Forgotten Friday #305 - ワルテール / Walter Lambert

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Forgotten Friday #305 - ワルテール / Walter Lambert

Walter was a young child when they passed away from pneumonia. Japanese does have gendered pronouns. It's just that it's really easy to avoid them. For some reason, the blurb on her personality adds female pronouns when none exist when automatically translated. "死因は肺炎" is just "the cause of death (subject marker) pneumonia". The verb "was" is implied. In the context of the whole paragraph, this is translated by as "The cause of her death was pneumonia."

Anyway, I have no idea if Walter is a trans ghost or if Walter is a cis ghost who is wearing what their parents made them wear to try and ward off evil spirits. They use archaic female first person pronouns, but tons of women use male first person pronouns without it meaning anything about their gender. 

Who Is Walter?

Art from official website

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"I wish I could stay longer, Mary," Gina laughed, "but the kids need me, you know!"

"I'm just grateful you came over, Gina." Mary smiled as she led Gina up the stairs. "And thanks for lending me John. If he didn't come through, I was just going to get a ticket to Hawaii and just live on the beach."

Gina froze when she saw Gem. Gem was not a pretty pony princess. She was an apex predator, standing exactly as a tiger waiting to strike would with her hind legs folded onto the wheelchair. It was the shoulder blades. That was what scared Gina the most. She tried to look at Gem's eyes for some kind of reassurance, but the blankness from the hopelessness of the situation just made the sight even more terrifying. 

If Gem could speak, she would want to make a joke about how murder was illegal, but she couldn't. And that made her more sad, so she simply turned around and went back into the bedroom.

Gina tried to stutter out an apology, but Mary simply patted her shoulder and took her downstairs to the kitchen.

Gina composed herself as she sat down. "So, you know my professional background. I specialized in English as a second language, but my skills in that transferred well to special education, so I got put into that. So I understand both the angle of not knowing English because of lack of exposure and not knowing English because of something else being in the way."

"Of course." Mary nodded.

"So... Since you're retired..." Gina was nervous. "I... Would like your help."

Mary softly laughed as she sat down. "Yes, I do have the time to help. But, am I clever enough?"

(note: please don't take this as actual scientific data, I'm just writing a silly story.)

"Well, I could send you over a copy of Rosetta Stone. This works for people because, let's say, we grew up with chickens. The chicken is a symbol." Gina pulled a flash drive out of her pocket. "But if you do not understand a chicken as a symbol, then you'll try to assign it to the nearest symbol you do know of. Then if you see a bird and get told it isn't a chicken... That's frustrating."

"So you want me to sanitize the data set?" Mary leaned forward. "To remove anything that isn't universal?"

Gina nodded. "Water is water. Red is red."

"But how strict do we need to be?" Mary sat up straight.

"That's really the problem." Gina shook her head. "The sun and moon are so important to us, but did her world even have a moon?"

Mary shrugged. She hummed a bit. "This sounds difficult. But, what's the worst that can happen? She gives up on learning English?"

"Well..." Gina paused before laughing. "It's not a choice on her end. We just want to do our best to make it as easy as possible." She did feel silly being so worked up. 

How Are Walter's banks?

Walter has two banks: A cv and a vcv.

The cv voice is deeper than you would expect from looking at the design, but the voice is still youthful!

The otos of the vcv would need to be fixed to get the best result, but even with the current otos, the voice is still very nice. The vcv feels less youthful than the cv.

Where Can I download Walter?

You can find them on their official website.