ZEN

Here's the English translation from the chinese raws of ZEN by Shunpei Nakata.

I like how many of his pages have only 1 line to translate only.

Well I'm more fluent in Chinese than in Japanese so translating it wasn't too slow. The entire chapter also only had like, 5 sfx so I didn't need to think too hard for suitable translations.

The Enn series will have to take some time though.

Here's the link.

Fantasy Box 3-6 Version 2

So just a heads up, there's a V2 coming, mostly because a helpful reader has updated my lousy versions of Fantasy Box 3 and 4 with higher quality versions, and surprisingly, it included the Japanese raw of Fantasy Box 4 too. I read through the Chinese and Japanese, and I decided to redo some of the words, so yeah... like I said translating a translation is just terrible, so much flavor is lost through two translations.

Also I had forgotten to translate the afterword of Fantasy Box 6. Not a terrible mistake, but it's not nice to have this glaring omission.

As of now I'm left with about 10 more pages of Fantasy Box 4 to do, so yeah, expect the new version in a couple of days.

If you do have the Japanese raw for Zen (前), please do let me know asap!! Thanks!

I've put them into one file for easier downloading. Please find it here.

Pride Chapter 13 and Fantasy Boxes 3-6

Okay so work on Pride has pretty much stalled. The truth is, well.... I'm supposed to be doing this for interest right, but the thing is, chapter 13 is so far out of my interest that well, when I was giving it one last look over before uploading I could feel my stomach protesting. I mean, I didn't even feel anything when watching two girls one cup, you could just imagine it's peanut butter or something, but this...

So yeah, chapter 13 is not for everybody, don't say I didn't warn you. I don't even like it, I don't know how I translated/edited the thing. Maybe that's why it took so long for me to inch my way through this chapter.

On the upside, I kind of digressed and decided to translate one of Shunpei Nakata's works. He's one of my favourite mangakas, alongside Mentaiko and Tagame, and it's a real pity that so many of his works aren't translated into English. I decided to start with the demon saga, because it's strange that nobody picked it up (not even into Chinese?), and also because it is one of my favourite series from Nakata. So far I've only done Fantasy Boxes 3-6. I'll be working on the rest alongside chapter 14 of Pride.

*start rant*

So the saga goes chronologically (story-wise) from Fantasy Box 3-6, to Zen (Before), then the unnamed chapters (Demon Sword), and then Kon (Near), Enn (Far) and finally Gou (Fusion). Unfortunately I could only find Chinese raws for Fantasy Box 3-6 and Zen, so that's what I worked with, and will be working with.

So anyway translating a translation is never pretty, and one of the things that can go horribly wrong is names. Since I don't have the Japanese version to double check, I can only rely on the Chinese transliterations, which, by the way, are horrible because unlike Japanese, in Chinese you can use several sounds to approximate one sound. Just within Fantasy Box 3-6 I had two different writings for "Hunter" and "Jacob". Especially for Hunter, I kind of pulled this one out of my ass because there are just simply no common names that seemed to fit. (海恩特 and 亨特) I'm still pretty satisfied with the choice of Hunter, though, it fits his personality, even though nobody uses it as a name.

That said, I took a peek at the names for the main story, and um, right, having the Japanese isn't any much easier. For the moment I have Estato (esutaato), Montesse (montesu), Zasshu, and Judge (jajji). My impressions of the origins of those names are, Italian, French, Japanese and ??English??. Especially zasshu - in Japanese this means hybrid, but the kanji, in Chinese (杂种), also refers pejoratively to a bastard or someone who doesn't know his father. I doubt it is the same insult in Japanese, but the choice of this name is really mind boggling. "Judge" isn't any better, but at least it isn't an insult.

So yeah, I'll tentatively use these translations of the names, unless somebody can enlighten me and let me know what they're actually supposed to be.

*end rant*

So anyway working with colour is really refreshing, although that means replacing certain SFX is incredibly troublesome. I've narrowed down to two options of adding SFX, I actually used both this time cos I couldn't decide. One is, à la Dragon Ranger, to just paste over the existing Japanese SFX. The other is what I did for the majority of Fantasy Box, that is to just put it beside the panel. If you ask me I think Dragon Ranger did it really well (option 1), but it looks and feels unpolished to me. Still, it's much more immersive than just putting it beside the panel. Although option 1 looks better, it's also much more time consuming. What do readers think?

To wrap up, congrats for reading/skipping all the way down here, you can find the links below. If you have hi-quality scans for the demon saga please let me know. Thanks!

Pride Chapter 13
Fantasy Box 3
Fantasy Box 4
Fantasy Box 5
Fantasy Box 6

A Boy in Hell uncensored

Clever Year and I have re-typeset A Boy In Hell using Arch's uncensored scans. Many thanks to Clever Year for making this a speedy process! =)

Here's the link.

You'll find that some have the watermark of Tinman. Basically those had no censors and were just pulled from the original release.

On a separate but related note, Aniki has kindly agreed to take over the translation of FaSiH, and so he will be doing the rest of the chapters.

I'll probably be trying to finish up Pride now.

Father and Son in Hell Chapters 1 and 2 uncensored

I guess it didn't take too long to transfer all the words from one psd file to the other. Here are the first two chapters of FaSiH. I took the liberty of adding a cover page since the one in the tankoubon overlapped with that of A Boy in Hell.

I understand that in the tankoubon the story's not split into chapters, but since I don't think anybody would want to wait till I was finished with the whole thing, I've decided to continue to translate chapter by chapter. It's also more manageable I think and less daunting than if I were to try to do the whole thing at once.

Father and Son in Hell Chapter 2

Update: Clever Year (who did Kranke) and Chris just informed me of an uncensored (light censor) version (yes I don't frequent the boards), so I will redo Chapters 1 and 2. Unfortunately this means another delay. I don't really know how long I might take though, maybe a couple of days or so?
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Current progress: 16/16

ETA: this coming weekend

PS. Any kind of redrawing takes a lot of time because it is very tedious. I try to avoid doing so, but sometimes it's unavoidable because there's no space to squeeze in a translation.

PPS. Just be patient.

Father and Son in Hell Chapter 1

Okay I've been requested to translate this specially. I know I've sort of stopped translating totally, but I thought I'd just make an exception for this. Here's the first 16 pages of Chapter 1.

Unfortunately I'm terribly occupied again this time of the year so for the next 2 weeks I won't be able to do anything, so work on chapter 2 can only start after that.

For those who don't know, Father and Son in Hell is the 2nd (and last) part of a series, the first of which is titled A Boy in Hell. I also contributed to the translation for that, although someone else typeset and released it, and I don't have the link right now. You can check out this site if you want to read it though.

And finally here is the link.