[Re:Aincrad] Chapter 4

After a long hiatus (our last release was back in February... of last year), we've finally returned to working on the Re:Aincrad manga. Initially, I just got too annoyed with Kibaou and ended up procrastinating this chapter because of him (I only got around to coming up with a speech pattern to use for Kibaou's dialogues due to his thick dialect in the past few weeks...and yes, the translation for Kibaou's lines might be hard to read, but as a translator, I prefer to bring out what makes the character unique over making everyone sound samey for easier readability, so I hope you can bare with Kibaouspeak in my translations... Kaan did have me rein it in somewhat, if you're wondering ^_^). Then I grew busy with real life matters and it spiralled down from there. The good news is that we're speeding through releases to catch up and already have four chapters ready for release, so you can expect weekly (or semi-weekly, if we have something else to release) for this manga for a while.

Chapter 4 covers the cream bun scene, Kirito's meeting with Argo, and the boss strategy meeting. In this chapter, the manga tries to blend the LN and anime canon together, even going so far as to add original scenes to explain differences between the novel and anime (such as Kirito dumping his coat from The First Day for newbie-looking gear for the meeting).

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: Celest
Translation: Gsimenas
Editing: Gsimenas, Kaantantr
Redrawing: Celest
Typesetting: Celest

Chapter 3

Index

Chapter 5

Chapter 4

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page 06: "The Heifer Strikes Back" - this quest has several translations in different media. Crunchyroll translated it to "The Heifer Strikes Back", Yen Press went with "Revenge of the Cows", and there may be more versions out there for all I know. The quest was actually explored in detail in "The Next Day" Aria cinema bonus story - the name refers to the fact that a mommy cow struck back at a kobold that came after its youngling, so I went with Crunchyroll's translation, as it did a better job at capturing the intended reference (the cow literally rammed the kobold, not plotted some fancy scheme for revenge). For reference, "heifer" is a word that means "female cattle", i.e. "cow".
• Page 07: "Even if I'm doomed to be defeated [...] I refuse to allow myself to be beaten" - technically, Asuna uses the same word for both "defeated" (負けて) and "beaten" (負けたくない), but preserving this nuance was difficult in the English translation, so we compromised by using two very similar words instead.
• Page 08+: 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 08: "Ya'd think a gal like 'er would kick the bucket any day now, and yet she's alive and kickin' stilL." (すぐにでも死にそうなのに　死なナイ) - Argo used the same word for "die" in different forms twice (死にそうなのに　死なナイ) in this sentence, so I used the word "kick" in opposing idioms ("kick the bucket" = "die", "alive and kicking" = "survives and is active to boot") to replicate this repetition without sounding awkward.
• Page 08: "vidgame" - Argo used the slang word "ネトゲ" (netoge), which is short for "ネットゲーム" (netto gehmu = net game -> online/video game), so I shortened "video game" to "vidgame" as an approximation.
• Page 10: "29k 800" - the number was written as "２万９８００" (2 x 10,000 + 9800)... which is pretty redundant (it just replaced a zero with a kanji for "ten thousand"), so I replicated this by adding "k" (indicates "thousand") after "29".
• Page 09-10: "Cor" (コル = koru / kolu) is the currency used in Aincrad. You'll see Yen Press and the like translating it to "col", but "CoR" is actually an acronym for "Coin of Radius", where "radius" refers to Aincrad (itself an abbreviation of the phrase "An Incarnating Radius"), so it's meant to have an "R", not an "L".
• Page 10: "Talk about charm pricing." - the original phrase was "ニーキュッパ" (nikyuppa), where ni (ニ) = 2, kyu (キュ) = 9, and pa (パ) = 8 (phonetically). It's the Japanese equivalent of pricing everything at .99 to trick people into rounding it towards the smaller number and thus be more inclined to purchase the item. This marketing trick is called psychological pricing, price ending, or charm pricing. We decided to go with "charm pricing" for simplicity's sake, since explaining the joke in-text would have been a hassle.
• Page 10: "all the boosts to its stats" - technically, the original text used the word "スペック" (supekku = "specs") rather than "stats", but we decided that "stats" make more sense in this context from an English language perspective.
• Page 12: " —《info》, in this girl's case—" - the em dashes here weren't present in the original text. I added them in of my own accord to make the sentence structure clearer in the English translation (to avoid excessive commas that would make it hard to read the sentence). On that note, "cornerstone values" is the manga's way to reference Kirito's monologue about the major difference between those who survive, and those who perish in Sword Art Online. The context of the monologue was lost in the manga, so I modified the sentence to carry the intended nuance that the manga didn't really make clear with its lack of context.
• Page 14: A "class" (職業, shokugyou) is a system that determines in-game character's capabilities based on their profession, in video games. Technically, the second bubble on the page with the word "class' had "ジョブ" (jobbu = "job") as furigana, but we still decided to translate the term as "class", since that's the term used by English-speaking gamer community and there's no actual system for it in the game for the specific word we use to matter to the story.
• Page 16: 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 (my editor made me tone it down a bit for readability concerns, however). So, just imagine Kibaou speaking with a Scottish accent.
• Page 17: "blokes" in Diavel's bubble - the phrase 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 19: Agil's speech is coarsely masculine, so I made his speech sound rougher in the translation.
• Page 28: "A svich? A potreshon?" - Asuna's lines were in hiragana, when they should be in katakana. This is used to indicate that Asuna doesn't understand the terms, so she's just repeating sounds she heard, rather than understanding what Kirito just said. To replicate this nuance, I had her lines written more phonetically, rather than using the intended spelling for the terms she says.

Adaptation notes:

• The first two pages are apparently based on volume 1 chapter 4, where Kirito narrates the events after the first day of the game. This narration wasn't in the Progressive novel.
• Manga changed the order of events on pages 3-12: in the novel, Kirito and Asuna arrived to town together, but Asuna just walked away on her own and Kirito only managed to tell her the appointed time, then Argo came to him to talk about the Annealed Blade, and only after his conversation with Argo did Kirito rejoin Asuna and found her already eating a bun/bread.
• The manga skipped the part where Kirito nearly revealed that he was a beta tester to Asuna. And Asuna later asking Kirito to finish the thought if they survived the boss battle.
• Manga omitted explanations for the weapon-enhancing system and how Kirito found it strange that someone was going out of his way to buy his sword so much, when it was only going to be useful up to Floor 3 or 4.
• Kirito's monologue about cornerstone values and what was the cruicial difference between those who've died and those who have not was omitted. Instead, the manga just throws in a reference to that monologue without the needed context to understand it.
• The scene of Argo telling Kirito to change his outfit to fit in with the other frontline players was not part of the novel. The manga added it to explain away why Kirito would dump his coat from The First Day story for newbie-looking gear Kirito was oufitted with in the anime. In the novel, Kirito was wearing his coat the entire time.
• The strategy meeting took place at 4 PM (16:00) in the novel, rather than at 3 PM (15:00).
• In the novel, there were actually two boss meetings. The first took place on December 2, 2022; by then, Diavel's party had only found the staircase that led to the top floor of the tower, not the boss room itself, so they didn't have any reason to talk about the boss just yet - the point of the meeting was to boost morale. The meeting consisted of Diavel's introduction speech, Kibaou's attempt to pin the blame of the two thousand player death's onto the beta testers, and Agil standing up for beta testers with Argo's guide. Then the next day on December 3, Diavel's party discovered the boss room itself, while Argo put out a first floor boss edition of her guidebook with all the info on it from the beta test period, so a second meeting was held to discuss the actual boss and to organise players into parties for the battle.
• Argo's presence in the sidelines during the strategy meeting was omitted.
• The manga didn't include Kirito's monologues about how the beta tester's relative death toll was actually considerably higher than that of first-time players (three hundred of the two thousand fallen players were beta-testers, so the relative death rate for beta testers was 40%, compared to 18% for the general player population). This is because various slight changes were made in the game prior to its final release, with the express intention of tripping up beta testers by subverting their expectations from their beta test experiences.
• The manga omitted Kirito's outrage that Argo was charging him (and other top players) money for the info in her guidebook, when she later opted to release that very same info for free to the general player population in the form of her guides.
• Kirito's monologue about how the loot system worked during boss battles - and Diavel's proposal to employ a finders-keepers rule to item drops to avoid conflict amongst the raid party members - were omitted.
• In the novel, Kirito and Asuna didn't go off on a training session right after the strategy meeting. Instead, the meeting was followed by the scene where Asuna learnt that Kirito's place had a bath.
• Various other dialogue trimming, monologue skipping.