New year, new month, and new script: Act 25! As well as the reprint version, Act 28! I’ve also finished revisions of Acts 12-14 (13-15 in the reprints), and of course comparisons for all of it. The Dark Kingdom arc is done again, and the rest of the old old stuff should also be done very soon.

The day is almost over, but I do have Act 24 ready! And its reprint counterpart, Act 27! Also revisions of Acts 10-11 (10-12 in the reprints), and comparisons for both the old and new stuff. (Farewell, Street Fighter and Terminator references…) It may not sound like it, but everything combined amounts to roughly the same amount of pages as I did last month, so I guess I’m still keeping a pretty consistent pace.

It’s only taken, what, four years? But the Black Moon arc is complete with this script for double length Act 23! At least I’m consistent now. And I’ve also revised Acts 6-9, with separate scripts for each version (and of course comparisons) and some much needed clean up work. One tankoubon a month is a lot slower than I expected for this sub-project, but I think it will speed up when I get to the stuff I did in 2011.

Speaking of the revisions, one thing I didn’t mention before is that things are more colorful now. If a character has colored manga art somewhere, their name is in color. But at the same time, attack names won’t be colored anymore, because I now think it’s a little obnoxious. And I’ve also been de-Wapanizing things a little further, like removing a lot of old quirks (“GC”) and reducing the amount of in-story translation notes. Names are now written in Western order (Usagi Tsukino, Mamoru Chiba, etc.), and certain honorifics (oniisan, senpai) are now translated. I remembered it’s a plot point that they don’t know Motoki’s name at first, so that’s something you definitely can’t omit or change to his name. You can find more details about this and other stuff on the notes page.

The next act is double length in both versions, so it would certainly be a fitting/annoying start for simultaneous double script releases.

So obviously a lot of my projects involve translating Japanese to English. But I’m not yet an expert or a professional at it. I often try to explain this in casual conversation, but I feel like I should finally explain it in detail somewhere publicly.

Back in roughly August or September 2000, I started teaching myself Japanese because I wanted to play some video games with no existing translations (at the time, anyway). A noble endeavor, right? Anyway, it wasn’t long before I’d mastered the grammar basics and learned to read kana almost as well as I can read the Latin alphabet. But that’s the easy part.

Fluency is about vocabulary and ease of use. Eleven years would sound like plenty of time to gain that fluency, wouldn’t it? Except that I did not spend the full eleven years actively studying. Probably not even a fourth of that. It’s not that I’ve been lazy about it so much as I’ve been undisciplined and unfocused for most of the past decade. I’ve also been hindered by the fact that I haven’t had a teacher to guide and correct me, or a pen pal or someone to converse with regularly.

But I have learned a great deal. Far more than the average fanboy. And I constantly see improvement in myself whenever I look back on old translation attempts. (The fact that I can go back and correct my old errors is the main reason I pretty much only do translation work on my site, rather than in any outside group projects.) So I’m confident that my unorthodox learning methods can work (along with some new study methods I’m trying). I’ve also recently gained the focus and discipline I need, so I’m going to bump up my immersion in the language.

Which finally brings me back to the website, and that stuff I mentioned a couple weeks ago. You’ll be seeing an increase in translation projects, as part of this increased focus. I know people would prefer that I went back to the Dragon Ball guidebook translations, but frankly I think it’s a little out of my league at the moment. Instead, I’ll be focusing heavily on my Sailor Moon projects for the next few months, until I feel more confident about going back to the guidebooks. I need to surpass myself and climb over the wall of Super Translator before I can defeat the Daizenshuu.

October is a relatively big month. First, here is Act 22! This is the penultimate chapter of the Black Moon arc (at least in the older books), and I’ve already made a lot of progress on the final chapter (which is double length), so yay.

Second, I’ve finally started a related sub-project that I’ve always wanted to do: separate scripts for both versions of the manga! Here’s the indexes for the old books and the new books, and another page for comparisons between them. I acquired copies of the reprints a couple months ago, but I wanted to finish the Black Moon arc before I started on them. I’m close enough now that I decided to go ahead with it anyway, but so far I’ve only managed to do up to Act 5.

With those separate scripts also comes a lot of translation revisions I’ve been meaning to do for a while, which is part of why I haven’t gotten many separate scripts done yet. I’ve also been reformatting the pages to include page numbers from the corresponding books. Act 22 doesn’t have most of these changes, and neither does what I have done of 23, but ideally everything will be updated to have all the new changes before it’s time to start the Infinity arc.

A new month, and Act 21 is ready. Very close to the end of the Black Moon arc now, with a certain character making her “debut.” It seems pretty obvious who she is in context, which is why I used the relevant color codes all throughout. But her name is treated like a big reveal, so I left her unnamed through the whole chapter. Do spoiler-phobes agree? Or does everyone already know the story well enough anyway? You can give your thoughts at the site Twitter or something. (Until I come up with a news comment-y system, anyway.)

On schedule again with Act 20! As I mentioned last month, this is double length, so it spans two Acts in the reprints. Now the different numbering will be even harder to keep track of… There was one line I really hit a snag with, and it should be obvious when you get to it. Hopefully I’ll be proficient enough to fix it one day soon.

This chapter also has a bunch of flashbacks, which brings me to something I’ve always wanted to explain. When there’s a flashback to a scene we’ve seen before, they often contain identical dialogue to the original scene. But there are also many times where the flashback dialogue differs from the original dialogue. I always go back to the original scene and compare the lines. If the dialogue is the same, it’s a matter of copy and paste, but if it differs, so does my translation. So if you’ve ever noticed flashback dialogue differing from the original scene, that’s not an inconsistency on my part; that’s a reflection of the original text.

Once again I have another script for you: Chibi Usa Picture Diary #1! I’m sure people were expecting Act 20, but since I’m working from the tankoubon, this chapter is what comes after Act 19 in volume 5. So it’s a lot easier for me to do it now than getting this book out again post-Stars or something. But I’ve tweaked the navigation bars at the bottom to account for both the main story alone and the tankoubon layout.

Also, Act 20 is double length, so this has conveniently given me extra time to work on it. But I won’t get such a convenience for Act 23…

Lots of little things today. First, I’ve started adding screenshots to the anime and movie pages! Just a couple of small ones per finished page, though. I don’t want them to be too large, for copyright reasons. But there’s a good chance I’ll go larger and/or add more per page in the future, once I figure out how I’d want to implement that stuff (in-line images? fancy gallery thing?). I’d also like to do the same with the manga pages, but for the time being I can’t use my scanner. (A reverse of the old days where I could scan but not do screenshots!)

Second, in addition to the two screens, I’ve (finally) fleshed out the miscellaneous section for the first movie. And third, I’ve added more to the terminology page. Not more people names, but place and thing names. Still not going past the revised/new summaries with it, or else that page would be the only thing I ever do.

On that note, there’s something I forgot to mention in the “Episode of Bardock” update. None of the name spellings are exactly “permanent” yet (which is why I haven’t added them to the terminology page). I’ll probably try to decide something for the new characters after the series is finished, and the old characters probably not until I get to the Freeza arc. Not that any of my spellings are necessarily permanent, because I’ve changed my mind and gone through massive find+replace operations more than once.

Another script ready for another month: Act 19! The introduction of the chatty transparent guy, and the end of one of my favorite characters. I feel like I did a really good job this time, possibly due to a change in the way I’m learning new vocabulary. Some things were a little loose to make them sound more natural in English, but I don’t think I sacrificed or ruined anything. There were also a few snags in my understanding of some lines again, but I think they’re less obvious than they were last time.