Saotome Senshu, Hitakakusu - Vol. 1 Ch. 7 - Saotome-Senshu, Turnabout

[MangaDex]

 

[lly]

I LIKE YOUUUUUU

Yeah, he definitively meant I love boxing

 

[Glomoro]

To be fair, Japanese allows for you to say things in ways that rely on other people needing to understand it from context rather than what you specifically said. If Saotome should have already known by now that he was talking about her, a literal translation of what he said there could have been as stupid sounding as "I like." No "you," necessary if you feel like they should already understand the subject. Doesn't really work in English, but this would be how you could easily do a joke where the coach is filling in the blank for him and deflecting the attention of the principal and mayor.

I don't know what it said in the raws, but this seems like a fairly likely scenario here. This sort of world play with "I like" is such a common occurrence in manga and anime that it's probably the #1 cause of jokes we can't really translate very well and/or misunderstandings between the characters. Just have them both working under different assumptions of what the correct subject is from how they perceived the context, and boom you get to have a chapter or even an entire arc about one of them acting awkward toward the other.

 

[Wilhelm_Stenvall]

@Glomoro Japanese, the language of confusions and unneccesarities.

 

[TanithG]

Damn, Saotome vibe checked the fuck out of Erika

 

[9manny99]

The boxer and her manlet.

 

[dementati]

To be fair, Japanese allows for you to say things in ways that rely on other people needing to understand it from context rather than what you specifically said. If Saotome should have already known by now that he was talking about her, a literal translation of what he said there could have been as stupid sounding as "I like." No "you," necessary if you feel like they should already understand the subject. Doesn't really work in English, but this would be how you could easily do a joke where the coach is filling in the blank for him and deflecting the attention of the principal and mayor.

I don't know what it said in the raws, but this seems like a fairly likely scenario here. This sort of world play with "I like" is such a common occurrence in manga and anime that it's probably the #1 cause of jokes we can't really translate very well and/or misunderstandings between the characters. Just have them both working under different assumptions of what the correct subject is from how they perceived the context, and boom you get to have a chapter or even an entire arc about one of them acting awkward toward the other.

What it definitely said in the raws, because it's the only thing that makes sense, is that he said "sukiiiiii", which by itself just means "to like", i. e., it's inferred from context that he's the subject and that she's the object. Which means, he may as well have been talking about liking anything, such as boxing, if that was the prior topic of conversation, which the onlookers couldn't know, unless they were also listening to the prior conversation.