Another chapter! I wanted to get it out sooner, but the entire month of January attempted to kill me, so it's here now. Thankfully this is a pretty big chapter, so I think it's worth the wait.
This time we get some history- I was tempted to add a note about Nobunaga, but I decided that might be too long to provide any effective information. I believe his wikipedia page will do a better job of providing context. As it turns out, Kuki's name is a reference to Kuki Yoshitaka, who was indeed a naval commander who assisted Nobunaga.
The "Demon Creed" organization gave me the most trouble in translation... "kidou" can be interpreted multiple ways. Demon creed, way of demons, the demon path, etc. This is why Kuki's profile in the first chapter says demon path while this chapter calls it demon creed.
This chapter also had lots of fishing notes! I'm not entirely sure how standard English loan words are in the Japanese fishing world, but some terms seem to be slightly different over here. For example, Kuki calls his lure a "minnow plug", but this is somewhat contradictory in American English. Both minnow and plug refer to a hardbait lure, but a minnow is long and slender, while a plug is short and fat. I am surprised however at just how many English loan words are used for fishing- even the "jerk retrieve" is spelled in katakana.
By the way, have I mentioned I'm an avid fisherman myself? It's part of what drew me to translating Grander Musashi in the first place... The weather is still too cold to fish over here, so I'm living vicariously through this manga :P Anyway, Grander Musashi very clearly wants to teach kids about fishing (volume 2, especially, has bonus chapters that go farther into specific mechanics), so I like to pretend I'm making a genuine, official translation (rather than say, for random 20 somethings on the internet). Maybe it sounds obvious, but it makes me focus more on how descriptions of lures and techniques sound, and it helps hold on to the integrity of the original manga.
I've been trying to put more effort into sound effects, they're my least favorite thing to do but I think it adds a nice touch. I had to look at fonts for them- you wouldn't believe how many terrible fonts there are. I'm praying I never have to download another, or rather keep looking at them.
Anyway, Kojiro is a character that really grew on me. He shows up in the previous chapter as this big cool rival, only to reveal he's a huge nerd with his fishing simulator in the very next chapter. He's got a fun design too.
Well, I couldn't find a good way to write an accent in the end, I realized Kojiro just sounded really dumb, lol. It's something better left to audio rather than writing, I guess.
No translated puns this time, but an interesting note- There's a lot of author's notes about fishing terms, some of which I included, but I removed a lot. The ones I removed were English terms that would've been redundant to include. For example, there's this:
The note is explaining an English term in Japanese, but a literal translation would be something like "Clear water - water that is clear, with two meters or more of transparency". Like, I trust you guys know what that would be. Other notes include stuff like "Line break - when the line is broken." and "Pressure - when the bass is cautious."
A little late on updating this site, but I released chapter 2 a while back. This chapter introduced Kojiro, our first rival. In general, I'm trying to put more thought into the way characters speak- with Microid S my main philosophy was simply making it understandable, as I was desperate to read it and assumed no one else would really be interested. Kojiro's from Kansai, and considering his personality I thought a New Yorker accent would be fitting. In this chapter I didn't do too much with it, I definitely don't wanna make the accent so overbearing that every sentence he says is unreadable. But I think I struck a decent balance in chapter 3.
On the note of trying harder with translation, I'm trying to replace sound effects and such too. I've finally discovered the clone stamp tool in photoshop and am making good use of it. Here's to higher quality translation!
The first chapter of Grander Musashi has been posted on Mangadex! I've been thinking of revamping this site a little- now that Mangadex no longer has comments, I think I'll start putting translation commentary here.
There's nothing too exciting in this chapter, but I thought this was worth sharing. In the original, Musashi introduces himself to Mio with "ore", which he usually uses around his dad, but then corrects himself and uses "boku". I tried to convey this by having him switch to something just slightly more casual.