Back to having real-world locations to research! Yay! Though not, admittedly, a great deal of it this week.
I couldn’t really hope to guess where Nadeshiko is at on pages 3-5, but the building shown at the top of page 7 is Minobu Post Office, albeit rather fisheyed. On page 8, they’re presumably sitting somewhere by the Hagii River, but there’s no street view there, so it’s not too easy to pinpoint.
On page 17, Aoi mentions she’s heading for Takayama - sometimes called (as Rin does in the same panel) Hida-Takayama, to differentiate it from several other places that are also named Takayama. Nadeshiko’s heading for Hamanako, but since (spoiler alert) we’ll actually be seeing it later, I won’t link it now. Ditto for Rin and Izu.
I’ve previously posted where Aki and Aoi work, but I’m trying to remember… have we seen Rin’s workplace in the manga before? Not… not that I can find it in the real world, though - there’s a few bookshops in the area, but none of them really resemble this one. The manga does show her walking home again, so perhaps it’s somewhere near Kai-Tokiwa Station. Assuming it wasn’t simply invented out of whole cloth.
So, Yen Press has translated Aki and Nadeshiko’s おつかれ on page 16 to “Good stuff working.” “Good stuff to you too.”, and… like, is that even proper English? Some sort of weird Americanism? Or is there something odd about their おつかれ that I’m just not spotting?
Also, Saito’s request to omit パクチー from the toshikoshi pho on page 25 has been translated as “bok choi”. Bok choi is パクチョイ - パクチー is coriander/cilantro. Like, you’re missing the whole joke of how there’s people out there who simply cannot stand coriander.
Page 30, just to check my understanding of something: 悉平太郎 and 早太郎 are different names for the same dog, right? Yen Press (and I really gotta stop making comparisons with Yen Press) says they’re friends instead.
I wonder how much work it would be (and how much I would be paid for it), but you make it sound like it would be quite easy to meet their quality standard.
Sadly, no one seems to be looking for Japanese->French translators either)