Clif and Simolea

In Chapter 7, Section IV, Clif has this to say to Martin and Leora: "Gosh, it's fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a low game of poker -- in which Father deftly removed the sum of 6 simolea, point ten, from the foregathered bums and yahoos."

Now imagine you need to translate Clif's nonsense into another language. Actually, if it were pure nonsense it would be easier, since nonsense is nonsense. But, in the case of Clif, if one parses carefully, there is always sense buried amongst the non.

To get this into Japanese the translator had to first figure out what Clif was trying to say, and then convey that message, perhaps surrounded by culture appropriate nonsense. 

How'd he do, in this case? Actually pretty well, but in the passage above Father, which I think is clearly a reference to Clif himself, comes out as the priest, and the tenth of a simoleon comes out as a game called point ten. The word simolea itself comes out as wild boar, but one has the sense that the translator really did understand this to be money, and that was the nonsense term chosen to represent it. 

Still, in my research it's not clear that wild boar ever had anything to do with money in Japanese, whereas simoleon is, of course, a well established term in English. So, in an effort to not lose the underlying meaning, I went with the usual word for dollar and let other bits of nonsense remain. I can only hope Red would approve.