I’ve been very busy! I managed to complete my October drawing challenge, and transitioned right into NaNoWriMo 
. I actually have been getting all of my reading/translating done, though I haven’t had the time to update this thread.
I translated three shows over the past few weeks. The first was from October 14. There was a contest of sorts where three women who were competing in TJPW’s “夢プロレス－dream on the ring－” project had exhibition matches, and fans were asked to tweet out which of the candidates had moved them the most during their match. I ended up getting distracted during the show trying to translate the twitter instructions for my followers, haha, though I’m unsure if my translation did anything to really help.
The voting did end up coming sort of down to the wire (the top two candidates ended up tying), but of course with this being pro wrestling, well, you never know if the result was worked or if that was actually how the numbers shook out…
The next show was on October 21, and it was Arisu Endo’s hometown show! She’s still in the rookie class, so she ended up being unable to get the win even in her hometown (Japanese wrestling frequently likes to give the hometown hero a big victory to send the crowd home happy), but she did look great in the special gown she had made for her entrance:
TJPW had a show a few days later, on the 24th, which was a special show for people who were Wrestle Universe subscribers. I didn’t have a transcript for this one (and there were no backstage comments), so it was really more listening practice than reading practice . I relied on an English recap of the show written by another fan to figure out what was going on, though I caught lots of bits and pieces on my own.
I didn’t do any translation for this, but the photos from it are extremely good because none of the matches were conventional, so I can’t resist sharing them.
One of the matches was Miu Watanabe vs Yuka Sakazaki (both of them hold the top two singles titles in the company right now), except instead of wrestling, it was basically a cooking contest. They did a series of three minigames, and the winner of each game got to pick better ingredients, and then they both went backstage and cooked a meal with those ingredients, and the referee tried both of the dishes right before the main event and picked the winner based on which he liked better.
One of the minigames was a drawing contest:
Here are the two drawings. Miu's art is rather infamous, so I was looking forward to what she did here, and she did not disappoint (hers is the second photo):
Here are the finished dishes. Yuka's (pictured first) was the winner, despite the fact that when she carried it out, she accidentally dropped the tomatoes on the floor and then put them back on the plate like nothing had happened...
I did actually get to practice a little reading, because they wrote the names of the ingredients on two sheets of paper, which the wrestlers got to choose between after each minigame.
After that, they did a “人狼ゲーム4WAYマッチ” (Werewolf Game 4-Way Match) which was… exactly what it says on the tin! The wrestlers all got assigned a role (three were citizens and one was the werewolf), and if the citizens pinned the werewolf, they won, but if two of the citizens got pinned, the werewolf won. Naturally, the match featured a lot of arguing, lying, and betrayal.
There was plenty of other nonsense, but this post is getting long enough as it is, haha.
TJPW’s last show was on October 29. This one honestly didn’t have as much work for me, the translator, but naturally that doesn’t correlate in the slightest to the popularity of the translation posts.
My tweet with the translation for that show was the first time a stranger ever produced a meme based on something I’d translated (it’s a joke referencing another wrestler, so it may be less funny to non-fans haha).
My friends said that this means I’ve made it. I guess it definitely did give a publicity boost to my account. It’s funny to see a quick joke post someone slapped together in minutes get more likes than the translation I spent hours working on, but such is life, I guess .
I gotta say, I do hope twitter doesn’t go under, because I don’t know what the global wrestling fandom would do without it. It’s nice to have a place where Japanese-speaking and English-speaking fans and wrestlers can all interact and share their love for this weird artform all over the world.
So far, November is looking a little quieter for me, as far as the translation workload goes. Which, thank goodness. I actually have been reading a little bit more of volume 3 of 大海原と大海原, since I am currently caught up on TJPW! But that won’t last very long, haha.