[Progressive manga] Scherzo of Deep Night - Chapter 019

Welp, after a couple of years, my country finally started getting SAO movies on screen and I'm just back from watching Scherzo, so... perfect time to release the final chapter of Scherzo to celebrate!

Chapter 19 covers the New Year Countdown Party and Kirito's run-in with PoH.

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 19

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download

Chapter 018

Index

Canon of the Golden Rule

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page 02: Kibaou speaks in a distinct Kansai dialect. So much so that you can easily tell that he's the speaker in the novel simply from the kind of grammar and words he uses. I took inspiration from Scottish English with some twists of my own to create my own version of Kibaouspeech in English. So, just imagine Kibaou speaking with a Scottish accent.
• Page 02-03: "HNY", "Happī Nyū Iyā", "Happy New Year" - the characters are using different ways to say "happy new year". The first one used "あけおめ" (akeome), which is a shorthand for 明けましておめでとう (akemashite omedetou), the Japanese phrase for "Happy New Year", so I abbreviated Happy New Year to HNY accordingly. The second instance uses "ハッピーニューイヤー" (Happī Nyū Iyā), which is literally the English phrase "Happy New Year" with Japanese phonetics, so I left it phonetical to make it clear that someone's trying to show off by using foreign words. Finally, Asuna uses the full "新年明けましておめでとう" (Shin'nen akemashite omedetou) phrase, so I decided to translate this one to proper English accordingly. Kirito uses the same, but without the "新年" at the beginning.
• Page 03, 09-10: "Inner Area" (圏内) and "Outer Field" (圏外) are SAO-specific terms that refer to being inside/outside the Anti-Criminal Code effect area (basically, the in-town safe area), where players are protected from any and all forms of harm and attacks. These are the specific terms in English that players see on their UI whenever they enter/leave town, which is why I used these odd phrasings (Kawahara gave them in English in the original novel, so I didn't come up with the translations).
• Page 04: "Welp" - Kirito used slang in the original text (shortened それは to そりゃ, which is easier to pronounce), so I changed "well" to "welp" accordingly.
• Page 04: "mats" - in the original text, Kirito just used "素材" (sozai), which literally means "ingredients" or "materials", but since he's a gamer, I changed the word to standard gamer lingo.
• Page 05: "You don't say, Captain Obvious!" (当たり前でしょ！, "atarimae desho!") - I freewheeled the translation here to capture Asuna's indignation about Kirito stating the obvious and making a big deal of it.
• Page 10: "The Inner Area only extends to the castle's front yard, while the castle's interior is treated as a dungeon, remember?" - the entire dialogue line was marked with boutens (dots next to kanji used to emphasise a word or phrase), so we bolded it to account for this nuance.
• Page 10: "IRL" the original phrase was "現実" (genjitsu) with "リアル" (riaru = "real") as furigana. The English world "real" is usually used as a short hand for "real world" in terms of "not in-game" in Japanese, so I used "IRL" (in real life) as the English equivalent for the slang.
• Page 11: "ＨＰ" and "Level-5" - both "HP" and "5" were in Western letters/numbers, rather than Japanese words.
• Page 11: The word "beta" was written as the Greek letter β in the original text.
• Page 12: "HA HA HA" - the laugh SFX was written as is in the original text (i.e., instead of kana for SFX, the manga artist actually used just a lot of "HA"s).
• Page 12: "bro" - the original text used "兄弟" (kyoudai = brother) with "ブロ" (buro = lit. the English word "bro") as furigana.
• Page 13: "Big Stage" (ビッグ・ステージ, biggu sutehji), "nickname" (ニックネーム, nikkunehmu) - PoH is a fan of Ingurisshisms. Both of these words were in katakanised English in the original text.
• Page 13: The note about John Gacy was present in the original text.

Adaptation notes:

• The manga omits the story of how people found fireworks some shady store and that's when they came up with the idea for a countdown party.
• Kirito's monologue on pages 6-7 took place before Kirito decided to climb downstairs in the novel. The manga kept the monologue, but decided to instead use it as filler until the PoH ambush (in the novel, Kirito was instead thinking of how he would specifically look for food that would get a reaction out of Asuna). The monologue is still the same, but somewhat trimmed up.
• In the novel, Kirito said he was going for a new bottle and food downstairs, rather than "somethnig to drink" (I changed this to "a drink").
• The manga omits the part of Kirito's monologue where he realises that PoH has to be bluffing.
• Various dialogue trimming, monologue skipping.