[UR Manga] Chapter 0 (Prologue) (+ Project Announcement)

Surprise! Celest really wanted to do the Unital Ring manga, so we hereby announce that we've taken up working on a new project as of this month.
Surprise! (#2) We've already translated the prologue release for the manga to commemorate this very announcement!
See what we did there? The manga decided to publish the prologue out of the blue along with the project announcement in the Shounen Ace magazine (this caught us so out of the blue, that we didn't even notice that the magazine that announced the serialisation for this adaptation actually came with a proper release, in fact), so we decided to play the same game!

Now, the prologue is listed as "chapter 0", since it doesn't actually adapt Unital Ring content (aside from the final 3 pages). Instead, the artist decided to adapt "Prologue III" from volume 18 as a leadup to the Underworld portion of this arc. The proper serialisation of the manga and actual Unital Ring content will begin later this month (let's just hope that the serialisation goes well, unlike the trainwreck that the SAO manga scene has been the past year or so...).

We would also like to dedicate this surprise release to one of our very own editors. Happy birthday, Cirtoyt!

On a side note, since this manga will likely get picked up by Yen Press down the road, we will not be hosting the translation in image form on this blog post. Instead, like with our other more risky projects, we'll be hosting the translation in PDF/7z file links.

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.

Any feedback is appreciated.

-Gsimenas

Credits

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

N/A

Index

Chapter 1

Chapter 0 (Prologue)

Links for the translation files:

• PDF
• Zip Download
• MangaDex

Translation (choice/nuance) comments:

• Page 01, 04, 06: The Dark Territory in Underworld has two names. One is in katakana English (i.e. ダークテリトリー), the other is in actual Japanese (暗黒界, literally "darkness world/realm"). For better distinction between the two names, I translate "暗黒界" as "The Land of Darkness".
• Page 01: "Life" (天命, Tenmei) is the Underworlder Common Tongue term for HP in Underworld. In this case, the narration is specifically referring to the fact that Kirito and Asuna have frozen their age, so their HP cap doesn't go down with age like it does for most other people. We usually capitalise the first letter to make the distinction between the reference to HP and the common word, but certain fonts may not have a visible distinction between capital and non-capital letters.
• Page 01, 06: "Real World" (リアル・ワールド, Riaru Wārudo, lit. the English words "real world" in katakana) is what people use as the proper noun for the world that the otherworlders came from. Since it's used as a proper noun, we capitalise the first letters (though again, certain fonts may not make the distinction between capital and non-capital letters clear).
• Page 02: "Star Empire Calendar" (星界歴) is the calendar used in modern Underworld. It's basically the same Human Empire Calendar, but rebranded to Star Empire. We shorten it to "SEC" in our translations for brevity (sorta like how we use AD and BC in the real world).
• Page 02, 07: The phrase "Blue Rose" on these pages is "ブルーローズ" (Burū Rōzu), i.e. it's English words written in katakana, rather than "青薔薇" (Aobara), the "blue rose" in the "Blue Rose Sword" (青薔薇の剣, Aobara no Ken)
• Page 02, 05, 15, 29, 34: The terms "Integrity Knight" (整合騎士, Seigou Kishi) and "Integrity Pilot" (整合機士, Seigou Kishi) are homonyms in Japanese. They sound alike, but the "騎" ("horseriding") kanji in the word "knight" ("騎士", kishi) is replaced with the "機" ("machine" or "craft") kanji. The order got renamed because they stopped riding actual dragons and instead started operating mechanical crafts, so the terminology no longer made sense (though the term only changed on paper, since it's still pronounced the same...). Unfortunately, English doesn't really offer ways to preserve the pun in our translation, so we've decided to just use Yen Press's translation for the term.
• Page 03+: I localised honorifics that go with titles. "Esteemed" is a localisation for "-sama" after a title.
• Page 03, 04: "main star" and "partner star" - Cardina and Admina don't share the same relationship as Earth and the Moon do in our world. Apparently, they both orbit around Solus (the Underworld sun), rather than Admina orbiting around Cardina. Since Admina isn't Cardina's satellite, but rather an actual planet that just happens to stick to Cardina with a similar orbit, Underworlders use different terminology to describe the two astronomical objects. As the bigger planet, Cardina is referred to as the "main star" (主星, Shusei), while the smaller Admina is referred to as the "partner star" (伴星, Hansei). Technicaly, these two words in Japanese are astronomical terms that refer to the "primary star" and "companion star" in binary star systems in the real world. However, since the Japanese term "star" (星) and its compound words can be interpreted more liberally to include "planets", while the English terms are specifically used to refer to actual stars (i.e. Sun-like astronomical objects) in a binary system, we decided to change up the words a bit to avoid making it seem like we're implying that Cardina and Admina are both Suns. I wanted to change "star" to "planet" for even less confusion, but Kaan convinced me that we HAD to use "star" to maintain consistency, because it's the "Star Empire", not the "Planet Empire".
• Page 04: The last bubble on this page is the only instance in the entire chapter where the word "planet" is actually written as 惑星 (wakusei), the proper astronomical term for planets in Japanese. In all other instances in this chapter, the word for "planet" is 星 (hoshi), which is the Japanese word for "star"... in the sense of "any star that's not the Sun and/or any planet that's not Earth" (i.e. anything that you can see in the sky at night and call it a "star" in the broad sense, not strictly referring to balls of fire in space). Since Cardina and Admina are planets, rather than "stars" in the strict sense, we translate instances of "星" (hoshi) as "planets" (except for when it's used as part of the terms "main star" and "partner star" due to the reasons listed in the previous bullet point) to avoid confusion.
• Page 07: Aside from instances where actual system commands are recited, Sacred Arts elements are almost always referred to with Japanese expressions (kanji), rather than English words. Since the Japanese kanji terms aren't as sophisticated as the English variants, I translated the element names literally when they are mentioned in actual Japanese. For example, the "cryogenic" element is called the "freezing element" (凍素) outside of commands.
• Page 08: The phrase "Abyssal Horror" on the first bubble on this page is written in kanji (深淵の恐怖, Shin'en no Kyoufu, lit. "fear from the abyss") with katakanised English (アビッサル・ホラー, Abissaru Horā) as furigana. All other instances of "Abyssal Horror" only use the katakanised English form (i.e. the katakanised English form is how the monster is actually called, while the kanji was only there to translate it to proper Japanese the first time for clarity)
• Page 29: "She was the greatest Integrity Knight in the annals of history." - technically, the word for "greatest in history" in the original text is "史上最強" (shijou saikyou), which would literally mean "strongest in history". However, in practical usage, "strongest" gets so overused in real life that it's basically become a synoynm for "greatest, but not necessarily in a physical strength sense". And since some people may take statements like this out of proportion in their speculations, we decided to err on the side of safety and translate it as a more vague "greatest" rather than "strongest".