Alyssa Niioka | 新岡ありさ

Made 汁なしうどん (soupless udon) for my wife! And she loved it! Normally she makes all the Japanese food in our home, but I wanted to give it a try.

Whipping around just in time to see mochi retracting his demon claws back into his cage. My mom keeps telling me my house is like a circus. 🤡

My cats are a couple of chaos gremlins. They have a huge cage which they sleep in bc Nona can’t help screaming at me throughout the night if left to run loose. I put them to bed. I turn my back to talk to my wife. I feel a strange pain in my butt. It grows sharper. I come unglued and scream…

you can join to ask fellow translators questions if you’re unsure about something.

make sure you Google set phrases before you assume you know what they mean because you may be assuming incorrectly. I see that happen a lot too. Slow down, double check if you’re not sure. (I have made these same mistakes in the past, no one’s perfect!) And there are always loc discords out there

A lot of mistranslations I’ve seen is because the translator didn’t stop and slow down and read the text properly. Feels like an error caused by speeding through the work, which I can understand in this industry the pay isn’t always the best and sometimes people have packed schedules. That said…

Made chili dogs this morning with a homemade chili recipe! It’s been so fun learning how to cook and getting to taste home. There‘s so much American food you can’t get in Japan so I’m trying to learn to make it all from scratch. My wife loved them!

a purple and white candle with the words gone but not forgotten above them ALT: a purple and white candle with the words gone but not forgotten above them

Update to the Helen the huntsman spider story, we found she had a daughter maybe? A much smaller huntsman spider with her, which my wife named Jenny. This was probably a day or two after I first posted about Helen. Sadly Jenny was murdered in cold blood by my cat today. RIP Jenny.

Yeah ours have cornered many a spider before but none this big until now. We’ve had lots of huntsman spiders in the house. I think bc the house next to us is an Akiya and they come from there.

problem is I don’t think we could catch her if we wanted. Those spiders are speed demons. Shocked me.

I expect it to stay out of sight bc I screamed bloody murder the first time I saw it. Helen is as big as my damn hand. She’s also missing a leg because my cat caught her on the floor. She’s lucky to have escaped with her life.

We have one of those enormous Japanese huntsman spiders downstairs and my wife, being the softhearted person she is, can’t bring herself to get rid of it and has convinced me that it eats all the nastier bugs I hate so we should keep it. Thus, I have named it Helen and told it that, as roommates…

Also her hot wings were really good.

I come from an abusive home, so having a partner who cares and goes out of their way to make me happy means the world to me. I probably won’t ever shut up about her. She’s made me a better person, and she makes every day enjoyable.

I know I probably talk about my wife to an annoying degree, but I just love her so much. I slept like crap the other day and so she ran to the store, bought plain chicken legs, garlic marinade and spicy chili pepper flakes to try to concoct homemade hot wings for me bc she knows I love them. 😭💕

My mom always talks about how quiet and lazy her cats are. Meanwhile mine stampede through the house, circle me like piranhas, and wail like a banshee. Idk why I got the crazy ones. 🤷‍♀️

Yay! My translation baby has been announced! I absolutely love this series and can’t wait for everyone to read it. 🥰

For manga and light novels, rates are generally determined by the publishers, so negotiation is difficult
For translators, $5/page for manga and $10/page for light novels are the lower end of market rate, but rates vary from $1-$9/page or $1000-$1500/vol (manga) and $6-$15/page (LNs)

As much as I love translating adult manga, if you're a mangaka and you have a single frame with 30 SFX all of which are various versions of TREMBLE, THRUST, SMACK, and SQUELCH... Maybe it's time you reined it in a little. 🫠 Also RIP in advance to the letterer.

New License: Trapped in a Dating Sim: Otome Games Are Tough For Us, Too! (Audiobook). Narrated by Jennifer Sun Bell and Yung-I Chang. ©Mishima Yomu/Tōi Moge / MICRO MAGAZINE. PRE-ORDERS SOON on sevenseasaudiobooks.com. Available from Seven Seas Entertainment August 2025.

Brand-new license announcement! TRAPPED IN A DATING SIM: OTOME GAMES ARE TOUGH FOR US, TOO! (AUDIOBOOK) by Yomu Mishima, Moge Tōi, and Monda, narrated by Jennifer Sun Bell and Yung-I Chang. An AU spin-off for the hit isekai franchise with an anime!

sevenseasentertainment.com/2025/07/23/s...

Are you a J-E interpreter? In the Toronto area?? With availability this fall for some artsy work??? Please DM me or email: jocelyne.allen at gmail! I maybe have a job for you (that pays money, of course)!!

This is part of why I really love living in Chiba btw, there's a lot of foreigners here and I feel like the Japanese here are way more open minded and welcoming of non-Japanese compared to what I experienced when I lived in Yamagata. 😅

Got to chat with the hygienist at the dentist and she is the absolute sweetheart I've talked about before on here. She was telling me, "Gosh I think it's so cool you can speak Japanese so well. I've always wanted to learn English, but it's just so hard!!" Her best friend is married to a Canadian.

Omg I’m so sorry that must be so miserable to have to wait even longer. My AC broke right as summer started and I barely managed to call someone and fix it before it got really hot out. But I’ve had to live summers without before and it’s absolute hell. 😭

TRAPPED IN A DATING SIM: THE WORLD OF OTOME GAMES IS TOUGH FOR MOBS (AUDIOBOOK) Vol. 4

The fan-favorite comedy jaunt that inspired the manga (also from Seven Seas) and anime—narrated by Yung-I Chang! #SevenSeasSiren

Out today on digital platforms!
sevenseasentertainment.com/audio_books/...

Translating Phatic Expressions Language is complicated, yet somehow, we manage to express infinite meanings with the limited words and sounds in our languages. But how do you translate a line of dialogue when the words the chara…

I have a whole explanation about how to translate these types of phrases!

katrina-l-translation.online/2023/04/18/t...

Happiness in life is the little things. Like hearing my cat Nona downstairs screaming at my wife as she cooks, and my wife meow-screaming back at her lol 😂

LRT it actually works being a bad joke because pan-da is literally the lamest uninspired pun you can make in Japanese, and it’s sooo old. The first time I made it my wife rolled her eyes and told me, “That’s so cringe. Surely you can do better than that. At least try with your dad jokes.” 🫠

This is a good example of the subjective nature of what a good localization means.

People who are interested in learning about Japanese culture and language will likely gravitate towards practices like "translator's notes" which are fairly prevalent in fansubs but are rare in official subtitles.

don't let up just because they admitted something they could've (and let's be real probably *did*) noticed with a quick glance at *any* language on that episode lol

they're not putting out enough shit that an army of QCers scanning over every single language would be infeasible or even difficult