Naoko Hasegawa Novels Translation Project

Schoolwork comes first, always!

Speed will ramp up the further we go along and the more members we amass so it may become a bit overwhelming for you depending on how much momentum we can build. Though as I said earlier I’d be more than willing to dump off the Machine Translations of the pages I did and you could refine whatever I came up with based on the actual pages for practice!

On that note, I want to start getting the word out beyond the borders of the forum itself. For this reason I’ve created a Twitter account that I will be posting progress to from time to time. This week I’d like to start a retweet campaign through the fandom to draw as many eyes to the project as humanly possible. We’ll need as much Tenchiforum twitter love as we can get. Perhaps the Tenchiforum tumblr/facebook can do a shoutout to the twitter account and forum thread once we start the campaign?

Organization. Something we’ll need to work on is collaborating, claiming who will take what blocks and what steps must be taken before a page is considered “done”. The simplest solution I’ve come up with so far is a private google docs spreadsheet made for each book. Page blocks will be divided and clearly labeled as claimed by a specific member, who will then update each page’s cell with a status. Something along the lines of “Incomplete” for a fully untranslated page, “Machine” for a fully machine-translated page and “Localized” for when the contents of that page have been converted into smooth, fluent English. Not set in stone though, things will possibly change over the next week or two.

Friend of mine suggested we try fishing for some folks from Baka-Tsuki, think it’d be worth going over there for?

We take after the best, after all.

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Any and all help is greatly appreciated – neither Crazed (speaking in terms of his Doujin work), Shadow, Wisper or I had touched the software we’re currently using for translation work until we dove head first into it for the sake of getting stuff done. If you’re willing to learn the ins and outs we could get you up and running after some time. Otherwise, just spreading the word and making sure Tenchi fans see is a huge help.

Today I took a bit of a break from working on OCR and JP-> ENG translating to toy around with getting a workflow set up for another aspect we’ll have to get around to eventually.

(Click here for full size since image rescaling is currently broken on the forums)

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A few imperfections and remaining color corrections aside, I should be able to get much clearer scans of the covers available. The color insert pictures and the B&W pictures on the pages may be a bit trickier since all I have is a flatbed and I don’t want to risk harming the books or destructively scanning by cutting the spine out of the book so every page becomes its own looseleaf.

We’re all in this together and I know i’m grateful for every little bit of help we get. Your activity on facebook is most appreciated, we’ve gotten some support from a few facebook pages already and having more pages draw attention to the project will be great. Thank you for your outreach work so far!

As Yosho had mentioned (and as seen on our Facebook/Twitter), our own Who has given us a shoutout on his Youtube channel!

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Youtube Vids hadn’t been something I had thought about in terms of spreading the word until he said so. And he’s already gotten himself a few extra subs out of it! kiyonesmile1

Lastly, our next big milestone has come and gone practically overnight! We’re now over 25% of the way through Novel 1! The work has been numbingly stressful at times but we’re seeing great things in the midst of our progress and really can’t wait to present our full findings. There’s still a ton of work to be done and if you’re reading this and able to lend a hand – we’d love to hear from you! There are only so many of us chipping away right now, if we want to get these out sooner we’ll need more fans helping us unearth what’s in the novels and whatever else lies beyond! And for everyone who has spread the word or deep in the mines covered in OCR dirt and grime – thank you so much.

I’m incredibly proud of all the hard work everyone has put into making this project a reality thus far. Things are really taking shape in the novel and every day I grow more and more excited to see the end result and to be able to share it with fans of the series. Thank you to everyone who has been waiting patiently while we work. And once again thank you to every one of us chipping away at these ol’ tomes.