Poll: Kicking Around a Bunch of TL Prospects

As of last Friday, I was only about 40% done with my little vanity translation project. Now it’s at about 80-something and progressing rapidly. I would be legitimately shocked at this point if it weren’t up by, at the latest, the end of next weekend. This project involved about 20,000 characters worth of Japanese and will probably cash out in the neighborhood of 6000-7000 words if my fuzzy math is right. In the course of working on it, I’ve been able to streamline the hell out of my process and I’m itching to try it out on something smaller-scale.

Since my current “short anime/manga articles I want to take a stab at” list is about 50 deep, I thought I’d toss this one to the crowd. Here’s a list of 10 articles, with links, that I’d be super-hype to translate after finishing my current thing. I’ve googled all of them to check and I don’t believe any has been done yet, so they should all be fresh. And a there’s a poll so you can vote, of course. I’ll definitely translate whichever article gets the most votes, and anything that gets votes I’ll think about doing. Poll will stay open until I finish my current project, and then I’ll get cracking on the leader.

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Sell Me in 20 Minutes: Nobunaga Concerto

Nobunaga Concerto was rough around the edges, squeezing a few chapters worth of material into its intro episode and getting sloppy with some more proto-animatronic CG. But the material, a solid-gold story about a guy accidentally living out Oda Nobunaga’s weird destiny by mostly having people misinterpret his random actions as those of a calculating genius, shone nicely through all that. I expect to be watching it for at least 2 more weeks.

Fun With Numbers: Scarce Demand for Simulmanga

This past year, viz media pulled off a first for the non-Japan manga industry. I’m referring to Shonen Jump Alpha, a digital “magazine” offering same-week release of the chapters of some 11 Weekly Shonen Jump manga. It’s pretty cool, and at 26$/year for 48 issues (and a buck per back issue), it’s not a totally unreasonable subscription fee. But that specific business model, one of same-week releases for official translations, is unfortunately not something that’s likely to be transferable to the majority of manga. Especially seinen and josei series with smaller fanbases. If you’ve ever wondered if the manga translation industry will catch up to where the anime industry is now with simulcasts, this article discusses the depressing reality of the situation and why such an outcome is relatively unlikely.

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Fun With Numbers: The Evil Genius of Weekly Shonen Jump

If you know anything at all about manga, you’ve probably heard the name Weekly Shonen Jump before. Armed to the teeth with megahits like One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, and Toriko, it stands undisputed atop the manga industry. But did you ever wonder how that dominance came to be, or why it’s been largely unchallenged for upwards of 20 years? Here’s a hint: it’s no accident.

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