I really didn't know what to do with "Is he dead yet?" because I think it's important that Matis uses the word 死んだ, indicating that he intended to kill Red. The speech bubble is so tiny it was hard to fit much in it. If you can think of something better, let me know!

"That little shit" is probably the worst the language is going to get in my translation. While the original comic is intended for children, I figure the people who are reading my scanlation are older, so I'm "adapting" some of the language to fit the new audience.

The thing with Japanese is that there aren't a lot of right out "curse words," kids and adults use the same kinds of interjections as one another for the most part. How you translate it is more depending on what you assume the speaker would say in English, rather than a straight translation. So when kids say くそ I tend to translated it as "Shoot" or "Crap," while adults can say "Damn" or even "Shit;" both kids and adults use the word and it just literally is just a colloquialism for poop. It doesn't "mean" a certain curse word or interjection, and is used in both light and heavy places, so it's all about the context.

In this case even something like "brat" would have worked, but I feel like Matis would definitely say something like "That little shit" lol.

Also he says "Heh heh heh" a lot. The Japanese is "fufufu" if you were curious, which I think some characters even say in the official English localization of the games, but I don't feel like "fufufu" comes across as meaningful in English lol. But yeah... It's almost like it's his signature phrase or something.

If you guys are curious, here's what I do to create a translated page of manga.

I use The GIMP 2 for editing, it's really great software and can get everything done quickly and lightly with powerful results. So I just drag a page of the raw scans into GIMP to begin.



The first thing I do is kinda boring, but I always make sure to scale the page to a height of 1100. This is just a preferred number for me; no real significance. But it makes the pages all the same size. Fortunately for me the scans I'm using are all the same dimensions, so I just have to scale and don't have to crop parts and stuff.

The next part is aligning everything so it's straight. The pages are usually kinda crooked at first.



I zoom to 200% and find a straight line on the page, and scroll until one corner of it is aligned with the top ruler...



And then rotate the entire image until the line is pretty straight on the computer screen.



Because the image is no longer a perfect rectangle, but rather a crooked one, there are areas of transparency leaked around the edge of the image where it was rotated. So I just create a layer that I fill with white and put it behind the page to fill in those gaps.



Next I adjust the color levels by upping the black levels to make the darks darker. The scans I'm working with are already very light and the base color is white, not grey, so I don't have to mess with the upper tones. I usually put the blacks somewhere in between 60 (pages with more shading on them) and 90 (pages without much shading). If there's a LOT of shading like the opening pages to VS Goriky for example, I'll go even lower, as you start to lose some of the detail when there's a lot of gradients.

But yeah, this process makes the outlines of things "pop" more so it's easier to tell where everything is on the page, and it makes the blacks "blacker." If you look on the before/after picture above, you can see stuff like Nyorozo and Red's shirt look kind of dusty or speckled in the original scan, but are a solid black after the adjusted levels. Overall it just gives the image a better appearance, and makes the black lettering fit in better, as well.



Then I just erase the text. I don't do anything special here, I just use a hard-edged white brush and scribble over it until the text is gone. You could even do this with the pencil tool in MSPaint if you wanted to. In fact, the first time I ever tried to scanlate a manga, I did it in MSPaint and erasing the text was just as easy!



Next I create a transparent layer on top of the page. This is where all the text is going to go. There are probably many ways of doing this but this is the way I like to do it. For now this layer does nothing, as text gets their own layers in GIMP anyway.



Then I quickly make text boxes and type in the translation. I'm doing this on my own, so I just translate it on the fly while looking at the original scan in another window. But if you were working in a group, you'd probably have a script or something?

Anyway, I just get the text on the image, it doesn't matter if it's off-center. I make the box for inserting the text within the text bubble so I know it won't overflow. If it's a little more complicated shape I have to make multiple text boxes or mess around with spacing and stuff, but usually it's just one box, type the text, go to the next box. Very quick and easy.

Once all the text layers are done, I merge them down onto one another until finally they're all merged onto the empty layer I made earlier for text.

After that, I forgot to make a screencap, but I just use the selection, cut, paste, and move tools to get the text in the places I want it to be. It's already small enough to fit in the bubbles, I just have to center it now.

The "hardest" editing part is when the text needs an "outline" around it (like, when there's white surrounding the text in the shape of the text, when the text has to go directly on top of the image, like the chapter titles). For this I type the text, then from the text layer I create a path from the text (Text to Path). Then on the 'blank' layer, I select from path, grow the selection by a couple pixels, fill in the selection with white, merge the text down onto it, and cut and paste the whole blob and position it where I need it. It sounds complicated but it's actually really easy and looks nice too. Much better than the text merging into the black of the image or just putting a big white box over the art.

If you want to fill in something that was filled in with a color with text on it or something, or try to edit the art in the background, you can use the Clone tool. I've only done this a couple times and it's very hard to make it look good. But you can even "erase" text that's on top of artwork, like the chapter titles, if you really had the technique and patience. I tried erasing the chapter titles before and ended up giving up, so now I just leave the Japanese titles with a little subtitle.

And with that, we have a finished page of manga. Quite easy and only takes a few minutes. The hardest part is deciding what to actually write for the translation. The editing part is easy. But I don't edit sound effects and other stuff that's on top of the art really (though I might go back and edit a few) so I'm only doing the easy parts, really.

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When Kasumi comes out in her fancy dress, Red makes reference to a saying that "Even the packhorse driver looks good in the right clothes," but he says "Horse" instead of "Horse driver," when Kasumi annoyedly corrects him because it's like he's calling her a horse. It was really hard to come up with a good substitution for this, so I went with "clothes make the man," with Kasumi being upset that he compared her to a "man."

I realize "even more stronger" isn't grammatically correct, but she's trying to nail home the point that they need to be MORE AND MORE AND MORE STRONGER so I feel like she'd add the "more" in there for emphasis.

I feel like I kinda keep repeating myself but Kasumi doesn't say "See you next time... Red..." (she doesn't say "Red" at all in that part) in Japanese, but rather something along the lines of "Next time we meet, I'm looking forward to it." which is not only a little awkward in English, but doesn't fit in the speech bubbles. I think addressing Red to herself kinda finalizes their meeting, in a similar way that saying she's looking forward to the next time does.

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A fun chapter, we finally get to meet Kasumi! Soooo much talking in this one, though XD

Red refers to Kasumi as おねえちゃん (Onee-chan) before learning her name. This literally means "big sister" as Japanese people use familiar terms like that to address people they don't know. I decided not to include this, nor to try to add words like "miss" or whatever, as it just doesn't flow in English. I'm trying to make the script sound like things people would actually say in English, and no one would say "oneechan," and no one would say "miss" or "young lady" or something like that, either. He would simply say "you" in English. In Japanese it's a bit rude to say the word "you" directly to someone you don't know, as illustrated by Red's response to Kasumi calling him "you." So they use those family terms, but it's really just a substitute for "you," so "you" works in English.

That was way too much explanation for that, but I know the "I-kinda-know-Japanese" weebs out there insist that this stuff get left in, when it makes the script flow poorly and sound horrible.

I decided to leave in the -chan for Hito-chan because it's a nickname. When I used to actively speak both Japanese and English, we'd use honorifics like that when speaking English if it was the "name" of someone we regularly spoke about in Japanese. But if it was someone we didn't speak about much or spoke about more in English, we'd use no honorifics or English ones like Doctor or Mister. So it's going to be tough deciding how to go about these in the future.

In one case, something gets lost in translation when you don't keep the honorifics in, as a lot of times there's no real substitute in English. But at the same time, it doesn't mean anything to someone unfamiliar with them and creates poor flow and an unnatural sounding script in English. I think the best middle ground is probably the way Atlus does it in the Persona series, keeping them in when they're commonly-used names for the characters, but using English honorifics when the honorific is more important than it being used as a basically "full name" for the character.

I haven't addressed this before, but in the Japanese script they use quotation marks around the names of techniques. I decided not to do this, as quotation marks have different connotations in English and Japanese, and it just makes more sense without them.

The word 草 (kusa) means "grass" most literally, but also can refer to foliage in general, so "plant" is an acceptable translation for the Pokemon type. "Plant" is probably more accurate, but I'm so used to "grass" that I've already used it without even thinking, and will probably continue to use it, so to preserve consistency I should probably just stick with "grass." Maybe someday if I do a revision (like if I get access to higher-quality scans or something?) I'll replace all the "grasses" with "plants."

Since the technique makes literal haustoria, I felt like "haustoria seed" was a more fitting name than "parasitic plant seed," and makes a bit more sense than "leech seed."

Gyarados's species is listed as 凶悪 (kyouaku) which can mean a whole lot of things, particularly very evil things. I went with "Atrocious" because it's the same as the English localization in the games.

The time finally came where I had to refer to what we know as "Team Rocket" in English. "Team" isn't very accurate, though I guess it could work. "Gang" was an option I considered, but that's about as accurate as "team," to be honest, and in the end I decided it sounded too childish. I settled on "Rocket Group" because it sounds quite professional, and the Rockets like to portray themselves as a legitimate professional organization, at least in the games. Hope no one is mad at me for this one!

Not really a translation note but a beef with the original writing -- IDK why Red is so shocked when Kasumi says she wants to come along and asks if she's going to be OK on "her own" (which I didn't put in my script because it makes no sense that she's going to be "on her own" if she's with Red anyway) when she already clearly showed her prowess against Gyarados, and it's already known that she's a Pokemon trainer.

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Another chapter is here! This was a "fun" one to work on, what with that Zukan entry AND the gym flier. I like when my job is easy and I just have to arrange the same size of text everywhere XD

I'm very happy I got to throw in the term "rat bastard" in there. It fits because not only is "rat bastard" a thing, but Pikachu is a rat. And the term is kind of an in-joke with my friend. So it's a very fun panel.

On page 52, Red tosses a Monster Ball and says はい which is kinda like "here," but he says it in a cute way. So I thought saying "boop" to show that he was being silly and showing how easy it was was a good idea. I wonder what kind of reaction this will get...

Pikachu's moves are based on electricity, not "thunder" like their English localization counterparts, but this makes them hard to fit in these little boxes. We have Electric Shock and Electromagnetic Wave, both which I just shortened to "elec." for the zukan entry. でんこうせっか literally means lightning-speed, but I changed it to "Lightspeed" to save space, and I just think it sounds better. But I don't look forward to Pikachu using "Electromagnetic Wave" in the future. Especially when the Japanese is so small, the speech bubble for it will be tiny.

Elec-
tro-
mag-
ne-
tic
wave!

lol...

I'm starting to take more liberties when the Japanese script translates into something that no one would ever say in English. So for example, Red says "What's going on back there?" when Pikachu is rustling about in his Monster Ball on his back, which sounds way more natural than anything even close to a literal translation, even if the meaning is different, and still conveys the same types of feelings from the original script IMO.

On page 56, I really was thinking about having Green say "slowly" instead of "slow," as that's grammatically correct, but I just can't imagine a kid colloquially saying "slowly" in that type of sentence.

On page 59, I was really close to having Red call Green a 'douche' instead of a 'jerk,' but I don't know if 10-year-olds say 'douche' like we did in high school. It's probably not a word that younger kids throw around because they probably don't even know what it means. I wanted something a little more slang-y than "jerk," but I couldn't come up with anything, so "jerk" it is...

Chapter 2 is up!

https://rapidshare.io/1UZj/v1ch2.7z

I'll do translation notes in a bit.