Time to do some shameless begging. The tl;dr is that I want someone to translate Japanese materials for Opentrain. Yeah, we have a joint project going for doing the Japanese TMNT stuff, but I want to get a new in-house member for game stuff. Preferably someone who is comfortable working with Kanji and plays old videogames. If you are interested in joining the glamorous* world of fan translation of manga, please contact me via email. You can get my address on the about page on this blog. Note that this job in no way involves payment or reimbursement. It’s a hobbyist deal and we just do it because we like the material. A successful “hire” could either hang out with us all in IRC to work or just correspond with me via email. Your English does not have to be 10000% perfect either, I will help you polish up rough translations into more natural sounding English. Could be a learning experience for the both of us.
What could we be working on if we did indeed get help from such an individual? I’ve got the following things in mind already (and the raw scans sitting on my drive):
A two chapter X-Blades manga.
A 5 chapter Popful Mail manga.
Several volumes worth of assorted Dragon Quest 4koma.
Some game-related hentai doujinshi by Yoshizaki Mine and Kenichi Sonoda.
People wanting to translate with us can also present material they are interested in working on, of course, and if it seems like something we’d be into we could do that instead. I’d really like to do Quinty and Valis someday, if I could get my hands on the pages.
I also have probably dozens of volumes of (non game related) manga by artists I enjoy (that are also mostly ignored by translation groups) that I would totally do given a willing and able translator to work with. Stuff like Sonoda’s early SF works and… pretty much anything by Shimpei Itoh, like Cutey Honey a Go Go! and Tokyo Bomber Girls. Hell I’d even do Buichi Terasawa’s Cobra stuff if someone wants to help out.
*glamor not guaranteed, or to actually be expected.
Go Nagai!
I’d be down for that too but a lot of his stuff actually is being worked on these days. Mostly mecha stuff though, so if someone were to go “hey let’s do some Nagai comedy stuff” I’d be interested.