Ever want to go back and make things better? I did. This is one of the first books I ever scanlated, and I've grown a lot over the past three years. I want one of my favorite books ever to get the translation it deserves, so I'm uploading a new version. I don't really know the rules for expunging the older book, and I couldn't replace the gallery, so I'm just making a new one.

In any case, I hope you all like it. This book was as enjoyable to do now as it was back then. Replacing old scans is not something I'm going to make a habit of, but I hope you appreciate it and how much I've developed as a scanlator.

TL: Xzosk
TS: Xzosk

Raw: http://e-hentai.fbk.tokyo/index/g/1636974/12639e669a/
My old scan: http://e-hentai.fbk.tokyo/index/g/1550318/92b9e5cdcf/

Thank you for the re-translation. This was my go to for interesting plots back then.

Base +7, nikgtasa +15, alfa_127 +9

To be frank, I think that your typesetting has drastically improved, but that the original script is much better. I think it's best to avoid the kind of slang and swearing that crept into this retake, that often gets associated with fan TL; it comes across as unprofessionally written, and often overshoots the boundaries of "reasonable speech", above and beyond not necessarily matching the original meaning, considering JP doesn't really have expletives. I recognise however that this is an opinion that not all translators necessarily hold, and I certainly appreciate that you took the time to produce what you felt was an improvement on your work.

Base +6, smartmeister +14, cybeast93 +20, wiow +6, ricrod +6, Shellstrom +10, nikgtasa +15, Addelheim +21, Ksintai -6, fredfredricson +10, dfgghgf +6, GuroLover12 -12, J Shadow +6, and 5 more...

@baneclaw

Thanks for the input. But as someone who's been at this a while now, with hundreds of books done among several scanlation groups, AND many official mainstream works now, I can safely say that you're wrong here. The best translators that I've learned from have taught me this--you aren't good at translating a language until you feel comfortable enough to step away from simply relaying the original script, and confident enough to tell the story in your own manner.

People who simply relay a script are barely a step above MTL, and have led to many of the tropey lines we know in manga. ("It can't be helped!" "My hips are moving on their own!") My original script is one plagued with that philosophy, because I had no confidence to step away from 1-to-1 translation.
Now, maybe I'm a little bit slangy, sure. Every translator has their own quirks that inevitably color their scripts. But there's no way you can compare the two and not think that this reads more succinctly and smoothly.

Take some time to read officially translated works and compare them to scanlated versions--I guarantee you that the official works always take more liberty with the script, and that is the result of the the translator's confidence to relay the story in their own words to the target audience, rather than being chained to every word in the raw.

Base +8, cybeast93 +20, LightSolas +12, tomci12 +19, Orazio +6, bloopypoo +7, roguedummy -7, wiow -6, brightnp24 +6, ricrod -6, Shellstrom -10, VictoryRush -6, nikgtasa +15, and 13 more...

Abandoning accuracy in favor of what the translator wants the story to be is exactly why we fucking hate companies like Funimation though.......

When people are telling you not follow the script 1:1 they're telling you to localise in moderation, injecting a lot of slang just for the sake of using cliched lines might not be enough to qualify as a Rewrite but it isn't better than a dull 1:1 transliteration anymore either.

That being said, the other comment made it sound like you reached 4kids level localisation for the sake of some self expression.....it's not that bad, I think I'll keep the old one favorited instead of this one because it's a tad too much overall but you need a bit of slang to make school setting like this sound natural so you'll just need to finetune the dosage.

Base +25, Bufudyne +6, rockball -6, wiow +6, Shellstrom +10, e-diver +10, nikgtasa +15, asdfghfd +7, omit_ +7, Xalren525 +6, Ethereal_Heart -6, Addelheim +21, warced +10, and 14 more...

@Glovelove.
>tell the story in your own manner
>Abandoning accuracy in favor of what the translator wants the story to be
These two are not the same.

Base +42, rockball +6, tomci12 +19, Orazio +6, bloopypoo +7, roguedummy +7, Shellstrom -10, heh...narto +6, nikgtasa +15, omit_ +7, Addelheim +21, Madu +6, Giriath +6, and 5 more...

They're not, but the former is used as an excuse to justify the latter more often than I've seen it used genuinely.

I've seen plenty of rewrites passed off as "oh yeah the original was a bit boring so I just decided to translate the story in my own way"

And the official translators responsible for shit like /img/e-hentai/ptljegqzmv7z.jpg will often take pride in "polishing of the rough edges you get with Japan being a socially backwards nation" and insist it's just telling the same story in their own superior way.

There's a line between "telling the story in their own manner" and "telling their own story" and most people claiming to do the first have definitely crossed it. Happy to see an exception here but it definitely wasn't expected.

Last edited on 11 December 2022, 20:04.

Base +25, rockball -6, wiow +6, Shellstrom +10, e-diver +10, nikgtasa +15, omit_ +7, Ethereal_Heart -6, warced +10, 44inf +6, Paulie22 +6, 01Anon -6, Blaze_fire +8, and 5 more...

If you want the raw story with no fluff, easiest way is to just learn japanese and save translators the headache of rehashing this discussion for the nth time.

Base +11, Shellstrom -10, dmnx -6, heh...narto +6, yaque -6, LightSolas +12, Orazio +6, nikgtasa +15, Novalaxia +6, Myouren +7, Ethereal_Heart +6, warced -10, Tezuka_Hoshizora +6, and 8 more...

as learnJP said: if you want the raw story, learn Japanese.

all translation involves localization. period. no exceptions. absolutely zero. otherwise you can just go read a google lens'd book and get the "real" japanese version, that is ostensibly in english. I get the feeling you, dear reader, probably wouldn't enjoy that very much.

yes, there is such a thing as going too far in localization, but the examples given (old funimation, viz, etc) engage in activities that de-emphasize or outright remove aspects of the original instead of embellishing them. this is a concept that sociocultural anthropologists and critical theorists have variously coined as "deterritorialization," "glocalization" and "internationalization," and that is not at all what is happening here.

if the viz comparison were accurate, this entire setting would be changed or something. the shit they do is drastic. what's happening here is not that. equating the addition of some curse words in order to better get across a school setting in English to the bad old days of jelly donuts is fallacious and/or dishonest.

(important to note that these companies DO BELIEVE they are engaging in embellishment, yet they have a different mentality: some part of the original product is "imperfect" or "doesn't fit with the audience" and so must be adjusted. I am confident in saying xzosk does not share this mentality, and would not destroy some aspect that might not match a modern western reader's sensibilities like the above companies would do. instead, he would try to actually bring the concept across to the reader in a non-clunky way. and, honestly? we're only human, we're not Shakespeare, sometimes things will be clunky because we all fuck up sometimes. taking things that may be mistakes or poor decisions in a genuine attempt to get the translation right, and equating them to headass corporate focusgrouping, is really silly, to put it mildly, and something I will always push back on.)

baneclaw's comment is misguided but understandable. industry localization has given fans who actually give a shit, like xzosk, myself, Zaibatsu (the group that was dedicated to working on Kaguya content) a bad name (or, a good name, depending on how you look at it!)

glovelove, on the other hand, simply loves injecting himself into whatever discussion is happening at the time, always with a nonsequitur that has a passing connection with the topic at hand in the sense that they're both written in English, seemingly for the sake of hearing his own voice. who knows what his motivations are. this guy's already been shit on by his beloved mods in the forums for this exact behaviour, and he had a big whiny baby tantrum about it that led to him fucking off for ages. I can only hope he follows suit here!

Base +11, nikgtasa +15, Orazio +6, Myouren +7, omit_ -7, warced -10, Thasces +14, Ksintai +6, Tezuka_Hoshizora +6, Giriath +6, Sataniel +6, Paulie22 -6, NaySlayer +7, and 6 more...

Ah yes, "if you disagree with me you're off-topic", a true classic.

And somehow you're still surprised I refused to be your sockpuppet.

Last edited on 12 December 2022, 06:40.

Base +25, omit_ +7, Xalren525 +6, Ethereal_Heart -6, Tezuka_Hoshizora -6, Bismuth1104 -8, Paulie22 +6, 01Anon -6, Myouren -7, bloopypoo -8, ChaseRaph69 +6

I was responding to a comment, and if you had managed to read the whole post you would have noticed that I mentioned the actual content wasn't nearly as bad as the comment made it out to be.

But of course the comment section is only part of the topic if it suits your narrarive.

Base +25, Novalaxia -6, Orazio -6, Ethereal_Heart -6, warced +10, Tezuka_Hoshizora -6, flambi +23, 01Anon -6, ChaseRaph69 +6

Lmao what is happening in this comment section? *Grabs popcorn* I agree with Daruna, heck, even in other's language (I do translate English to Spanish) sometimes when you are translating words/sentences they don't even make sense, so you have no choice but localizing a little bit, ofc not at the level of funimation lmao.

Base +6, Giriath +6, TXDaiVKikk +7, 44inf +6, Leviathan +8

Translation of intentions is more important than literal accuracy for most things outside of specialized technical and scientific documents, simply because of the nature of languages and cultures (hence the exceptions of technical & scientific docs, as those have the least amount of cultural baggage cluttering up).

Base +6, 44inf +6, Leviathan +8, 01Anon +6, orasmase +8, raytester +6

This entire debate is completely misguided. Xzosk didn't sacrifice accuracy "in favor of what the translator wants the story to be". In fact, comparing with the JP version, the old script is actually more inaccurate than this version due to inexperience lol

Some of you guys are so used to being fed god-awful "translations" that you developed an aversion to anything that isn't a 1:1 DeepL copy paste, or a distrust of anything that sounds "too natural" because you've come to believe natural sounding = egregious rewrite à la jelly-filled doughnuts. There's a middle and it's a called a good translation.

Again, robotic 1:1 TLs aren't more true to the original Japanese intent because they replace phrases, structures, and words 1:1. They're usually just flat out wrong on top of being poorly written. Check the "rough translation" tag if you want examples.

Base +18, Paulie22 -6, orasmase +8, raytester +6, bloopypoo +8, hehtrain +6

Well yeah sure, as I've already mentioned in my previous comment, I checked the comment section to see what had actually changed, took the comments at face value and replied before reading.

Then added a paragraph backpedalling on it being a major issue in this gallery after I read it for myself, I personally prefer the old wording (and I'm probably at least a little bit biased in favor of the original just because I read that one back when it was posted and remember loving it for what it was) but the amount of slang used here is definitely not as bad as the comments I was responding to made it out to be.

The paranoia towards anything that might not be a direct transliteration comes from the drama around MTL uploaders having to make shit up whenever DeepL or their OCR left a gap somewhere; A lot of people have been conditioned to reach for the torches and pitchforks as soon as anyone that might actually know what they're talking about gets critical in the comment section. Of course, they can never be sure without reading the raw, (and even if they can read Japanese, that doesn't mean they will, they're already on the right page for reading the comment section instead and probably still a lot more fluent at English.) but they've been taught that half of the new releases are machine translated and maybe 5% accurate at best because of it and need comments to tell the difference.

Not to say translators should be immune to peer review, or that criticism is inherently evil or anything (though I'm sure there'll be someone that didn't read the entire comment accusing me of saying that anyway) but the way it has been done aggressively and excessively in recent years has had some side effects. The trust in scanlations has been tarnished to the point that people, myself included, are prone to expecting the worst, and those expectations matter a lot when confirmation bias is factored in.

Last edited on 14 December 2022, 03:30.

Base +25