Chapter 4 of the manga covers Kirito's battle against Morte, up to the point where Asuna joins the fray. The manga does still take some creative liberties (I've made a detailed adaptation note list below, for those interested in a comparison), but nothing major.
Since we've made a double (technically, triple) release this week, I'll be taking the next week off to finish reading Volume 26. The week after that, we'll either finish up the V24 summary, or maybe we'll be blessed by Mtt again 👀
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the release. If you have any suggestions/requests for what to work on, feel free to leave a comment or contact us through Twitter/Discord/Email.
-Gsimenas
Credits
Raws: Official SAOP Canon Twitter AccountTranslation: Gsimenas
Editing: Gsimenas
Redrawing: Nguyên Milk
Typesetting: Nguyên Milk
Quality Assurance: Mttblue2
Canon #004
Links for the translation files:Translation (choice/nuance) comments:
- Page 05+: Morte speaks in an informally polite tone with a speech quirk, wherein he elongates the final vowel (usually the sentence ending particle) in his sentences. The elongation consists of an extra small kana for the vowel + a vowel elongation mark (chouonpu, ー). So, sentences that end in desu ka (ですか) become desu kaah (ですかぁー), sentences that end in desu ne (ですね) become desu neeh (ですねぇー) and so on. To account for this quirk, I tried to include some kind of filler phrase at the end of his sentences that I then elongated with an em dash + extra vowels. I also made him sound a tad more formal, but sprinkled his speech with some slang and informal expressions, since he's basically feigning being polite. Strangely enough, Yen Press made Morte sound like the informal guy and made Joe sound like he was speaking regular old Japanese, rather than coarsely informal Japanese.
- Page 11: "Yikes, my alarm bells are ringing...!!" - the original phrase was "I've got a bad feeling about this...!!" (ヤバい予感が…！！), but the word "bad" was "yabai", which actually sounds more like "yikes" or "oh shit", but that didn't work with English grammar, so I decided to rework the sentence in a way that I could use "yikes".
- Page 16+: Joe speaks in a very coarse manner, so I tried making his speech more informal and slangy.
- Page 18: Joe uses the word 女 (onna), which is literally the common word for "woman" in Japanese. However, using this word on its own usually has negative connotations (i.e. sounds brusque) that the English word "woman" doesn't necessarily have without extra qualifiers. The way Joe uses the word sounds more like an insult, so I decided to opt for the word "broad", as it better fits his tone.
- Page 21: "Sayonara, sucker!" - the original phrase was あばよ！ (abayo!), which is a colloquial way to say "bye" in Japanese (kind of like saying "ciao" or something). I tried to think of some sort of humorous way to say "bye" to account for this nuance and fit the tone of Joe's speech as well. My first idea was to use "Hasta la vista, baby", but then I found out that the Spanish translation of Terminator 2 used "Sayonara, baby" instead to maintain the humours nature of the phrase in Spanish. Since sayonara sounded more in-line, I decided to go with that, but changed "baby" to "sucker" to better fit Joe's tone. It also helped avoid making direct references to Terminator 2 that weren't exactly intended in the original text.
- The part about knocking over the jar was from Kirito's point of view in the novel, rather than Asuna's.
- In the novel, the first half of the chapter was told through Kirito's narration. The manga changed it to monologues and dialogues to better suit the medium. Accordingly, a large portion of the text got rephrased to better suit the new format.
- Kirito blocked Morte's first throwing pick with his sword, rather than dodging it, in the novel.
- Kirito's question about Morte's picks got changed a bit. The order of the clauses got reversed and Kirito referred to poison in general, rather than paralysis specifically, when talking about how rare such picks were.
- In the novel, Kirito used the reflection of his sword to check on the smoke, rather than glancing at it directly.
- The manga doesn't make it clear that Kirito saw that Asuna was no longer paralysed based on his party window; he was just worried for how long she could hold her breath.
- Morte's explanation about the smoke to his companion was greatly shortened.
- The line about Joe being surprised that the smokes were toxic was not part of the novel.
- The order of Joe's lines about Asuna got changed. Because of this change, Joe sounds like he cared more about Asuna than dealing with Kirito, when he was the one to propose dealing with Kirito first, as Asuna seemingly posed no danger at the moment.
- The manga skipped Kirito's monologues about his hesitenacy to kill anyone in the game, even player killers. In the novel, Kirito's brooding over this matter allowed Morte to jump into action against him; meanwhile, the manga made an original scene about Morte taunting Kirito to get him to lose his cool and launch a poorly-thought-out attack of his own, which left him open to Joe's attacks. Meanwhile, in the novel, Kirit was well aware of how foolish it was to give into impulses like that, though he let his guard down by overthinking things instead.
- In the novel, Kirito noticed Asuna coming out from the smoke well before the player killers did, as his fight against them took place a bit of a distance away from the smoke, which meant that Asuna had to close the distance first, rather than attacking straight from the cloud of smoke.
- Various dialogue trimming.
Happy birthday to Jeng!
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks a lot for the translation !