Translating for LINNE先生

A Debrief and Retrospective

In June 2022 I approached LINNE (@hld_doreko) to translate a number of Dragon Quest fan comics into English. Before continuing, I encourage anyone who enjoys the art on this page to follow and support LINNE.
A link to the original Japanese Canzar comic is here.
A link to the original Metal Slime story is here.

Preparation

I started with The Birth of Canzar, a short, one-page manga. From the beginning of the translation process I was faced with a decision: do I follow the official Dragon Quest localisation style guides and translate with British-English voices and playful puns and alliterations, or should I translate straight to the point?
I don't think either choice is wrong, and I obviously found the Japanese charming by itself, however I wanted this project to reflect the expectations of an English-only readership so I decided on the former path.

The next step in preparation was cleaning.
Cleaning Canzar was fairly easy. Other than a small piece of text in panel two (1年後) the cleaning process was entirely a matter of clearing up speech bubbles.
During cleaning for Metal Slime there were a few more tricky sections to clean, however the original manga used a white-ink approach to the spaces I needed to cover over, so it was mostly a matter of matching the style and reshaping the areas to fit English text more comfortably.

Typefaces are a critical part of translations. The right font does a lot of work adding to the expressiveness of English-language manga and comics. As a volunteer production, the project had the benefit of no brand or company font limitations (this is foreshadowing for future debriefings), but I was limited to only creative commons or free options. The typeface chosen for the main text was CC Wild Words. Gadugi was used for some system text.
CC Wild Words is a playful comicbook-type font that doesn't draw too much attention to itself. It's a monotype font (no distinction between upper- and lower-case letters) with a 'cross-bar I', perfect for distinguishing between the English first-person pronoun "I" and other capital "I"s — basically, it's really good for readability.
Gadugi was not a strongly considered font, but it identifies system text without drawing too much attention to itself.

Translation Decisions

As previously mentioned there was a lot of intentionality with giving the slime characters a Dragon Quest "slimey" voice. This involved translating ニンゲン to Gooman, consistent with official examples. I also leaned towards slime-based wordplay in places that made sense.

In Canzar panel three I translated 「そろそろ狭くなってきちゃったし」 as "Startin' to feel a drop too snug for me now". There isn't really an expression "a drop too X", but drips and drops fit the flavour of slime linguistics and rhymes with known expressions like "a tad" or "a bit", and this softening element felt relevant to translating the lackadaisical mood of the slime in question. In hindsight I'd probably cut "for me now" from this bubble, since it's implied.

In Metal Slime page two panel three (comparison pictured) I translated 「なんて厄日だ。どうやら僕の人生もここまで…」 as "My life's zooming before my eyes! What a day..!".
In the Dragon Quest series, Zoom is an iconic magic spell, and the expression "zooming before my eyes" rhymes with "flashing before my eyes", an expression used in life-threatening situations. 厄日 is kind of a tricky word and doesn't translate well with space limitations, so I decided to only imply its meaning with the expression "what a day...". I also flipped the sentence order because the translation sort of flipped the hierarchy and it made more sense to express the fear of death before the general statement about how (un)lucky the day was.

Reception and Final Thoughts

Both Canzar and Metal Slime received roughly 40 reposts and 70 likes each.

A number of social media users expressed their joy that LINNE先生's work was able to reach outside of Japan for the first time.

This was my first public-facing translation and I learned a lot about my translation process while working on it. I was very grateful to work with an artist whose work I admire. Additional proofreading and editing could have helped each line shine a little more, but I feel that my translation adequately conveys the original manga's message and flavour quite well.

Full Manga