Looking at the deadline until September 7th, and the fact that I only have 6 chapters left, I feel that I can take a break tonight without worry.

I’ll be busy with family stuff tonight, and at the moment I’m translating chapter 5 of Vermillion, so there might not be time for EGA.

As for why I’m starting on chapter 5, the chapters are really long, and chapter 5 has the dialogue that I want to translate as practice. You can read it without major spoilers, but some things may feel a bit abrupt and badly written as a result (because the foreshadowing was actually in the first 4 chapters).

But well, I think it should serve as a great teaser. It’s a good example of the sort of dialogue in this series, and if I do chapter 6 and 7 as well, there should be a good example of the sort of battles that this series has too.

I wonder what kind of female-oriented sexcapade novels I’ve just unleashed onto the world.

Synopsis:

Western VRMMO 【DEMONDAL】 was known for its extremely harsh game system. To begin with, there were no levels. There were no skills. There were no guilds. There was no inventory. There were no convenient system messages or maps of any kind either. It was so needlessly realistic that it was already basically a VR life simulator.

As for anything game-like, it was basically limited to weapon masteries; a proficiency level that you got from using your weapon, as well as physical strength that increased as well. That was it.

It was a fantasy game so there was magic, but forming a contract with a spirit was extremely difficult, and only 1% of the playerbase were magicians.

In this VR game 【DEMONDAL】 that was ridiculously close to reality, the protagonist Kei who was a well known mounted archery expert, was one day sent to another world with his Russian 【DEMONDAL】 friend.

The game that was severe to begin with had turned into a reality, and the harshness increased again――

Why you should translate it:

1. The partner is a blonde Russian loli “ninja” who speaks like a bro
2. The excerpts below:

「FUCK YOU(死にさらせ)！！！」

「――”NINJA”！」

頭目は呻くようにして叫ぶ。

“忍者”。

それも、純粋な日本製《メイド・イン・ジャパン》の”忍者”ではなく。
　外国人が勝手にイメージを膨らませて創り出したような、何かちょっと間違えてる、”NINJA”。

「”NINJA”！　”NINJA”のアンドレイ！？」
「Holy Shit(なんてこった)！！　本物か！？」
「あの一瞬でマントを身代わりに……！」

周囲の手下たちにも、動揺が広がる。

“NINJA”のアンドレイ。

彼は、この世界でも屈指の有名人だった。
その個性的すぎる見かけと――それでも、確かな実力から。

「流石は”死神日本人《ジャップ・ザ・リーパー》”……死神様には相応しい武器、だな？」
「…………」

が、アンドレイのからかいに一転、渋面を作る。

“死神日本人《ジャップ・ザ・リーパー》”。

幾つかあるケイの渾名の中で、おそらく最も広まっているものだ。

かの有名な殺人鬼、”切り裂きJACK《ジャック・ザ・リッパー》”をもじったこの渾名は、ケイと交戦した者のあまりの死亡率の高さから名付けられた。

現在ではさらに縮まり、”ザ・ジャップ”とさえ呼ばれる始末だ。
呼んでいる者たちにはあ(・)ま(・)り(・)悪意はないのだろうが、いち日本人として、「ジャップジャップ」と呼ばれるのは、あまり良い気持ちはしない。

**3. The MC’s nickname was Jap the Ripper.

As if you don’t want to translate this!

Art for the LN (Vermillion – Étranger à L’arc Rouge)

translating EGA has given me gestalt collapse

flooooooooooooor

fluur

floor

floooor

lorloorfloor

always sounds like Nepnep in my head?

CDJapan boasts an English interface, and pretty cheap prices.

I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to update the links, seeing as I’ve been using it for ages now, but well, I’m changing the links now.

Link to the LN on Otoburi will be updated. Link to the recently released Tilea LN adaptation will be put up. Next month when EGA releases, I will put up a link for that as well.

Otoburi
Tilea

The Theocracy of Holy Anri Nation is a fledgling, orderly nation, renowned for its absence of drug laws, punitive income tax rates, and devotion to social welfare. The hard-nosed, cynical population of 5 million Holy Anri Nationians are ruled without fear or favor by a psychotic dictator, who outlaws just about everything and refers to the populace as “my little playthings.”

The enormous, moralistic, socially-minded, well-organized government juggles the competing demands of Spirituality, Welfare, and Law & Order. The average income tax rate is 75.1%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The imploded Holy Anri Nationian economy, worth 22.0 billion Anris a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. The industrial sector, which is broadly diversified, is led by the Arms Manufacturing industry, with major contributions from Pizza Delivery, Automobile Manufacturing, and Basket Weaving. Average income is 4,405 Anris, and distributed extremely evenly, with practically no difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a very well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Holy Anri Nation’s national animal is the Anri, which frolics freely in the nation’s many lush forests.

https://www.nationstates.net/nation=holy_anri_nation
https://www.nationstates.net/nation=alyschu_empire

This is important. It is long, but please, please read it all.

So, I know this is rich coming from a shithead like me who rarely actually translates anything, but there’s no rule saying that you have to be perfect to criticise other people! (lol!) Basically, not one, or two, but a great number of so-called translators don’t understand BASIC Japanese grammar.

To illustrate just how basic it is, it’s basically the same as not understanding the difference between,

“I ate the cat.”

“I was eaten by the cat.”

It’s that bad. And they’re translating without knowing something so basic. Learning a language is like learning anything else – it’s diminishing marginal returns to effort.

That means that 30 minutes of learning for a complete beginner might improve the translation by 500%. 30 minutes of learning for these guys would be the same as a year or two of improvement for me. But they don’t do it. Why? Don’t they just lack integrity?

For people who don’t understand how Japanese verbs work, basically you have a ‘stem’ that’s like a key word, and the shit tacked on the end determines the tense, whether it’s passive or otherwise, and sometimes whether it’s transitive or intransitive.

Basically it fucking determines everything. If you don’t understand this, it’s the same as somebody throwing a bunch of key words at you, and you making up your own sentences with it. Does this sound familiar to you? It should; this is exactly what machine translators do.

There’s a certain blog that had been translating things decently up until now. Then a ‘translator’ joined the team and created an atrocious translation. In three lines of dialogue, it got everything 100% wrong. I’m not going to name them, because it’s nasty. I’m not going to contact them and tell them off because that’s being high-handed and arrogant. But you guys are the readers; if anybody can justify themselves for complaining about translation fraud, it’s you guys. I know you’re afraid of upsetting the translator, but surely there’s a gentle and supportive way of pointing out easy ways they could improve. There are a LOT of readers out there, and surely somebody is socially competent enough to do so.

And it’s not like nobody knew that the translations were wrong. On reddit, somebody illustrated how the translations were completely wrong. The project head even commented “I think this is correct”. And yet the guesslation is still up there.

Fucking, why?

Why are you even translating when you don’t even understand grammar that you’d learn in your 4th lesson of Japanese? It would take you 30 minutes to google a verb conjugation table, and it would improve your translations so much, but you don’t do it.

Instead, you spend god knows how long on completely guesslating this series. People all have their own circumstances, so I’m not here to complain about how some people are less dedicated to improvement than others. But something as basic as verb conjugation is literally 30 minutes of learning.

As far as I can tell, the project in question is completely free, so they aren’t even doing it for money. But in that case, I just can’t understand.

And like I mentioned earlier, it isn’t this one project. Plenty of people are ignoring grammar, and I don’t understand it. If you want to build a car, surely it would be more important to have an engine and wheels than having a frame.

I criticise quite a bit more than other translators, but it’s not because I’m angry or like having somebody to vilify. It makes me feel tired and dirty when I do so, but there’s something seriously wrong with our community when a retarded novice like me counts as one of the better translators. I like drama and starting shit up, but only when the people are nasty or mean. I don’t like criticising otherwise nice people like this.

To that project head, if you know who you are, please have a gentle talk with that translator of yours. Considering that your project’s quality just took a 100% drop in quality, this is arguably more your problem than theirs. You’re the manager after all.

Anyway, sorry for saying something unsightly again. I’ll try and get the next chapter of Tilea out tonight. Sorry. And yeah, I know that I’m being harsh and stuff this time, so justice knights, feel free to flame me.

So this Tanuki commented 4 hours ago and told me about how they were translating a novel.

The um, author actually makes their own otome games. In particular, they seem to have made one called Magical Party about a normal 11th grader Japanese girl ending up in a world of swords and magic. It’s called Magical Party and can be found here.

…and that is not what I’m going to be talking about today.

Actually, what’s being translated is the web novel side story of that otome game, about one of the students from that world. She’s (allegedly) a normal girl, who somehow ended up involved with a hot guy. I haven’t actually read it yet, since I’ve been a bit preoccupied, so I can’t really say if she’s actually a normal girl, or a Mamiko-Normal girl, but the blurb does mention that it’s a really sweet story (meaning that it’s actually sickly sweet), so if you’re into sappy shoujo stuff, you might want to try out the translation.

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Don’t forget to thank the Tanuki.