The plot thickens.
As I finish up the translation of the 番外編 at the end of the first volume and get ready to start on the next volume, I find myself thinking about how glad I am to have picked this title out of that list in the NanoDesu site. Yes, you can’t run away from drama/romance/slapstick comedy part of this book, but the darker sci-fi/military/psychological aspect of this 作品 is keeping me fairly excited for the rest of the series.
And well… I guess a good translator reads the entire series first and then does the language transfer after that, but I’m really just reading as I go, like I do for all light novels I translate (Eda Yuuri’s Koushounin series was an exception). Sometimes I think about how I try to produce translations that bring out the correct mental image in the correct colour intensity and still read like, well, something that is not translated, and wonder how much I actually succeed in doing so… It’s something I definitely want to continue working towards, though. For no good reason, of course, other than the fact that it is fun.
On an unrelated note, very few things I read would tickle me. Terry Pratchett’s stuff did. Simon R. Green, too. Dry humor usually does the trick. However, I find myself trying not to snort in laughter when reading about Suizenji’s crazy antics and Asaba’s endless internal struggles, and the fact they may (or may never) unravel the mystery that is the Sonohara Air Base. Yet, my heart aches for these children who joyfully traipse through the countryside; their eyes still bright, their minds still unsullied, and their hearts still pure, when a very ugly world lies just on the other side of their reality, a paper’s breadth away.
茉莉花の独り言 