[Progressive manga] Canon of the Golden Rule - Chapter 7

Heya, folks. I was on vacation the past couple of weeks and didn't have time or energy to work on any translations, while Mtt was busy moving and couldn't QC any of the chapters I had stockpiled. Now that I'm back from vacation, I do hope things will pick back up again, but it all depends on how much RL decides to be a bitch, to be honest. Anyway, since we haven't had any releases for around a month, it might be time for a love-starved project of ours to get some much-needed attention. So, for this week, we'll be releasing a chapter of Canon of the Golden Rule. We were planning to make the release yesterday, but MEGA decided to randomly stop syncing files our files, so I had to wait for Mtt to get back from work to fix the issue.

Chapter 7 of the manga covers Asuna and Kirito's talks with Kizmel, before an obligatory excursion to the bath.

In kinda old news (seeing as we haven't had a release for this project in over half a year), as you've probably heard, the Canon of the Golden Rule manga was cancelled on chapter 10 because of poor reception (i.e. some a-holes on Twitter posting negative comments for petty things, which broke the artist's passion). This is a grave loss for the SAO community and we at Dreadful Decoding are devastated by this turn of events. Although the manga got cut short, we do plan to finish this project to the end.

So, I hope you all savour what little we have left of this amazing manga with the upcoming releases. 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 #007

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download

Canon #006

Index

Canon #008

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page 01: "or something far more sinister, out with it!" - in the novel, Kizmel's line was "ただの物盗りか　それとも…" (tada no monotori ka, soretomo... = just a band of robbers, or...), where the meaningful pause was filled in by Kirito's answer. In the manga, however, Kizmel's line was expanded to "ただの物盗りか　それとも…一体どんな連中だったんだ！" (tada no monotori ka, soretomo... ittai donna renchuu datta-nda! = just a band of robbers, or... what in the world was this gang!). The manga version of the line is very awkward to translate: it doesn't connect well in English, and it ends in a somewhat demanding tone (i.e. "tell me!), rather than a meaningful pause. To make her line work in English, I had to replace the meaningful pause with an outright "or something worse", and decided to throw in a "out with it" at the end to account for Kizmel's more desperate/flustered/demanding tone.
• Page 01: "Ehm, they were a pair of playe-" - Kirito almost used the gaming term "player", which he realised Kizmel wouldn't understand all that well, so he decided to switch to terms elf NPCs would be more familiar with.
• Page 01: 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.
• Page 02: "If only I had been present during this attack, I would have made sure such scum had their heads lopped from their shoulders in no time!!" - Kizmel uses the conjunction "ものを" (mono o) at the end of the sentence, which adds a nuance of strong discontent. I decided to treat it as "If only I had been" to express her discontent. Also, in this case, she uses the word "奴ばら" (yatsubara) to refer to the PKers, which is a derogatory way to say "they".
• Page 04: "throwing pick" - the original text used 投げ針 (nagebari = throwing needle), but this whole term had the word ピック (pikku = (throwing) pick) as furigana. I decided to just translate it as "throwing pick" for both clarity and simplicity.
• Page 05+: The original text uses two words to refer to "Fallen Elves": the katakanised English word フォールン (fohrun), and the actual Japanese word 堕ちた (ochita). Both mean "fallen" as in "fallen from grace" or "depraved". I decided translated instances of フォールン as "fallen", and instances of 堕ちた as "disgraced"
• Page 07: I replace honorifics with English words when they're used with titles. "Esteemed" is my replacement for "-sama".
• Page 07: 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 09: All months have unique in-lore names in Aincrad.
• Page 12-14: Kizmel adds the suffix -domo (ども) when referring to Fallen Elves. This is a denigrating pluralising suffix, implying that the speaker sees the person references as either very much below them in status, or it emphasises that they are bad people (e.g., criminals).
• Page 13: "How did I even manage to miss this when we were looking over it; such an epic fail…!!" - the original sentence had a word tacked on after another word that usually marks the end of the sentence. To replicate this effect, I used a semicolon instead of a full stop.
• Page 18: The word "beta" was written as the Greek letter β in the original text.
• Page 22: Since elves have never heard of a thing called "swimsuits" before she learnt the term from Asuna and Kirito, Kizmel still finds the word a bit foreign to her. This is depicted by having the Japanese word for swimsuits (mizugi) written in katakana (ミズギ) rather than in kanji (水着), since katakana is used to write out foreign words or words pronounced awkwardly. To account for this, I deliberately wrote the word "swimsuits" phonetically as "swemstyuts".
• Page 23: "Whoa, changing room big!!" - Kirito's remark here is an exclamation of surprise, not a full-fledged sentence, so I made it a bit broken grammar-wise to make it sound more like a sudden reaction, rather than a well thought-out comment.
• Page 23-24: "Art of Mystic Scribing" (幻書の術, Gensho no Jutsu) - the elven term for player menu windows.
• Page 29: "Whoawai-" - in his fluster, Kirito slurred the words "whoa" and "wait" into one.
• Page 29: "Outer Field" refers to areas that are not affected by the Anti-Criminal Code (i.e., outside of safe zones).

Adaptation notes:

• The dialogue on the first page was re-ordered/rephrased due to the manga skipping Kirito's line about them being attacked for more dramatical oomph.
• In the novel, Kirito was the one who interrupted and calmed Kizmel down when she started demanding that they stay by her side at all times.
• Kizmel didn't hype up the bath for Asuna in the novel.
• The girls' dressing room scene wasn't in the novel, since it was from Kirito's perspective.
• In the novel, Asuna was the first to get into the bath, so Kirito was the one who came across Asuna already enjoying the bath, rather than vice versa.
• The manga changed up the final bath scene: in the novel, Kirito tackled Asuna to stop her from punching him and going criminal because they weren't in the safe zone, then the downpour hit both of them, and that's when Kizmel came in and found them in an incriminating position (there's even a coloured illustration for this scene); instead, the manga skipped the tackle and just went with Kirito being the only one to get hit with a downpour, then Asuna rushing to cover Kizmel up, only to end up giving Kirito a nice view. The other parts of the bath conversation get covered in the next chapter as a flashback.
• Some of Kirito's lines were given to Asuna in the manga.
• Various dialogue trimming and rephrasings.