Les traductions - French manga in English

I've begun reformatting (or perhaps better formatting) the translations. I'll be futzing around with how I render them a bit until I'm satisfied. In doing so, I also did some minor editing to a few of them here or there where I noticed misprints or inconsistencies.

Les traducs

Übersetzung

A few caveats...

You remember the game "telephone," where people whisper a message to each other in a line, and everyone laughs at how distorted it got between first and last? You can amuse yourself in really idle moments by doing a similar thing electronically - run some text through AltaVista's "Babelfish" online translation service, cycling back and forth between the different languages. Usually it just gets kind of incoherent, but sometimes rare gems will emerge.* Translations done instead by human means will hopefully remain coherent, but they will drift.

All this is just by way of warning that what I'm presenting here is something suffering from two levels of distortion: English translations of French (or German) translations of Japanese manga. So no, I can't claim I'm providing all that faithful a guide to the original text. What I am hoping to provide are two things:

1. A close enough translation to the French text so you can get a feel for what it is like, especially in comparison to any English translations (commercial or fan) which may exist. (I was careful not to look at any other English translations when doing these, so mine are relatively "uncontaminated" reads.)
2. Enough of a start on the French text to encourage you to go on and do the rest yourself, if so inclined. I find the first chapter of a new book is usually the hardest, as I get used to the style and vocabulary of the author/French translator. Hopefully the cribs here will get you over that hump.

Note on format: If you've seen other manga translation scripts on the web, these should look similar. Angle brackets (< and >) indicate characters' thoughts, while square brackets ([ and ]) are my own insertions.

I've generally tried to make the translations rather complete, including the various stray bits of untranslated Japanese found in some of the books. However, I haven't been compulsive about it, and have usually not done anything with the sound effects or unimportant signs or the like.

No, no, please don't, Sailor V! It's fair use, I swear it!

Note on copyright: I don't want to get dragged into a discussion of copyrights, so I'll just say this: I assert no copyright on any of the translations here; they are provided freely in the hope they may be of assistance. I don't believe what I present here is any material infringement on the rights of the original copyright holders, but if they disagree, they are welcome to contact me (mahousu@gmail.com) and I'll be happy to straighten things out. * If you do decide to try out that cycle-through-languages stuff, it turns out someone's created a website to automate the process: Lost in Translation

Satisfied? Dissatisfied? Puzzled? Have something to add? Mail me at mahousu@gmail.com

Copyright 2000-2002 by Mahousu, but: May be freely redistributed by any means, for any purpose. I don't even care whether or not you acknowledge me. Have fun! [Portions, as marked, may be copyrighted by somebody else, with other restrictions. You should still have fun, though.]