These Translations Suck

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 44-45

2005-11-26T22:33:00.000-08:00

Wow. It's been over a month since I last posted a spread. That's a long time.
Why have I not updated for so long? College essays, homework, anime, and ADHD, not necessarily in that order. I'll try to get pages up more often, though I won't promise anything.
In other news, I got to watching Bleach during this past month. Holy crap, it's freaking awesome.
I don't really have anything else to say now. Enjoy the spread!

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nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 42-43

2005-10-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

Man. More than two weeks since the previous spread. This huge wave of homework (and college essays, ARGH!) has really been tripping me up. But whatever.
Last week my copy of Negima! Volume 7 arrived and good LORD it's hilarious. IMO, it's the funniest one yet. It is also, however, the least fair. I won't spoil it for you, but let's just say that the preview of the next volume left me screaming, "TWO MORE MONTHS NOOOOOOOO!"
I also took the opportunity to pick up Death Note Volume 1 and it's really, really cool. Thankfully, the next volume appears to be coming out in just over a week. At this rate, there'll only be a month between releases, which is very nice. What's even nicer is the low price of the volumes ($8 instead of $10 or, in the case of Negima!, $11!).
I was probably going to say some other things, but I can't remember them. Enjoy this spread!

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 40-41

2005-10-06T23:22:00.000-07:00

And now, two weeks after the previous spread, I finally manage to create another. Yipee! The next few spreads should come more quickly than this one. I had some Real Life troubles and writer's block. Unfair!
With this spread, I am establishing what I shall call The Rule of Two™. What is The Rule of Two&trade? Why, it's quite simple! It states that I will make and post one spread every time I write the translations for two. With this, I can build up a buffer of translations. Then, eventually, I can totally disregard this rule and post a bazillion spreads at once!
This comic introduces something which I may never use again but shall nonetheless give a grand and imposing name to: the Freaking Enormous Exclamation Point. As with other punctuation, I am unsure as to how one would pronounce it, so figure that out on your own.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 38-39

2005-09-21T21:31:00.000-07:00

Man. It's been a while since I've posted a spread. The delay has two causes. The first is homework, which is evil. The more important cause is the need to actually translate the pages. See, my translation process works as follows:

Stare at the physical, untranslated pages for a while.
Spend some time figuring out what the heck to say.
Write that down somewhere.
Lose the paper. Swear. Repeat steps 1-3, this time typing the results into the computer and saving the file.
Scan a bazillion pages in one run.
Take a page and erase the original text from it.
Insert new text.
Post it to the net.
Repeat steps 6-9 for a while. Then start over.

The point I'm trying to make is that I have, at present, totally run out of pretranslated material. I shall therefore not post any more pages until I've set up a big enough buffer of translated text. With luck, I should be able to get that done over the weekend, but I make no promises. In the meantime, enjoy.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 36-37

2005-09-16T23:51:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the wait between the previous spread and this one. I had homework and such to deal with. With school come such annoyances.
Anyways, yeah. The spread. I don't have much to say about it save the following: I have added notes explaining some of the speech into the page itself. There was originally nothing where they were. As for what I added, I explained that I was referencing characters from Love Hina by Ken Akamatsu (who created Negima!, as well) and GTO by Tohru Fujisawa. Both of these series are absolutely hilarious, in my opinion, and you all should check them out and spend lots of money on them. Or borrow them from the library (read: a friend).
And, you know, it's odd. For some reason, all the images seem to have been replaced for 403 Forbidden errors. Hopefully this will resolve itself while I sleep. If not, it may mean I've been booted off Blog*Spot, which would suck. I suppose we shall see, though.
Update: Yay! The images came back! Enjoy!

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 34-35

2005-09-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

Another day, another spread. I've got some real fun stuff planned for the next one but you'll just have to wait until tomorrow or whenever for it! BWAHAHAHA!
Anyways, this page was somewhat annoying due to the frame on the left page with Asuna's head. Why was this annoying? Well, you can't see it here, but the speech bubble to the right of her head was originally transparent. That is to say, there was text in it but you could also see her hair behind the text. Unfortunately, there's no good way to erase the text in those, so I had to nuke it. I'll see if I can find a more elegant solution come future transparent bubbles.
I really hope I didn't have anything else to say, because I can't remember if I did.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 32-33

2005-09-12T18:41:00.000-07:00

Oh, man. This spread was freaking easy. Totally awesome.
Anyways, as of this frame, I am out of pre-translated material. There will therefore be a bit of a delay before the next couple spreads come out. I may get one more out today, but I doubt greatly that I'll do any more than that.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 30-31

2005-09-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

WOW did this page ever suck. EIGHT bubbleless groupings of speech. Had it not been for them, this would have been up sooner. These were so bad that I resorted to putting a colored box over the original text for two of them, something I've been trying to avoid doing. This just wasn't fair.
HOWEVER, this is probably the hardest spread I'll be doing for a while, meaning that the next spreads should be up in much less time than this one was. WOOO!
In this spread, you may notice that a very small character is translated as "The sound of several people forgetting what just happened". Well, what can I say? The Japanese have some really simple ways of saying really complex things.
You may also notice that "!?" is Japanese for "?!". While I didn't know it at the time of translation, this is actually true. Seriously, pick up the English version and find this spread. They did the exact same thing I did, excepting the minor fact that they erased the original, first. Now that's funny.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 28-29

2005-09-08T19:02:00.000-07:00

FINALLY! GOOD GOD THIS PAGE SUCKED! Not only were there 31 people to invent stuff for, but there were 31 people's worth of text to erase. Furthermore, said text was not in a textbox and was therefore much harder to erase. AND THE NEW TEXT HAD TO BE SO SMALL! GAAAAAH!
But I did get this spread done, which is awesome. The later ones will definitely be easier. Unfortunately, I have once again exhausted my set of scanned pages, so I'll need to scan a bunch more. Expect the stream of translations to return sometime soon!
By the way, I don't know if you can tell but my favorite character is Nodoka, followed by Yue. I masked it well, didn't I?

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 26-27

2005-09-06T17:58:00.000-07:00

This spread was a major pain to do. Good lord. The amount of small text was absurd. Furthermore, there were more difficult-to-erase non-bubbled text things. UNFAIR! It is probably worth noting that the girl in the middle of the bottom-right panel is saying something that is intentionally too small to read. Don't worry about it. Or, if you're particularly curious, email me and ask about it.
Now, the next spread will not be completed for a while (though hopefully I'll finish it sometime tonight). This is because there's a whole bloody lot of translating to do on that page and I haven't fully scripted it out yet. It's really annoying.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 24-25

2005-09-05T22:13:00.000-07:00

Well, that's all for tonight. I'll get more up tomorrow.
I find that, in manga, when one of the characters find something they weren't expecting or whatever, they'll tend to say something like, "This...! This is...!" and trail off. And then the camera pans over to see what it is and it's something really dumb, like a cheeseburger. "A CHEESEBURGER! MY PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED!"
Um, yeah.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 22-23

2005-09-05T20:02:00.000-07:00

And another spread has been completed! I would have had this and others up earlier in the day if it weren't for the fact that my school starts tomorrow. See, there's this book I had to read over the summer and I listened to most of it on audiotape. I therefore had to finish it this morning. Upon looking at the tape to determine what I had to read, I discovered a terrible truth: the tape was abridged. This meant that I had to read most of the book before today became tomorrow. Thankfully, I got that out of the way (aided greatly by the fact that I could skip large sections due to having already heard them).
I'll see if I can get another spread or two up tonight, but I will definitely not get pages 28-29 up today. Those are gonna be a major pain to translate. They'll be up tomorrow at the earliest, but don't be surprised if they aren't up until Wednesday.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 20-21

2005-09-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

Got quite a few more pages scanned. I don't think I'll translate any more tonight, though. I am, however, unreliable, so don't be terribly surprised if I do actually get another spread up before I sleep. The same thing, though, definitely applies to the inverse.
Anyways, I'm looking for other manga to do a cursory read-through-and-pretend-I-can-understand for future translation. If you have any suggestions, note them here. Do note that I will not do manga that has (or will eventually have) a bazillion volumes out, where a bazillion is anything unreasonable like 45 (HOLY CRAP DETECTIVE CONAN!). Furthermore, I'd prefer to translate manga that has (or will have) an English version out, so that I can, upon completion, read said English version and say, "HOLY CRAP! I DIDN'T MESS UP THAT PART!" Finally, I don't want to do any manga that I've already read (this being the one notable exception). For this, you can't really know, so go ahead and I'll let you know if I've read said manga. So, yeah. Comment here or email me if you've any suggestions.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 18-19

2005-09-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

With this spread, I have run out of prescanned pages. I now need to scan a bunch more. Gurgle.
Anyways, you may notice that one of the frames on the second page of this spread has some Chinese under the text. Why is this? Well, think of it this way: sometimes the artist decides to say, "Screw word bubbles!" When this happens, the art is placed directly above the art. Erasing it is a major pain. You can see an attempt in the previous spread. That one went much better than this was going (i.e. I couldn't do anything with this one). I therefore said, "Screw erasing this!" and placed my text above their text above the art. So, yeah. Whatever.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 16-17

2005-09-04T00:11:00.000-07:00

Back from college visits, I am! So, I get back and what do I do? A bunch of unrelated things and then TRANSLATE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT! WOO! Anyways, yeah. Expect a couple more pages tomorrow.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 14-15

2005-08-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

This may very well be my last post for over a week. Tomorrow morning, I leave for Texas. I shall visit Rice University and otherwise remain in Texas until Wednesday, at which point I go off to North Carolina. There I shall look at Duke University. Finally, on Saturday, I shall return home. With luck, it won't be too late when I arrive and I'll be able to make and post a couple pages then. I wouldn't bank on it, though. I wanted to get two more spreads up today, but I suppose that isn't happening. I'll see if I can sneak one or both of them in before I go to sleep, but I doubt it'll happen.
Anyways, until I get back, enjoy these!

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 12-13

2005-08-26T19:18:00.000-07:00

There are a couple things I should note about this spread. You may notice that the page number at the bottom says 14, yet I call it page 12. Why is this? Quite simple: the book page numbers count the title page and the table of contents. I don't. Therefore, the page numbers in the images will be different from my page numbers. They will be further apart when I get into Chapter 2 and so on, as I'm going to restart the counting with each chapter.
Additionally, in the second frame on the right page, the double word bubble is cut off somewhat. Were it not cut off, it would be possible to see that the smaller bubble is ascribed to the black-haired girl (though technically she's a brunette). Since it is cut off, though, you can't really tell. I figured it'd work anyway, since she seems to be talking in that panel.
Finally, I just noticed about a minute ago that the supposedly full-size images are actually being slightly scaled down by Blogger. For example, the version of this spread that's on the site has dimensions of 1024x800. However, I uploaded a file with dimensions of 1264x988. This has been happening with all of the spreads, though not the single pages. While this isn't too big of a change, it does make some of the smaller text slightly harder to read. Thankfully it hasn't, as of yet, made anything completely illegible. Since I'm not going to make any smaller text than I've already been making, I don't think I have to worry about this. If you want the full size versions, you can do one of two things: email me and ask for them or wait until I finish the chapter, at which point I'll put them all in a Zip file and host them somewhere.
Uh, yeah. Enough of my talking! Enjoy this spread!

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 10-11

2005-08-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

And now for more translation goodness! In this spread, I encountered several problems. Problem the first: since I don't scan the comic at a high enough resolution (300 DPI vs. my 150 DPI), several of the text bubbles in the big middle frame were too small to really fit anything in. Problem the other: .....I can't remember this one anymore. It was something really annoying, though. Whatever. I'll post it if I remember it.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 8-9

2005-08-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

One of the speakers in this spread says, quite accurately, "This got cut off!" Why is this? Well, it's because their speech was, in fact, cut off. When I put the original book into the scanner, parts towards the center of each page are obscured by each other. While this is annoying, it doesn't affect anything too much. I imagine that, as I get to the middle of the book, it'll go away for a bit. Once I get to the end of the book, though, it'll return. Argh!

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 6-7

2005-08-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

I had to split this spread into two images because one page was color and the other was greyscale. Had I left them together, Photoshop's leveling feature wouldn't have worked as well, and I need it to make the images look all nice.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 4-5

2005-08-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

Pages 4 and 5 have been translated! I hope to get a couple more done today. Keep checking for more!

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Pages 2-3

2005-08-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

Yay! I cranked out two more pages!
I really have to say, the covers and the title page are much harder to translate than the actual content pages. The content pages are nice and easy (AND QUICK!) to fix up. I hope this continues when I get to the greyscale pages.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Chapter 1 Page 1

2005-08-24T22:42:00.000-07:00

I am proud to present the first page of actual content. I hope you enjoy it! I'll try to bang out the second and third pages soon.

nELYgima! Volume 1 Covers and Front Page

2005-08-24T20:44:00.000-07:00

nELYgima! Volume 1 has begun! Here are the covers and the title page. Enjoy!

Front Cover

Back Cover

Title Page

It may be worth noting that I accidentally bought the Chinese version of this volume. Future volumes will probably be the Japanese editions, so the publisher and title text and whatnot shall be different on those.
Stay tuned for the actual comic!

Volume 1 Index
Next pages

nELYgima! Volume 1

2005-08-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

Covers and Front Page
Chapter 1

nELYgima!

2005-08-24T20:41:00.000-07:00

nELYgima! is my version of Negima!. Negima! is the creation of Ken Akamatsu, to whom I profusely apologize. Negima! is written in Japanese and therefore does not read in the same direction as English. To read this comic, start at the top right and make your way to the left and down. That is, treat it like an English comic that's been mirrored.

Translated:

Volume 1

Buy the originals: