Transformers Generations Selects Comics CBR + Musings on translating

 Firs exciting piece of news,  I have made all the Selects comics into one handy-dandy CBR file for your reading pleasure.  Having a fair bit of the story now, I went back to the earlier issues and made some changes for continuity's sake and it should make a bit more sense.  But just a bit.  

Link after the jump.

Updated with complete comic 17 May

You can download it from here:

Now that it is finished, you can get the whole things here

Feel free to store it as you like, but a link back and credit for my  work would be appreciated.　　Hell, drop me  a comment on here or twitter if you wanna say thanks.

 And now for the musings.  

wow, 87 pages.  Looking back on it all, I'm pretty impressed with that effort.  Doing them, I didn't realise they added up to that many pages. Shame I don't make any money off this gig.

It's not easy doing these things, there are a few of problems.  The first being that the story is pretty whacky.  If you read through all the pages, we currently have many loose threads blowing in the wind.

The other is the nature of the comic releases.  At the start, Star Convoy (for example) only had two pages of comic.  This can make it rather tricky to get the right context of the story.  Sure when I read the Japanese it makes sense, but to translate it into not super weird English is another kettle of fish. It helps to know the context in which the story is happening.  If half the story is being held off until a month or so later and there are only 2 pages to go with, it can be a challenge to fully grasp what is going on.

This also applies to certain hmm, I guess we could say, Japan-isms.  Specifically (as my example) Primus referring to himself as "that person."  This phrase first shows up in the Seacons comic and when I did that one, There was no context to it, except for "hard-core dude with controlling power" from the way it was mentioned.  Of course at the time, I thought "that person" sounded (it still does) pretty damn stupid, so I tried to make it more natural sounding, however, It turns out the "That person" was a pseudonym for Primus. It took break form the comic for a while only to return for the God Neptune.  As a result, I re-did the Seacons comic for this set to reflect the consistent usage of "That Person."  Without the later knowledge that "That Person" was a key point, the meaning of that section was unclear at the time.

Another tricky aspect is the conflict of translation that caught me by surprise...

How far does one go with translating/interpreting?

I found that making the comics flow with natural English that carried the same meaning got flack for not being a "correct" translation.

A "correct" translation gets flack for sounding awkward and obviously translated.

Wherein does the middle ground lie?  I found there really is no middle ground and decided that I would do the translation to please myself.  After all, if someone wants to complain about the translation, or they think something sounds awkward, they have the options to:

• not read the translation.
• learn Japanese themselves so they don't have to read the translation.
• read it and put up with it.  

I soon came to the conclusion that there is no way to please everyone and as unfortunate as that is, it is a fact of life.  

What am I trying to say here?  I guess, it mainly comes down to 

Enjoy the comics and don't take them too seriously.

I certainly don't (take them seriously, I do enjoy them).  

The reason why?  They are created for fun.  

I have fun translating them.

 I have fun editing them into English. 

 I guess for me, it's all about having fun and I'd like others to enjoy them as much as I do. 

 Thanks for reading my empty musing post. Enjoy the comics.