CAINEv2

A friend and I managed to find a raw scan of the first chapter of the Ergo Proxy manga, "Centzon Hitchers and Undertaker".

Of course, I don't know Japanese, but it's also non-existent in English.

I don't know if you guys mind me asking this here, but would anyone be able to do a translation for the greater good of teh interwebz? If I can just get someone to translate the speech bubbles, I can do all the Photoshop work to properly translate it and release it online.

I also posted on /a/, not particularly expecting to find any help, and the original scanner turned up. My friend and I are talking to him on MSN, and he said he should be scanning the second chapter in the next couple of weeks.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time just to read and/or reply.

P.S. Oh, and it's 42 pages for chapter 1.

First page.

Hmm, might not need to get someone here, actually... the guy we picked up from /a/ seems to be doing pretty well, plus we've got others to bounce stuff off of.

If anyone's interested, I can post updates here on the progress, or each page as they get done. We're taking our time to try to keep the lines as true as possible, while also making sure they're worded like the real characters from the show would say them. We're also likely to go back and make adjustments to previous pages further down the road, if we find something that changes the meaning or feeling behind the original.

I could translate a few pages. Third-year Japanese student here, doing this kind of stuff makes my study feel less worthless. Alternatively, if you've got a solid translator, I could help proofread and edit (also an English major, lol).
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Literacy is the best tech.

Oh, sorry, I haven't checked back here in a little while.

We've got a pretty good translator, who managed to translate everything in a few days, as well as a friend of mine helping out with occasional tricky bits.

I think it's safe to say we've got our team pretty much set. The friend of mine who managed to find the original scan really wants to help out more, so he'll be our primary editor. Us three(me, friend who found it, translator) all work together to make sure we manage to get a compromise between the most authentic translation possible as well as sounding fluent and natural in English.

The scanner himself also spotted our thread on /a/ and got in contact with us. He said he'll be scanning the second chapter some time in the next week or so(this was about a week ago, he said 1-2 weeks).

I'm currently in the process of entering all the English text. All that's really left to do is figure out what font we should use.

If anyone's interested, I can post the first few pages that we've translated.

I'd like to see them.
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Literacy is the best tech.

OK, I'll post the first few pages. Keep in mind that we haven't found a good font yet, so pretty much everything to do with the text is temporary. At the moment, I've got two examples of different versions of the vertical text. I'll elaborate on those with their containing posts.

OK, here's the first example of vertical text. Luckily, it all just manages to fit. However, it's still not very nice to read, but that might be fixed once we settle on a font.

And here's the second example. Obviously, I toyed with having a whole word(or two, in smaller cases) each line. I also set the text to be narrower. This helps illustrate that it was originally vertical text, as well as possibly making it just work better somehow. Feedback on this would be great.
[Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention that this text doesn't fit when using the vertical method shown on the previous page, so chances are this will be the one we go with.]

The next thing I did in this one was my first crack at adding in artwork that was originally covered up. In this case, it was primarily the line along the top of the left ear(Pino's right ear, on the left of the page for our view), between "the" and "facial", as well as a little bit that's mostly(but not all) covered by the latter word. I haven't bothered with the area underneath "of this" just yet. Later on, when the text is more final, I'll redraw the areas that won't just be covered up again.

Nothing in particular to say about this page.

Likewise, nothing in particular about this one.

The first double-page! This one took a while to manage to stitch the two together. The toughest part of this is all the artefacts from the scanning. You have no idea how annoying those little patterns are.
The second toughest bit is the detailed line-work in some areas. I'll probably go back later and have a think about where some of the lines were supposed to be going.

Another simple page.

Now, this one was a little difficult to figure out how to space the sentence "I am Ms. Wandering Nurse." The translator included "Ms." since she essentially called herself "Wandering Nurse-san", and that it may be her of adding some personality to it.
The spacing was the trickiest. We couldn't fit it all on one line, but breaking up the name just wouldn't look very good. In the end, I think it's ok to sacrifice the normal spacing in order to make it read better.

As for the "YET TO BE TRANSLATED" bit, I'm waiting until I get a chance to talk to the translator to figure this one out. Here's what he wrote in his translation document:

私は地の人を。。。
ｗａｔａｓｈｉ　ｗａ　ｃｈｉ　ｎｏ　ｈｉｔｏ　ｗｏ。。。
[Literally, "I am/will (something) the people of this land". The thought trails off so we don't get a verb to go by. Also, "chi no hito" may have a specific English equivalent - a name for the people living outside of Romdeau.]
(06) "I have come to...."

Until we figure out a bit more on this, it'll have to be left for now. By the time we get to the last page, we should be able to get the best translation.

Judging from the context the most likely meaning would be "I'll search for others buried underground" or something to that effect.

As a fellow scanlator I wish you luck.
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