[Progressive manga] Canon of the Golden Rule - Chapter 9

Heya, everyone. Since Scherzo got some love earlier this week, we decided that Canon should also get some deban!

This is the semi-final chapter of the short-lived Canon of the Golden Rule adaptation. It starts covering Progressive volume 6, beginning from when Kirito awakes with Asuna in his embrace (so much for borders in beds ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ) to the part where the gang goes across the map an encounters a slime while searching for the Key. The next chapter will continue with the battle, but that's where the manga got axed due to people harassing the artist on Twitter... which is a horribly shitty way to lose one of the best manga adaptions SAO has ever had...

On a lighter note, today (28 November in Japan) marks best bro Klein's birthday. So grab your pizza and share it with your bros to celebrate!

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 Account
Translation: Gsimenas
Editing: Gsimenas
Redrawing: Nguyên Milk
Typesetting: Nguyên Milk
Quality Assurance: Mttblue2

Canon #009

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download

Canon #008

Index

Canon #010

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page 03: "This fine gentleman loves fish." - Kirito usually speaks in the casual register, but in this case, he's using polite speech (-desu) and uses the personal pronoun "watashi" (私) rather than his usual "ore" (俺). I went with "fine gentleman" to express that Kirito is being unusually formal in this sentence. In the novel, the joke here was that Kirito's answer was so stale that it felt like it was a model sentence from a textbook for Japanese learners (e.g. A: "Do you like fish?" B: "Yes, I like fish/No, I do not like fish."), where the students are forced to use full sentences, making it sound awkward (who answers a yes or no question by repeating the whole sentence?). This doesn't carry over well into manga format, since there's no commentary from the narration in the manga, so I tried other ways of making Kirito sound awkward.
• Page 03: "personal space" (パーソナルスペース) - Kirito uses English words here and then explains what they mean in Japanese.
• Page 04+: Elves refer to humans as 人族 (jinzoku, lit. human race/tribe), just like how all the fantasy creatures/people in games use the -zoku suffix when talking about the creature/people species/race. I decided to translate this term as "humankin(d)" to account for this nuance, as I could easily apply -kin(d) to any other race to maintain consistency. When the word "elf" comes with the -zoku suffix, I translate it as "elfkin" accordingly.
• Page 04: The mid-sentence question mark after "personal space" in Kizmel's bubble was present in the original text. I added parentheses around it to make it clear that it's not a sentence-ending question mark, but a "did I get that term right?" kind of question mark.
• Page 06: The word "beta" was written as the Greek letter β in the original text.
• Page 11: Kizmel and Asuna use different words to refer to leafy garment that Kizmel donned. Kizmel used the word 外套 (gaitou), which is a Japanese word for "cloak" or "mantle" or "overcoat". Meanwhile, Asuna used the Ingurisshu word "ケープ" (kēpu)... which is just the English word "cape" spelled in katakana.
• Page 11: The trees in elven legends are called 聖大樹, where 聖 means "holy/sacred", "大" means "big/great/grand", and 樹 is a fancy word for "tree". Yen Press translated the term as just "Holy Tree", but that sounded horribly boring, so I decided to go with "Sacred Grandtree" to make it sound special. I fused "grand" and "tree" into one word both for easier reading, and to account for the fancier verbage used in the original text.
• Page 18-19: The word "water spirit" (水霊) has Undine (アンダイン) as furigana, while the word "tree spirit" (樹霊) had "dryad" (ドライアド) as furigana. Villi seems to be the word for an "undine maiden"
• Page 22: "Front Runner" is Argo's preferred term for the group of players trying to beat the game. "FR" is the shorthand for it. In the raw, Kirito used just "FR" (which had "Front Runner" (フロントランナー) in furigana to elaborate what the acronym means to the reader).
• Page 22: Argo has a speech quirk, wherein she nasalises the final syllable of her sentences (represented as katakana for the final kana in her sentence). However, since she's writing down her messages in this case, rather than speaking, she doesn't display her usual speech quirk in these panels.
• Page 22: "AFAIK" - Argo used a colloquialism "とさ" in her sentence. This colloquialism consists of two particles: the quotation particle と (to) and the flavour ending particle さ (sa); it's used as a shorthand for "from what I hear", since it ends in a quotation particle, implying that she heard what she's quoting from someone else, rather than knowing of it firsthand. "AFAIK" sounded like the perfect way to convert this colloquialism into English.
• Page 22: The end of Argo's message contained the string "100C" at the end. The "C" in this string refers to "Cor" (Coin of Radius), the currency used in Aincrad. Argo is indicating how much her info will cost Kirito.
• Page 22: Goskai is a town located in the fourth area of the 6th Floor.
• Page 22: In his message to Argo, Kirito referred to the new boss as "FB" in the original text. FB is an abbreviation of the words "Field Boss", the boss-class monsters that obstruct player passage between different areas of a floor in a way that the players cannot reach the Labyrinth at the end of the Floor without going through the areas guarded by these monsters. The abbreviation is explained to the readers in the form of furigana (フィールドボス) over "FB".
• Page 23: "While the elfkin do have their 《Spirit Trees》, they're still forced to send out messenger soldiers to deliver letters by hand." - due to sentence restructuring, Asuna's sentence in the manga kind of has a different meaning from the original novel version. In the novel, Asuna's first sentence was about elves needing to use messengers to deliver letters, then the second one mentioned that they had Spirit Trees, but their work must still be hard. The manga, on the other hand, moved the Spirit Tree thing to the very front and removed the "must be hard" part, making it sound like they have a means of teleportation, but using it still requires people to deliver stuff by hand. It doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things, but it's not exactly the same thought in different words.
• Page 24: Kizmel's line in the first panel is an approximated quotation of N'ltzahh's words, while the text in background in the following panel are N'ltzahh's own words verbatim. N'ltzahh used some more literary/fancy expressions, so I made his own line more grandiose.
• Page 24: Kysarah speaks in kenjougo (humble language register), so I made her sentence fancier.
• Page 26: The word "clue" in Japanese consists of the word "hand" (手) and the がかり (a whole lot of possible meanings, including "hang", "take" etc.). Hence why all the talk about "clues" lead to thinking about hands and what was in his at the time.

Adaptation notes:

• On page 4, Asuna's reference to the 3rd Floor (Kizmel hiding Asuna and Kirito under her cape) was replaced with a reference to earlier Canon events (the hug scene from a previous chapter) when bringing up that Kizmel doesn't shy away from being close to them. Some additional dialogue was added as well.
• Kirito's monologues about AI were greatly simplified.
• Kirito's monologues about the PKers and their paralysis poison while they were getting their freebies from the Dark Elven supply room was omitted.
• The manga has Kirito giving excuses for why he wanted to find a shortcut to their quest destination.
• The gang's trip to Lake Talpha was skipped entirely. This includes Kizmel taking off her cape the moment they encountered the first signs of greenery and water, the cactus fruit scene, Kizmel's stories of Tilnel, and some minor combat scenes.
• The manga changed how the shoe sole scene played out. In the novel, Kizmel called out to Kirito to lift his shoes first and he made an idiot of himself by lifting his leg to the front, which made him lose balance and fall over himself. After laughing at Kirito, Asuna lifted her leg backwards, keeping herself stable as Kizmel applied the droplets. The manga instead opted to have Kizmel call out to Asuna in favour of a skirt lift scene over a bumbling Kirito.
• Kirito's monologue about the new boss was greatly trimmed down.
• Asuna's first line on page 23 is an original addition to the manga.
• Some of Kirito's monologues were given to Asuna. The phrasing is also a bit different in some lines.
• In the final two pages, Kirito's monologue about slimes was changed into a dialogue with Asuna.
• Various dialogue trimming and rephrasings.