This translation diary will just be a fairly short post regarding the updates to the site and release scheduling. Also, this should conclude all updates with the website for the near future. The next translation diary will actually be about translation; in particular, it will be about the meaning of ‘I’ in Japanese. Now without further ado, here are our current and discontinued banners.
KonoSuba: (Current)
Akashic V1: (Discontinued)
Akashic v2: (Current)
About the creation process:
To be honest, most of my motivation came from seeing the banners of the nanodesu translation group sites. However, since this is a multi-project site, I decided that I would make a banner for every series I pick up. There are two primary aspects that I focused on when I was making these:
1. Does it represent the nature of the series well?
2. Is it easy to absorb?
For the KonoSuba one, I felt like it was a series that explains itself through its characters, so I didn’t anything more than the title of the serious, and some more color. The illustration is taken from Mishima Kurone’s twitter.
As for the Akashic Records one, it was slightly trickier. I wanted to depict the hidden depth of the series and it’s discussion of society. After all, magicians in Akashic Records represent a noble society that is ignorant towards the masses. That’s why the first version of the banner ended up with the tagline that is features on the front of every volume, just under the title. However, after a brief discussion with Miyuchi, who happened to be present at the time, we decided that the first banner was too monotonous, and the part with the frowning Sistina didn’t seem to represent the series really well. Well, part of it was just me not wanting the clean the illustration but…
I ended up doing it anyway. Also, taking some inspiration from one of the ads for Akashic Records, I decided that a blackboard was the most suitable and engaging way to add flair and text to the banner, especially since the title of the series has ‘Bastard Magical Instructor’ in it. While it does somewhat fall flat on the cryptic part of the series, I feel like its a more refined and simpler version that achieves what I was looking for, there’s also a lot of fun things you can do with it given the template.
Rant about the implementation problems:
My original intention was for the banners to scale to the top of the site, and that was how I went into making these banners. However, that only kind-of worked out. The first problem was the margins; this was solved using the custom CSS available on WordPress, but then I encountered another problem, which was the banner cutting off on smaller windows/devices. Once again, I partially remedied this using CSS by adding an exception for screen size, which at least makes it not get cut out of the screen. The banners will most likely stay this way for a while to come:
Akashic Records and Upcoming KonoSuba!:
College has been getting busier recently, so Akashic Records will most likely be released bi-weekly for while to come. For the most part, KonoSuba will most likely be released bi-weekly basis, concurrently with Akashic Records.
Some unused illustration assets:
Uhm, just an opinion. Why not release the novels alternate, like this week is kono suba, then next week akashic..?
I’m sorry if stating my opinion might offend your or something. In any case, Thank you for your hard work on translating the wonderful novels.
yuNS, do you want to translating Seirei Gensouki ~Konna Sekai de Deaeta Kimi ni~..? I found this LN quite good. There’s a tranlator for this but they work at wn version. And unfortunately LN version’s too different than WN, even in first volume….
You might want to spellcheck that KonoSuba banner…
Lol I see it…
this is an unrelated question…
But can you tell me how much time did it take you to master Japanese to this level?
It’s hard to say, but I suppose it would be around 2-3 months of studying 1-2 hours a day, and a fairly extensive background of watching anime. That’s about how much experience I had when I first started translating publicly (Consulting with this Masked Devil).
My action plan for learning Japanese had been:
1. Memorize all the hiragana and katakana; to the point where I could draw both tables through memory.
– I did this at home; Learn the columns one by one, and at the end of learning each column (a-i-u-e-o), I found a blank piece of paper, and wrote them all out in order. Rinse and repeat until I was done with all of them.
2. Learn as much basic vocabulary as possible, such as times of day, common objects, directional statements.
– During a summer vacation, I attended an 2-week introductory-level course at a language school in Japan for two weeks. Being forced to use a language is extremely helpful for learning, as it forced me to synthesize the language both ways to get my meaning across to the teacher. This wasn’t a crucial component however, it just accelerated my learning of basic vocabulary by comparison, as I was forced to apply them in order to converse with my teacher.
– After that, I learned Japanese through a mostly Japanese-only textbook. I tried to read what I could out loud, as sometimes a phrase/sentence isn’t intuitive until you hear it in it’s entirety. If I really couldn’t understand some part of a sentence, I used google translate
3. Go through an entire fairly simple novel/manga/anime of choice in Japanese, and learn all the vocabulary used.
– I did this using KonoSuba Volume 8. Using google translate for everything I didn’t understand. It’s also nice that Sky was translating Vol 8 when I was doing this, as I could go through a chapter and check myself the week after. Once I got through it, my reading pace went up by a lot, and I only ever needed to use a dictionary or translator once or twice a page by the time I got Volume 9 of KonoSuba (After I translated ‘Consulting with this Masked Devil’).
In all honesty, once I learned all the hiragana and katakana, a lot of the text that I was reading came together naturally, since a lot of the dialogue in anime is similar to what you might see in a novel. Also, for most people at that stage, kanji becomes a difficult hurdle, but given that Chinese is my second language (with Japanese being my third), I had essentially learned a lot of the common kanji already.
Wait, why is Akashic vol 1 discontinued? Doesn’t it say chapter 3 will come out next week? o_o
That’s a discontinued banner lol. V1 stands for Version 1, not volume 1
Oh I’m a moron. Thanks for the hard work.
Good banner. That Sistina is cute! Thanks for your hard work… 🙂
Sistina is always cute no matter what.
Yey more banners!
All hail good pics
I like this banner. especially with the green blackboard as the background rally represent the setting of the series
Agreed