Kaleidion

I visited TGS today. It was super busy.

I was part of the first 555 people to show up at the Atlus booth with a copy of P5, so Soejima Shigenori signed it! I’m so happy!

Unfortunately I was too late to receive tickets for the live performance, but I did take some pictures of the booth and the Morgana car parked outside. I also bought some merch.

I believe the seiyuu event was today. I’m not sure if they’ll put this event on the Blu-ray as well though. If they do include it, I think it’ll be on the last volume which releases in August.

I can definitely try to translate it, though it’ll take me a lot longer. The last event translation took me about a week and a half, but I’m a lot busier now, so it’ll take at least 2 and a half weeks, if not more. I will also be going to Japan for a month in September, so I can only work on it when I get back in October. Then Persona 5 comes out around that time too, and I’ve been waiting to play that for 8 years, so that will slow me down too.

No, she’s definitely saying “yes”. The official lyrics confirm it too.

In the normal version she’s turning down the Matsu’s offer with a “No! No!”. In the F6 versions she’s clearly into them, so she accepts their offer with a “Yes! Yes!”. It’s to show the difference of her behavior toward the normal and F6 version.

No, I haven’t seen it before. Too bad it only contains stuff from the first cour.

I’ve only translated one drama CD. My method was nothing special. First I listened to the full drama CD about two times to understand the story completely. Then I opened a text file, and I started to translate each line one by one, writing them down in English (also adding the name of the character that is speaking for each line).

If I had trouble with grasping the specific meaning of a line, I would write the line down in Japanese and analyze the sentence grammar in detail. Also looking up definitions of certain words in both Japanese dictionaries and Japanese/English dictionaries to be sure I knew the correct meaning. Obviously, since I’m not a native speaker, I sometimes come across words I don’t know. Then I just type the word in romaji/hiragana in the dictionary, and I look up the meaning. Searching a Japanese word on google together with 意味 (meaning) can also be useful. When it’s difficult to hear the pronunciation, I sometimes have to guess what the word can be based on the context.

And finally, when everything is translated, I open the text file in Aegisub and start timing it to the audio. Of course, this final step is optional. Drama CDs don’t necessarily have to be timed, a text file is already enough.

I pretty much used the same method for translating things like the Osomatsu seiyuu event. But because that one had so many lines (exactly 2000), I actually did the timing and translating in parallel. I would time about 100 lines in Aegisub, translate them in Aegisub (I didn’t use a separate text file), and color code them based on the speaker. Then I would do the same thing for the next 100 lines, and so forth. This was to switch things up, and prevent me from getting bored.

Translating Japanese text is easier, since you don’t have to worry about mishearing things. On the other hand, kanji can be a huge pain. Google Translate is surprisingly helpful for looking up kanji though. The handwriting function can recognize kanji really well. Just press the handwriting button, and try to replicate the kanji by drawing it (it works most of the time). And the Google Translate smartphone app has the camera function, which is super useful. Just press the camera button and take a picture of the kanji you want look up and you’ll get the romaji. You can then use the romaji to look up the word in the dictionary. Don’t use the English translations by Google, as they are mostly incomprehensible and sometimes they use the wrong definitions. Unfortunately, I don’t think the camera function really works on handwritten kanji though. Also, install the Rikaikun (Chrome) Rikaichan (Firefox) addon, it’s very useful for kanji lookup on stuff you can highlight with a mouse!