Azrael on the Boundary of Life and Death
THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS AND IT'S INTENDED TO TALK ABOUT THEM. IF YOU HAVENT READ THE NOVEL WE ADVISE YOU TO LEAVE AND COME BACK ONCE YOU'RE DONE READING!!
The Idea of this entry is to give the team thoughts about the product, in two parts, the first one in a technical aspect intended for other aspiring translators or people interested in that side of translation! After that is spoiler talk, just the team general feelings about the product.
Translator Side
Shinzou Translations' biggest project so far, the third →Quantize_ novel. This project as always taught me several things. The novel deals with cults, which I had to investigate in order to understand how to translate certain terms that I couldn't translate that easily from Japanese. At the end, I thought about it much more logically. If a cult wants its believers to feel that they are in a safe place for them, things would normally be named similarly.
For example, 'purification', in the original Japanese script the word is closer to 'Strangulation of evil' if we translated it literally. But at that point I felt that something that sounded purer... would be much more consistent with that idea of the cult trying to use pretty words to make people think that it's good for them. The same goes for the name of the cult itself (although this name does resemble the original japanese script) and other small things like sacredness.
On a slightly more technical note, the novel, for some reason, didn't have margins in the text box (or maybe they were just too big for the box itself) so I had to do some word wrapping which I hadn't done before. Very useful for the future...
As you probably saw, I created also some videos based on the original videos, I actually paid someone to do those as I'm not too good with video editing, I personally liked the final result for them and hopefully you did as well, all them are as long as their japanese counterpart as these videos don't have music, it comes from the game itself...
Overall, I hope you could feel the slight differences between all the characters, I tried to give some vocabulary to each one so you could differentiate each of them. If you could feel Az's personality as taunting and sassy, then I got it right....
I'm exhausted, but happy with the result. I'm talking to other circles and if all goes well, I'll be starting other projects soon. The 23rd of this month we will mark 6 months of translations, I think it would be the perfect moment to change our website, something I've been working on for a couple of months.
Thoughts Side
Accepting life no matter how hard it gets is probably one of the main topics of the first four projects of Quantize. Since their first project, their stories have always been bittersweet, including something as innocent as Rabbit Heart, which was also trying to hammer this point in the climax of the story.
And in this novel we can experience very similar things in a longer novel that has a bigger goal. Personally, the Ideal World Chapter was a little long. The idea was clear to me after a couple of chapters but it kept going, which was a little jarring. I actually played a partly voiced version that you can get if you purchase the second game. Because of that, the characters' personalities were easier to understand, so it wasn't that bad.
As we get to the real world and really understand the central conflict of the story the pace is much better and the novel gets much more exciting. However, at least in Japanese, the explanation of the science/mythos that happened on the night of April 3rd was very long. It's right before the climax of the story, which makes the timing much worse, because at that point you want to know what's going to happen with ______.
Other than that, it was a really good novel that was exciting, had fun characters all the way through and had a really emotive BGM, and we're very excited to translate the sequel, the Celestial World Chapter. Not sure we will be translating that this year, as the free version is divided into three small games and the last part will be released in August of next year, so maybe we could translate all of the parts at the same time? We'll think about it. But, if you want to know what that game is about, why dont you click on the O of the BGM MODE after clearing the game? You might find something interesting there...