Submarine 707 v4
OctonionicIn this volume, we don't quite get to the end of the Mu story, but a lot certainly happens. I think this volume has the highest count of destroyed or damaged submarines so far.
Captain Red, while being pretty stereotypical, gets a bit more limelight than his predecessor Wolf. An aspect that was particularly interesting to translate was his new title: 総統 (“soutou”). This word means something like “supreme ruler” and its primary use was to be a catch-all term for the titles of 20th century nationalist European leaders, who tended to adopt titles strongly tied to their particular history and culture. Instead of worrying over how to correctly convey the difference between Führer, Caudillo, Poglavnik, and so on, Japanese newspapers could call them all “soutou”.
The point is that, when Red uses this term, the intent to the Japanese audience was probably to convey that he was using a term evoking his own history: American. I read through a couple articles on early titles proposed for George Washington's office and tried to come up with something suitable, but it's just my guess. This is a curious case of effectively un-translating a “translation” for which an original probably never existed.
Volume 4