as the definitive translation.
Translation Notes
General:
Fonts change depending on who is speaking and what tone or volume they're using. It looks eclectic and random, but I tried to replicate this with similar font choices.
Page 1+:
• Reminder that China ends most of his sentences with ある (aru) or よろし (yoroshi), accented Japanese and default polite language respectively. Some of his word choices are also the archaic form.
• Additionally, I think I forgot to mention this last time, but China uses the archaic pronoun 我 (wa/ware). In media it's often translated in a haughty, ancient-sounding way like "oneself."
• I do not know Chinese!!! If any of my pinyin romanizations are wrong, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.
Page 3:
• Yes, China does call Japan a child here. He uses the word 少子 (shoushi / little child, boy between 4-16 years old, disciple), which as expected, is a bit archaic.
• Horlicks is a British sweet malted milk hot drink invented in 1873, often drank near bedtime thanks to a successful marketing campaign with a fictitious condition called "night starvation" that Horlicks was supposed to relieve/cure.
Page 5:
• District 44's recent "big change" is almost surely referring to Brexit... or whatever form it would've taken in this alt universe.
Pages 6-7:
• The UN Security Council was founded originally in 1945, when Russia was known as the Soviet Union. There was indeed a debate about whether the Russian Federation, which succeeded the Soviet Union, should inherit the Soviet Union's permanent member seat on the council. There's no formal mechanism by which a permanent seat is to be passed on to a successor state, as that would mean the UN would need to predict the dissolution of any of its permanent members - and none of them are particularly interested in signing treaties predicting their own political demise.
• So, when it came to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was sort of a "no choice" (fait accompli) scenario of Russia being the "main" legal successor of the Soviet Union, at the consent of 11 of the 15 post-Soviet states (Georgia was an observer, and the three Baltic states refused to attend as they were/are of the opinion that their forceful inclusion into the USSR was illegal and they should not be considered successor states).
• Thus was political history written, but the debate among legal historians immediately flared up - and their consensus seems to be that in accordance with the UN General Assembly, the rights of a member state to membership ceases to exist "with its extinction as a legal person internationally recognised as such." So, the Soviet Union seat in the UN should have been abolished and Russia made to apply for a new one, like its fellow post-Soviet states... buuuut, they did not, and the "no choice" scenario did what it does. The UN accepted the Russian Federation's claim of continuity, and politics continued from there. Such is history vs policy!
Page 9:
• **CORRECTION FROM THE ORIGINAL NOTES** The hanzi used here is 哦耶 (ó yé / oh yeah), which at the time of translation I thought perhaps could have been the origin of China's usual "aiyaa," but that's actually 哎呀 (āiyā), an interjection often of mild frustration/annoyance.
Page 10:
• China narrows down the criminal to America! Remember how two chapters ago I mentioned in my notes how irl America owes the UN about $1.1 billion? Yeah, about that...........