I’m in Japan

Yep. I’m currently writing from the airport in Japan (because my battery is such a long-lived damn thing). It’s a vacation trip so releases -will- be delayed somewhat. I’ll do them at night and such, but yeah, it’ll be a little slow for 2 weeks.

Here’s to having fun.

PDF versions of Hyouketsu chapters are now available

Vu has endeavored to create the PDFs for Hyouketsu Kyoukai no Eden’s chapters, and has recently delivered for chapter 1.

Click to access HKnE+V.4+Ch.1.pdf

These will be made available in the pertinent posts (the translation post) as well as beside the post link on the Projects page.

If you have any suggestions for Vu, or seem to have spotted anything wrong, please post them in the comments here and I will either relay them or (more likely) he/she will read them.

Hyouketsu Kyoukai no Eden Volume 4, Chapter 2 – Three People Plus One

Let me open this up with a “HOLY CRAP, THAT WAS LONG!” And with that out of the way, here’s chapter 2. A few things to mention before you get right to it though…

First of all, someone pointed out that I forgot to add the volume’s title translation to the summary. The title for volume 4 is “Heavenly Melody”.

This chapter took from page 54 to page 135 with 2 images in it. That’s a total of 79 pages. What a whopper. I dozed off many times in the midst of translating this (I translate at like 2 AM?).

Yaaaay! Tsundere(?) or panicked Ymy is so lovable~

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Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai Kara Kuru Sou Desu yo? Volume 7, Chapter 1

sinemerald notified me that someone on the animesuki forums had already translated v7ch2 and v7’s epilogue and decided to send it our way. Chapter 2 is just about 20 pages long, which is about a day of work for me, but as previously mentioned, I wanted to make some time to fix up all of my releases thus far and updating the key terms list with a bunch more than what’s currently on BT. From what sinemerald told me, it’s missing a few things here and there but for the most part it should be good, so I might end up using it to save a bit of time. I’ll let you guys know if I decide to use it or not tomorrow night.

Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai Kara Kuru Sou Desu yo? Volume 7, Interlude

So I noticed that this author has tendencies to use very vague/broad kanji combinations for common descriptions that I assumed held the same general (read: most common) meaning. Due to this, it appears that I may have had several mistakes in my translations for some of these descriptions that I will probably go back and fix in my releases sometime this week.

sinemerald has also brought to light the fact that apparently I don’t follow a lot of the guidelines for translating; I don’t keep the paragraph structure as the novel does (which I actually didn’t really notice/care too much about until she mentioned it), nor did I keep the TL notes on the proper nouns and terms (ie. kanji combinations with a different phonetic reading and enunciations via ““` in the furigana space). I’m not really keen on some of the procedures but if it makes it easier to read, I’ll figure out an alternative.

Chapter 1 is around 30 pages long, so I’ll be on it for a bit. I’ll expect to have it out before Saturday.

In the meantime, here’s a short interlude.

TL Notes:

• Kouen no Miyako (煌焰の都) – The name of Salamandra’s city headquarters. I’m too lazy to flip through the earlier volumes to look for a proper/official equivalent, or maybe I’ve heard of it before and it slipped my mind. Either way, I’m looking for a good translation for this.
• I’m starting to doubt my kanji reading on some of these words due to the way the font tends to change the kanji. On one hand, it could be a font difference issue. On the other hand, it could just be Chinese. Who knows. If you notice something wrong, speak up.

Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai Kara Kuru Sou Desu yo? Volume 7, Prologue

I am thoroughly enjoying this volume so far, and I feel like I made the right choice in moving onto this volume to keep my motivation up. The crazy grammar is still present, but it’s still a much better read than v4ch1, which makes it worth translating.

Those of you who would rather read this in a chronological order, I apologize, but the good news is that I’m pretty sure the entire series will get translated eventually with this many translators working on it (as I estimated, around the end of summer), so it’s just a matter of patience before then!

The prologue for this volume is full of mythology with India as its origins. A simple google search should explain most of them if you’re not familiar with Indra and the Adityas and so on, but there is one thing that I couldn’t find an english equivalent for, which is this:

Hounou-Enbu (奉納演武) – hosted by Shimogamo-jinja Shrine every May 4 in cooperation with the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Classical Martial Arts.

If you can give me a concise english equivalent for that, feel free.

And without further ado, enjoy!

Hyouketsu Kyoukai no Eden Volume 4, Chapter 1 – As Much as a Wish

Good day to everyone! It is a glorious day as I finally managed to trudge through chapter 1 after throwing off various (major) distractions like Terraria and Animal Crossing. And Sonic and Metroid, etc, etc. There’s some work mixed in there, but the brunt of it can be attributed to games…

This is where you’ll really see how this is going to be formatted and such for the rest of Hyouketsu, as well as all the terms from previous chapter by CE Translations and how they’ll be preserved or chosen. That being so, it is also the time for you guys to tell me if you prefer something a certain way. I’ll take all the suggestions into consideration and try to remember them.

When I was posting this, I realized I’d forgotten to update the projects page with the links. I’ll do that now. Also, I looked over how to create a PDF for these chapters, but if somebody wants to create them for me, I’d be very happy (hint, hint). I’ll probably do that at the end of the volume (ie. batch work). Also, about the color illustrations and putting the text on them, I’ll probably end up doing that myself again. People want money and I’m a cheapskate. Sorry, I just don’t want to pay you for something I could easily do myself.

A note about the next chapter: it’s like 80 pages long. I’m not sure if I’m going to post it in parts or not (because I don’t particularly like doing that), but bear the length in mind before saying it’s taking forever.

I have yet to proofread this chapter. With all that out of the way, enjoy the read!

PDF Link: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ywws1sv48zcx5q4/HKnE+V.4+Ch.1.pdf

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Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai Kara Kuru Sou Desu yo? Volume 4, Chapter 1

I’M DONE. Finally.

This chapter was about 40 pages long, and about 15 of them were complete bullshit. It took 4 days longer than expected to get this out, but to be honest I was actually procrastinating a lot due to my unwillingness to translate some of the grammar in this chapter.

I’ll explain in detail since some people had the wrong idea about my previous blog. I wasn’t going to just drop this project just because it was too hard, nor was I just going to spit something out that wasn’t even going to be accurate. What I meant was that the grammar used in this chapter wasn’t hard because it was that complex a scenario, but that it felt like it was hard for hardness’ sake. Like the author just put it in for a laugh, focusing on the details that, in my personal opinion, didn’t really matter.

After this continued for around 15 pages straight (it was mostly the part in the middle), I was really just up the wall trying to figure out not how the grammar translated to English, but why the author had decided to write the chapter this way. The extra 4 days were devoted to slogging through this part, and I spent most of that time trying to avoid putting personal preference in the way of work. The grammar was difficult, yes, but all it really takes is understanding what the sentence is saying in Japanese (very easy) and then creating a sentence from scratch using the same concept (not as easy). Here’s a good example of what I was dealing with in this chapter:

伝令の絶妙に奇妙な表情を言い表すのならば——-天上天下の不可思議を寄せ集めたような、機会で怪異で奇妙奇天烈摩訶不思議アドベンチャーな反則的ナマモノを目の当たりにしてきたような——-要するに、そんな絶妙に複雑な表情をしていた。

That is indeed, one sentence. I’ll let you figure out what it means.

In key terms related news, I received a suggestion to change You’s name to Yoh, like how most names with an ‘ou’ in their name is americanized to ‘oh’ (Touka to Tohka, for example). I’m not really keen on the idea, and it would still require changing the key terms (along with all of the previous translation slightly) if I were to make it stick, but I’ll leave the decision up to whoever wants to bring it up with Firebird. I’ve also noted that some more people like calling Calico Cat (currently named Calico) Mikeneko. If I see more support in the comments on this post, then I’ll go back and make the change stick.

Finally, my decision to start doing volume 7 -> 6 hasn’t changed, but I will be saving volume 5 for last, which means I will eventually be getting back to volume 4 no matter what happens. In this sense, I’m leaving volume 5 open for another translator to work on (possibly Drinkingwater on Baka-Tsuki, since at the rate he’s translating, he may be done with volume 2 next month). So the next update will be volume 7 unless I get a very good reason to keep working on volume 4.

Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai Kara Kuru Sou Desu yo? Volume 4, Prologue

And suddenly, volume 4!?

My apologies for getting this in rather late, I was actually pretty much done with this about a week ago with two pages remaining (and another day waiting for proofreaders who apparently never showed up). Thinking about it now, I probably shouldn’t have introduced Summon Night 5 to sinemerald because I ended up getting hooked on it too!

For those of you who were expecting an update on volume 1, I decided that the progress being made on the first 3 volumes is proceeding steadily enough that I can expect them to be done by the time I finish translating the remaining 4 volumes, which I expect to have done within 2 months’ time. I know that you guys are probably still waiting on the rest of volume 1 and 2 to be completed before you start reading ahead, but I’m putting my faith on the translators at Baka-Tsuki in the hopes that they finish their volumes around the same time that I’ll finish mine. If it happens that I finish before they do, I’ll consider picking up the remaining unfinished chapters.

The difficulty of the grammar used in this novel is quite surprising; it is very easy to understand if I read it in Japanese, but actually quite difficult to smoothly transition it over to a coherent form of English. I had heard from sinemerald that this would be quite common for this author, but it still took me by surprise nonetheless. I’ve tried my best to make it work, but there are some parts that I’m not especially proud of. Feel free to submit a better/more accurate translation for parts you don’t agree with and I’ll take a look. Take note that I try to keep the original formatting of the text as closely as possible, down to the number of periods and commas in a sentence and the dashes between trains of thought. I’m glad that this author doesn’t freely use question marks because those are always a pain in the ass to preserve during translation.

A few things to take note of as you read this.

• I’ve taken the liberty of renaming Calico Cat （三毛猫/mikeneko) to just Calico, after You starts talking to him. In Japanese, it doesn’t sound all that weird to me, but in English, it gets kind of weird after a while hearing You saying “Calico Cat” all the time. If you don’t like the change or prefer naming him by phonetics (Mikeneko), let me know.
  
• The text is written in first person, but I’ve decided to change it to third person except for dialogue since sinemerald already started it that way.
  
• I am contemplating changing You’s name to Yo, like how some translators shorten names like Sakai Yuuji to Sakai Yuji, but for the simple reason that it’s just confusing to look at sometimes. If you’d prefer keeping it as You, let me know and I’ll keep it this way.

Looking for somebody who likes working with Photoshop

So it came to my attention that at least one person wants those color pages with the English printed on them. As such, I would like somebody to do them…for quality assurance, just do one of the four pages and send it to sakurahonyaku@gmail.com.

Please:

• Redraw the entire affected area. Don’t just put a gigantic text background and slap the text on that so that nothing show up between the text, allowing you to hide the fact that you pretty much cleaned nothing off.
• Remove the page gutter.
• Keep the text styling the same.
• Don’t cover up important parts of the scene with the text. For example, covering up a character’s face with the text should not be done.

These next ones are just “It would be nice~” kinds of things. Try to:

• Up the image quality (the color quality at least) by removing some of that color warping (particularly noticeable on faces)
• Sharpen the contrast in colors. I notice that the colors on the version I downloaded are kind of faded. It could be a lot better.

If you take this request up, you may want to try to find better raw versions than what I have. I’m fairly certain mine aren’t the best ones available.