@torukoseki
Two years and a third scanlation group. :p

Indeed. Dating someone doesn't necessarily mean you're attracted to, or even like them, as I can regrettably say from experience.

I'm pretty sure you're making some impressive leaps in your logic, but you're not really hurting anyone, so I suppose that's fine.

last edited at Jun 19, 2018 8:59PM

I'd say it's a manga about an adult woman who happens to be lesbian

*Bisexual, different ball game.

Well it's reassuring that you know more about the manga than I do, I suppose.

I don't necessarily agree nor disagree with Nya-chan's statement. This manga is a very slow burn, and if you're in it for a quick, steamy romance, you may want to look elsewhere. I'd say it's a manga about an adult woman who happens to be lesbian, rather than a story focused on yuri romance.

last edited at Jun 19, 2018 4:34PM

@malibus88
I don't want to spoil too much, but I can say that I hate stories like that, and would never translate/work on one. Hope that's good enough. :p

The "I hate what you do, but the choice is yours" doesn't offer as much consolation as people seem to think it does...

Honestly, these things are the reason it's hard to motivate spending 30 something hours working for free on something like this, lol.

@DYWYPI
If a defining and frequently referenced part of her character isn't a reason to include a dialect in the translation, what are your criteria for it being required?

I had never considered that people think of non-standard US English as "not serious", nor did I realise that changing of the "do/can" verb to a regional variant would make it hard to understand. I deliberately chose not to use too much regional vocabulary, because I didn't want to make it too hard to understand.

While I do understand that some people find the accent hard to understand, that's part of her character. I chose to use Scottish because Ohsawa chose to use a Hakata accent.

The accent Nanami has is thought of as "dorky" and a "country bumpkin" accent in Japan, so on the contrary, the preconceptions some of you seem to have about non-American English should just help get that part of her character across even better.

Summary: I translated a non-standard accent into another non-standard accent, just as I would've translated obnoxiously complicated Japanese into obnoxiously complicated English. My goal as a translator is to translate and convey the tone of the original as closely as possible, not to make things easier to understand than they were in the original.

Would people ask for revisions of Agatha Christie's Poirot because they don't understand the occasional French, I wonder (and would Japanese readers ask Ohsawa to change Nanami's accent to a more familiar Kansai accent, because her current one sounds "dumb" and is hard to understand if you haven't heard it before?).

last edited at Jun 19, 2018 11:23AM

I must admit that I never realised that people thought of Scottish as "comical"...

I'll think about alternatives, but completely dropping a defining feature of the main character would feel like changing her haircolour to me, and be equally disrespectful of the source material. (Especially since other characters make references to her unusual accent, and one of them gives her a nickname because of it.)

last edited at Jun 19, 2018 8:56AM

@Goggled Anon
But the "problem", if you can call it that, is that American dialects aren't hard to understand, and thus wouldn't properly convey Nanami's dialect.

Compared to other regions and languages, the regional/dialectal differences in North American English are extremely small, especially relative to the geographical size of NA.

last edited at Jun 19, 2018 7:32AM

I understand the confusion, but the entire point in using non-standard English is that she speaks non-standard Japanese, which is hard to understand if you aren't familiar with it (Edit: by comparison, a southern US accent isn't hard for anyone to understand). I suppose it's a question of ease of reading vs translation/tone accuracy.

As much as it pains me to ignore a —in my opinion— defining part of Nanami's character, I might make a strawpoll later, and see which people prefer.

last edited at Jun 19, 2018 7:14AM

It appears I underestimated the impact of changing a single verb... D:

Incidentally, my translation is less different from American English than her Japanese is from Standard Japanese. :/

last edited at Jun 19, 2018 6:59AM

I'm wondering if everyone missed the bloody TL note... OTL

It's a Hakata accent, as I mentioned in my TL note. The Hakata accent uses considerably different grammar/conjugations compared to Tokyo/standard Japanese, and can be hard to understand if you aren't familiar with it, thus the choice of mild Scots. There is another character that's introduced later, who speaks in a Kansai accent, which I had indeed planned to use a southern US accent for.

Edit: For anyone unfamiliar with how the accent sounds out loud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX8QPDjwRyw

last edited at Jun 19, 2018 6:20AM

@Goggled Anon & ergzay
I'll think about it, but the point I was trying to get across is that she very much speaks non-standard Japanese, lol. The problem with English is that it's very difficult to convey dialects/accents through text, which is why I settled for one of the few dialects that are easy to convey. If there are more requests for it, I can drop the accent, of course, but it always hurts me when so much is lost in translation.

I wrote "possibly" because while it's been dead for ages, we hadn't talked to Yuri Project yet about taking it over.

Since then, however, we've decided to start working on it, and should be ready within a week or so. I didn't update our message since
1. The project has been dead for 2 years and no one else has expressed interest
2. We had publicly expressed interest in working on it, and no one has since replied to my post or otherwise contacted us to ask about it (I'm available in the Dynasty Discord server, and our scanlation group's email is readily available on all our credit pages).

You didn't see information about it in other places, because Dynasty is where we publish, even if our works are eventually uploaded elsewhere.

We are set for translation and typesetting, but would certainly welcome help with cleaning.

If possible, contact me on discord at [redacted], to discuss this further.

Update: The matter has been resolved. Kouyuri will move along with the project, while a member of Chaosteam will provide the cleaning.

last edited at Jun 13, 2018 4:36AM

But we... We're already working on it...

Steam censorship has always been weird. Games like Postal and Hatred deliberately offensive, letting the player do horrible things for entertainment, and while controversial in their own right, they're sitting comfortably in the Steam store. Likewise, games like the Witcher series feature uncensored T and A aplenty, but their place in the Steam store is taken for granted by users and developers alike.

It seems like "anime tiddies" are indeed the greatest threat to the sanctity of a Steam user's mind. =_=

I spotted her too. She knows what's up～♪

@johnb
You should check out the author's Twitter. They post a lot of stuff that's nice to look at even if you don't read Japanese.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

They also draw a fair amount of stuff featuring girls on the chubbier side, so for anyone who's looking for more of that, I'd definitely suggest a follow.

last edited at May 31, 2018 12:26AM

Once again, TL, cleaning, & typesetting by me, QC by Faust.

last edited at May 30, 2018 11:50PM

Reminds me of a good line from a mediocre game. #relatable