Belated Gifts (SZS 212)

Yaru yo.

This was originally intended to be a quickie package of Oya’s tank retypeset and some TL Notes in time for Valentine’s Day. Then I discovered that the available tank raws were actually missing two pages from this chapter; fortunately GreenTea still had the five year old magazine scans. Then I actually read these originals and started to discover some mistakes … lots of mistakes … actually, our original release of this chapter was kind of bad. As in please throw it away and do not look at it again, because it contains a number of howlers that we lacked the skills to avoid in those pre-Umin days. So this ended up being pretty much a redo from scratch apart from the clean and type layers, and hence missed the target date by a country mile. Anyway, pretty much lived up (or down) to our group motto here, honto ni sumimasen, sumimasen…

As it happens, and as usual with Kumeta-sensei, the Valentine’s Day custom of chocolate-giving (as adapted by the Japanese) was just an excuse to launch into the topic of 下克上 gekokujō, awkwardly translated by the EDICT dictionary as “juniors dominating seniors; retainer supplanting his lord.” I chose to go with “social upheaval” as, particularly during the Edo period shogunate’s rigid social/class structure, any idea of people bucking the status quo was considered a major violation of social norms. As you of course know by now from reading our many TL Notes on the topic, the Japanese language is notable for specific linguistic patterns specifically used to signal one’s understanding and conformance to these social norms, mostly involving automatic respect/status given to those either older or of higher social class than oneself. The entire chapter dialogs reflect this, but I will just discuss one example, our release picture of Chiri. The “yaru yo” she says in Japanese uses the ‘do’ verb 遣る which is used to mean “to give” when giving to an inferior, most commonly an animal; for example  zanpan o inu ni yaru “I’m giving the leftovers to the dog.” Not using respect speech with a teacher would be rude enough, but Chiri’s “Here.” would be closer to “I’m letting you have this (not that you deserve it) you loser!” Itoshiki-sensei is of course all too aware of her skills with the shovel to take offense…

>> Get SZS 212 here <<
>> Mirror <<
TL Notes
[Translator: slyborg TLC/Proof: pseu Typesetters: Oyashiro, slyborg]

We here at Suimasen of course hold our readers in the highest regard, and proffer our poor attempt at translation with all humility. Please accept it!

So, I hope I didn’t discourage Moy Moe from taking up the great cause here; you see, we’re dead and it makes scanlation a slow business. I don’t usually read other translations because I don’t want to be biased, but I liked that chapter and was curious what they made of it. I actually think they did a fine job, apart from, you know, getting Nami’s name wrong … which I’m sure was a simple mistake, but given the specific importance in this manga of the character names, it was too much for me to avoid pointing out. I’d actually be happy to joint with a group with staff and time to finish SZS, having it with a couple of volumes untranslated still fills me with despair…

Fate Kaleid Batch Links Updated

また読んでね！

In the never-ending struggle against the forces of automated copyright trolling, those of us that want others to have nice things must be eternally vigilant. TL;DR – Project page now has updated links including the batches of the original series (of which Suimasen only did the last 4 chapters), as well as batch for 2wei. Names are slightly obfuscated to make the bot herders work harder, but no promises, eh.

Still would like to re-master the series, was working off old-school small format magraws in the dark ages of five years ago, and some of the chapters, particularly ch. 9 were off some heinous black and white Share raws. Or maybe Kadokawa will finally license the thing for English translation. It’s like they hate money…

Nyantastic (SZS 231v2)

Our Lady of Bizarre Lyrics

Alrighty, first of the leftover Oyashiro tank re-edits. He originally did these approximately two years ago, which gives you some idea of how long we’ve been dead. Our original release of the original magazine version was in April 2011, this was one of the chapters animated in the BD extra released January 2012. Yes, it’s been 3 years since SZS got its last animated release.

I started with this one because the tank extra was a papercraft page with almost no text. Then I decided to put up the TL Notes on the wiki, having forgotten that this one had Kumeta in rare form, with not one, but two Despair Lists and a panel of background references to boot. I know that there are approximately zero people that actually read the TL Notes, but we do these things not because they are popular, but because we are enormous weebs that thrive on suffering.

This also happens to be one of the most difficult to translate chapters in the series, being essentially sound puns in Japanese the whole way. Umin just left the “nyan/nan” thing stand, the anime sub by [gg] tried to make a rhyme in English and made it even less comprehensible IMHO.

>> Get SZS 231 here <<
>> Mirror <<
TL Notes
[Translator: Umin Typesetter: Oyashiro Proofreader: slyborg]

 

Cool Runnings (SZS 295)

Has Marui been featured on a blogpost before?

So, remember when I said that this one would take less than six months? Yeah, about that…
Actually, this was finished last August, and then we were dead, so motivation was lacking, but since I was releasing things this week, finally got around to doing pseu’s proof edits. Having a good proofer is really the difference between a decent scanlation and complete shite for me at least.
In any case, this completes the chapters from SZS vol. 30, although as it happens, this one is basically completely unrelated to the final arc.

>> Get SZS 295 here <<
>> Mirror <<
TL Notes
[Translator: slyborg TLC: pseu Typesetter: slyborg Proofreader: pseu]

Still have a couple of tank re-edits done by Oyashiro that need translation of the tank additions that I’ll try to get out the coming week. Not sure what happens after that, since we’re, you know, dead. But if the current state of the art in SZS scanlation doesn’t improve, we may have to take things in hand once again:

「カナーちゃんって言うな！」 PROTIP: Furigana are your friends!

And it’s correct in another panel on the same page :facepalms: See what I mean about a good proofreader?

Refugee Status (SZS 251)

Know that feel, Meru-Meru…

So it’s been brought to my attention that these guys have started releasing SZS chapters. This is useful, since we’re dead. However, we think of ourselves as being a little like Ononoki Yotsugi, so we tend to take these things in stride and thus keep releasing SZS as any self-respecting kaii scangroup would.

Timing here is actually coincidental, since it just happens that a Wild Translator suddenly appeared a couple of weeks ago and provided us with a script. Thanks to Lemon for their contribution to the cause here! A Wild Hipster also suddenly reappeared to do some proofing, and thanks as always to pseu and apologies for the lack of a right single quote character in Anime Ace ._.

>> Get SZS 251 here <<
>> Mirror <<
TL Notes
[Translator: lemon TLC: pseu Typesetter: slyborg Proofreader: IO]

However, it appears somewhat unlikely that we will receive a follow-up to this, since Kumeta manga tend to repel staff like a Starfleet navigational deflector. So there may, or may not be further releases, suimasen. ✌️ Peace Peace ✌️