A few words of explanation...
I've been studying Japanese for less than a year (as of August 2004), so it goes without saying that these translations will have mistakes and will miss some subtleties. I welcome corrections of all kinds, but please be gentle. ^-^ I'm doing the best I can with limited skills.
These translations are most definitely in beta stage -- hence the many, many comments and questions in square brackets (feedback most welcome). I'll gradually eliminate the comment lines as I continue to revise.
Also, for reasons explained below, I've tried to translate as literally as possible. The translation won't always be as graceful as if I had paraphrased into more idiomatic English. Again, I'll probably revise for greater fluency later.
I did these translations mostly for myself, but I'm also hoping other fans will find them helpful. If you read these and like/hate them, I would really apprciate a brief email -- I can't learn unless I get feedback. Even a "read your translation, thanks!" would be helpful since it'll tell me that the translations are useful to someone besides me. If you have more time, I'd dearly love to know...
I'm trying out an unusual format, partly because it helps me get through the process of translating, and partly because I've always wished more manga translations were done this way. When I read a translation, I'm always trying to match it up with the Japanese text as closely as possible, and it gives me a headache when I can't figure out which bit of translation goes with which bit of Japanese. And the more Japanese I learn (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing), the more often I find myself wondering "How did they get *that* from *that*?"
So, I did my translation in JWPce (if you use Japanese at any level, on a Windows PC or Pocket PC, this freeware word processor is awesome, by the way). Then I transferred the file into Word so I could save as HTML.
The translation is in a three or four line format:
Obviously, you'll need to have Japanese support on your computer to view the Japanese, and if your browser doesn't select the right setting automatically, you'll have to set Encoding to Japanese (Auto-Select) or Japanese (Shift-JIS). If you don't have any interest in installing Japanese support, the Japanese characters won't display properly, but you should be able to view the romaji and the translation without problems.
Pages are divided by ------ or &&&&&, followed by a page number (numbered from the beginning of the chapter). At the bottom of each page, I've kept a running vocabulary list of stuff I had to look up while translating that page (JWPce has a feature that makes this really easy) -- just skip over it if you're only following the English translation. [For Ch. 6, I stopped keeping a page-by-page vocab list, but I still have a list of all the vocab words saved -- let me know if you'd like me to post it!]
Spoken lines are indented, with attribution to the person I think is speaking (often problematic!); "thought" lines (those which are not in speech bubbles) are flush with the margin, and I try to add notes in my translation indicating who's thinking (or who I THINK is thinking). I've also added minimal scene descriptions where they were needed to clarify the dialogue.