I ran the whole thing through ProWritingAid. It is always disturbing to see the kind of grammatical and word choices you are making. Boy, Penny uses way too many "and" clauses in this book. The omitted commas, I can deal with. It's part of her motor-mouth, wildly darting manner. And I seem to recall that I went out of my way to avoid ellipses in the first book...
After that, I went through manually to chase down italics. To take a second crack at deciding when to italicize at all. But also, much subtler; checking the italicization of punctuation.
The Chicago Manual latest version appears to be that the only time you italicize punctuation is when it belongs to the word. So the musical Oliver! the exclamation is italicized since that is part of the name of the show. But if you are writing, "I can't believe we got tickets to Pirates of Penzance!" the exclamation mark is not.
There is argument that punctuation can be adjusted so it doesn't collide; a quotation mark directly following an italicized word looks ugly. But Chicago has deprecated that and the general consensus is that you'll have to put up with it.
So my punctuation choice is fairly simple; a sentence that is in Japanese is italicized including the quotation marks. "Sumimasen!" I said. A sentence that includes some italicized words does not italicize.
It is, however, hard to see, so I had to manually go through the whole thing and select closing quotes to make sure they were correct.
So, the words. I am using a fairly fluid "colonization" approach. It also might be thought of as "signal to the reader." If a word hasn't been defined within the book and is likely to be unfamiliar to the reader, it is italicized until the reader has had a chance to get used to it. Preferably, by seeing it defined, or at least used in clear context.
This gets especially fluid later; when Penny is using her bits of fractured Japanese, I italicize based on how closely she gets to making a proper Japanese sentence. One or two words, like her frequent "Ganbatte!" don't get it (she's using the wrong case, for one thing). A full grammatical sentence like "Athena Fox desu," on the other hand, does.
This gets particularly peculiar with Aki's weaboo Japanese. In early chapters, her words are italicized to point out how much Penny has no idea what she is saying. Even the "-chan" gets italics when she's using it. Later, entire sentences are left without italics to make it clear that Aki, like Penny, is often not speaking proper Japanese.
(And then there's English loan-words in Japanese sentences. Early on, "Shiito beruto wo..." appears. That's "Seat belt," if you -- like Penny -- didn't get it. But late in the book a man says “Ho ho ho, now ai habu mashingu.” He is more-or-less speaking English -- which to him is quite foreign -- and Penny doesn't get this one either.
Connected to this; words that are generally known by English-speakers -- particularly place names -- with different orthography are given the familiar English-speaker orthography. So "ninja" is never italicized, and "Tokyo" is not "Tōkyō." And I'm being completely inconsistent with long vowels, weighing each for how much they look like they should be pronounced or how they look on the page. Uchū, for instance, also appears once as Uchuu. And there is the entire range from arigatou to ōkini to Susanoo.
(For that matter, I've used both "Dan-no-ura" and "Taira no Tokiko.")
And this is the sort of thing I'm chasing down now. Like checking to make sure Kusanagi is capitalized each time (whatever choice it is, it should be consistent) and that senpai isn't appearing as sempai in any place (a problem that would basically be impossible in Japanese.)
I am thinking about dropping even more bucks on Fiverrr for a gremlin-check. Because even for basic stuff like not forgetting periods, ProWritingAid makes some weird mistakes.
(One that it did several times for me this week; given a one-word sentence in dialog with exclamation mark, aka "Yes!" it would respond "You appear to be missing a comma here." What the hell is it thinking? What comma could possibly be wanted there?)
At least I've cobbled up a "Next time..." to put in my End Matter:
April in Paris…
The Impressionists at Musée d'Orsay, the cluttered bookstalls on the banks of the Seine, the pink magnolias blooming in the Tuileries — and an ancient conspiracy that may shake the elegant buildings down to their foundations.
In the night above the lights of the cafés The Fox hunts. She’ll find the clues and solve the puzzle before rival treasure hunters tear the city apart.
If only she wasn’t making it up as she goes along!
Sometimes a Fox : The fourth Athena Fox adventure
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