[Progressive manga] Scherzo of Deep Night - Chapter 017

Since Scherzo got licensed a while back and we only have a couple of chapters left, we're currently prioritising on getting these out before working on our other stuff. We only have two more chapters to do.

Chapter 17 covers part of the boss battle aftermath. Since the boss was defeated, the big question now... is who got the flag?

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.

Finally, a standard thank you to all of those who contributed to the SAO Scans project for helping us get the raws.

-Gsimenas

Credits

Raws: SAO Scans
Translation: Gsimenas
Editing: Gsimenas
Redrawing: Nguyen Milk
Typesetting: Nguyen Milk
Quality Assurance: Mttblue2

Scherzo of Deep Night - Chapter 17

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download

Chapter 016

Index

Chapter 018

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page 01: The "Congratulations!" message was written in English in the original text.
• Page 04+: Argo has a speech quirk wherein she changes the last kana (usually a sentence ending particle) in her sentence to katakana, when it would normally be written in hiragana. This is accounted for by emphasising the final letter in her sentence in the translation (making it capitalised or look bigger). Argo also speaks in boyish tone, so I made her language more casual.
• Page 07+/10+: Agil's speech is coarsely masculine, so I made his speech sound rougher in the translation. Hafner's speech is also coarse, but maybe a bit lighter on the coarseness compared to Agil.
• Page 07: The words full raid (フルレイド) are appended with "forty-eight players"（四十八人）as furigana text to explain what a full raid means.
• Page 08: "pure tanks" was in katakanised English in the original text as ピュアタンク (pyua tanku).
• Page 08: Okotan's dialogue line about scouting Liten was hard to translate accurately due to the manga taking creative liberties. The original line in the novel was リーテンをスカウトできて、ようやくタンク事情が改善されると……それこそベア、いえ熊くまのように活かつ躍やくしてくれると思っていたところです; on the other hand, the manga changed "改善されると……それこそ[...]と思っていたところ" to "善されたんです。それこそ[...]と思っていたところ" - basically, it split the sentence into two sentences but didn't change the grammar involved. The original line would translate to something like "I thought/hoped that [our tank situation] would be improved......and that's putting it mildly, as I thought she'd [...], while manga changed it to "[...] our tank situation was improved. And that's putting mildly, as I thought she'd [...]". The sentence is pretty unwieldy so it's hard to translate already, but the manga messes up the tenses on top of the unwieldiness and breaks what was intended with "それこそ".
• Page 08: "I could already see her standing tall as the bearer…I mean, the bear of our frontlines when I recruited her." - in the first bubble, Okotan begins to say the English word "bearer" (ベアラー) but only goes as far as "bea[...]" (ベア[...]) before realising his slip of the tongue. Then he changes the word to 熊 (kuma), the Japanese word for "bear". Basically, he tries to make it seem like he said the word "bear" but in English (ベア), but then decided that it was better to say the same word in Japanese for some reason to hide the fact that he meant something entirely different with his analogy. This play on words doesn't work in English, since both words end up being just "bear". I could have added furigana do differentiate between the English word for bear and the Japanese word for bear, but then I'd be spoiling the reveal, so I opted to use the same strategy as Yen Press as use "bearer" for ベア and have the full phrase be "flag bearer".
• Page 09: "make their grand entrance" - Shivata (sarcastically) used a honorific (sonkeigo) register word おいでなさる (oidenasaru) in this context, so I tried making his phrasing sound fancy. The fancy phrasing is only present in the manga; the novel version of Shivata's line uses plain language.
• Page 09: "ants in my pants" - the original text use the onomatopoeia ワクワク (waku waku), which is an onomatopoeic way to describe a state of restlessness due to excitement or nervousness. I felt that the English idiom "ants in my pants" captured the intended nuance better than just a generic "I'm getting excited".
• Page 10+/11+: Wolfgang and Lowbacca speak in some dialectal or highly colloquial version of Japanese. Wolfgang replaces the copula "だ" (da) with "じゃ" (ja), replaces the cojunction "という" (toiu) with "っちゅう" (cchuu), tacks on an "い" (i) on the question particle か (ka). Meanwhile, Lowbacca changes the same "という" (toiu) conjunction to つう (tsuu), replaces the copula "だ" (da) with "ったい" (ttai) or "じゃ" (ja), and uses the dialectal personal pronoun オイ (oi) to refer to himself. It's hard to describe their speech patterns when both characters only get two or three lines in total, but Wolfgang sounds like he's trying to go for an old-timey tone (so I tried using some more dated words in his lines and abbreviate his words occasionally), while Lowbacca is definitely using dialectal speech (tried using some non-standard words and colloquialisms for him). Seems like oi is used in Kyushu dialect specifically.
• Page 11: "item drops" - Japanese like to reverse the word order for this phrase to "drop items" (ドロップアイテム).
• Page 18: All instances of "FPS" were written as "ＦＰＳ" (western alphabet letters) in the original text as well. Also, Kirito uses the English word "heavy" (ヘビー) for "hardcore", but I decided to go for the more natural phrasing.
• Page 18: All instances of "CTF" are written as "ＣＴＦ" (western alphabet letters) in the original text. Also, the first instance has "capture the flag" (キャプチャ・ザ・フラッグ） in furigana to explain what the abbreviation stands for.
• Page 18: "The player carrying the flag in CTF mode is referred to as the 《Hatamochi》, also known as the 《Flag Bearer》, if we're using English terms." - Kirito first uses the Japanese word "旗持ち" ("hatamochi", literlly "holds-flag" or "has-flag" or less literally "standard/flag bearer"), and then translates the term into katakanised English as "フラッグ・ベアラー" (furaggu bearah). Both of these words would be translated into the same phrase in English, so I left the first word in Japanese to make it clear that Kirito is using two different phrasings for the same thing.

Adaptation notes:

• The order of events on the first few pages was different in the novel: Nezha ran over to Kirito AFTER the scene where Kirito comments on Shivata x Liten.
• On page 2, Nezha and Kirito use quite a few different phrasings compared to the novel.
• Page 4: Asuna didn't sound so accusatory when referring to Argo in the novel.
• The manga omits that Kirito forgot about how SAO's item drop system could cause problems for them, which prompted a sudden outburst of panic when he started thinking of the flag after his conversation with Nezha. This is also where the explanation about how item drops work from page 11 is covered in the novel.
• Kirito's monologue about the intricacies of why inspecting everyone's inventory wouldn't work (as well as possible measures they should have taken beforehand to prevent the issue from ever taking place) was omitted and replaced with a simple "it's impossible".
• The novel didn't make it sound like Asuna was giving Kirito a doubtful look when she prompted him to say if he got the flag drop.
• The manga didn't show Asuna and Argo realising the cause of Kirito's concern over the flag drop.
• Pages 12-13 played out entirely differently in the novel.
• Various dialogue trimming, monologue skipping.