(NanoDesu) A Translation of the Kono Sekai ga Game Dato Ore Dake ga Shitteiru Novel

Hello everybody. Kuro-pi here again. First of all, sorry for the delay. There were some large developments in the VTuber world over the last few weeks including 2 of my favorite VTubers announcing their retirement, and the favorite of our translator announcing an extended hiatus. He was busy translating some clips for her (and I was editing them) and I’ve been trying to enjoy the little bit of time I have left with two of the people that I follow. I’m also going to be moving in a few days here which is going to slow my progress a little bit, but I’ve already left enough stuff that Agagus should be plenty busy until I finish. We should be getting back on track now and bringing the updates at a quicker pace in the coming weeks.

I’m pleased to announce that all parts of chapter 1 have been updated with extensive changes that should give you a much more pleasurable reading experience. There’s 2 larger changes we decided to make.

One: In the original story, within a chapter part when the scene jumps forward or changes location abruptly, the author will usually put a single space between lines, which is actually quite obvious in Japanese, but in the English we came across a specific place in chapter 2 where we thought it may be better to make this more clear to our readers. As a result, we decided to place a visual physical divider (nothing fancy, just 3 asterisks centered ***) in order to make this more obvious to English readers. The problem was even more evident on Word Press than it was in the documents we’re working from for editing. Of course, we also went back and added these in all the appropriate places in every chapter we’ve already updated as well, and you’ll them in appropriate locations going forward.

Two: One of the main characters was given a nickname in chapter 2 that we felt didn’t convey the original meaning/joke properly in English, so it has been changed, and we’ll be changing every instance of it that we come across going forward. I won’t write it in this post, so as to avoid spoiling anybody, but when we upload the part where the name first appears, I’ll leave a comment so you know what it was, what we changed it to, and our reasoning behind the change.

As for the current progress, obviously, as the post title mentions, we’ve finished the entirety of chapter 1 now. Going by the original PDF version our group released several years ago, we’ve re-released 82 pages out of 327 for volume 1 in English. That’s about 25%. I’ve also completed a first editing pass on chapter 2-1 to 2-3, and I’m about halfway through part 2-4 (I’m hoping to finish at least this part tonight). Agagus is about halfway through his first pass on part 2-1 (on average we take 3 or 4 passes for each chapter before we’re happy with them and upload them). If I can get 2-4 and maybe 2-5 done before I start ripping apart my PC setup, that should hopefully keep Agagus busy until I finish moving.

As I mentioned in the previous post, we were originally only going to lightly re-edit the existing chapters, but after seeing the extent of the issues that existed, we decided to go over them with a fine-toothed comb, for a number of reasons. Everything from giving people a better reading experience to catching any errors made in the original TL (Jon was still learning Japanese when he first translated these novels) to save ourselves any headaches in the future where something in these chapters might not match up with something in a later volume or anything like that.

If anybody out there is still following the project, thank you. We’re doing this as much for you as we are to improve ourselves, and I hope you enjoy, because this is a great story. If it happens to get licensed in the future, know that we’ll remove our translation and ask you to please support the official version. Again, if you want to know the moment I post the edited version of a chapter segment to the site, you can follow myself and/or Agagus on twitter (though he usually only retweets these posts). I’ll only make a full post on the front page like this when we complete an entire chapter.

Also, sorry, I don’t know how to change or update the “progress bar” on the front page, so I’m only changing the last chapter updated, the link, and the date of the last update. Just to break things down completely for volume 1 (for anybody interested), in the original English translation’s PDF, here’s how it looked:

(Prologue begins on page 13)
Prologue: 28 pages
Chapter 1: 42 pages (25% finished)
Chapter 2: 50 pages (40% finished)<- we are currently working on this
Chapter 3: 53 pages (56% finished)
Chapter 4: 43 pages (72% finished)
Chapter 5: 34 pages (82% finished)
Chapter 6: 46 pages (97% finished)
Epilogue: 8 pages (99% finished)
Afterword: 3 pages (100% finsihed)
(％ doesn’t take into account the first 12 pages cause I’m too lazy so it’s a little skewed but anyway, gives you an idea)

That’s all for now. Back to work for me.

-Kuro-pi

Hi guys, Kuro-pi again. All 4 parts of the Prologue and the extra that goes with it have been re-edited and updated. Originally, I never intended to make such extensive changes to the existing chapters and was just going to update the tenses to match what we would do going forward, and maybe fix a few bigger issues that I noticed. But after discussing it with the new translator, we decided to fully edit all of the existing chapters to try and bring them up to the standard we would like to have as we begin on the new content.

There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, this is the only translation that exists for the first two books right now, and anybody wanting to start reading when we start releasing new chapters will have to read through this. We don’t want people coming here new, seeing the quality of the writing in the first prologue chapter, and then turning away before they even get to our own work. What would be the point of even doing it then?

Another reason is because, back when I first read this book 6 years ago, I thought the translation and writing were pretty good. But now with 6 more years of experience under my belt, I see problems everywhere. So I actually thought the book was in a lot better shape than it really is right now. That said, I’m sure the writing improves immensely over the course of the story. You don’t translate 460 pages of text without learning and improving both your translation and writing skills. So the editing work will get quicker and easier the closer we get to where the translation stopped.

The final reason is for practice. Our new translator has never worked on novels before, and it’s been a while since I worked on one myself. So, the way it works, I go through and make changes to all the things I think need it (which in some cases has been like 450 changes over 9 pages of text!) and then I pass it off to him along with comments where I might need any context or insight he can give from the original. He goes through, makes sure my changes and comments make sense, checks some of them against the original JP to make sure I’m not changing anything too much, and then accepts them. And then he adds his own changes (a lot of which are already really good!) to places he thinks need them along with any other comments he might have. Then he gives it back to me, and I do the same thing for his changes, adding anything else I see as I go through the chapter again. We keep passing the document back and forth till there’s nothing left, and then go over it with a fine-toothed comb for punctuation issues or other minor errors before posting the updated chapter.

By doing all this, I’m getting a good warmup, and he’s getting a good feel for how translating prose works by putting his own translation skills to the test as he tries to rework particularly awkward lines or fix mistranslations in the original TL. Again, this is all so we can put out much higher quality work once we get caught back up to volume 3, and so hopefully the first two books will match that quality by the time we’re finished with them.

What does this mean in the big picture? It’s gonna take a little longer before we get to new content. Since we’re being so thorough, it’s taking a while to go through everything. But now the entire prologue chapter is completely edited to the best of our abilities, and the first pass of edits on parts 1, 2, and 3 of chapter one are finished. As we finish each new chapter, I’ll post another update with our progress, and maybe address any questions if we actually have people stopping by to read the story and leave some comments. Till then, I’m going to get back to work.

PS: If you want to know when each individual part gets updated, you can follow me on twitter.

Our new translator’s twitter and Youtube.

-Kuro-pi

Hello everyone. My name is Kuro-pi and I’ve been an Editor with Nanodesu translations since 2015. Some people may recognize me from Grimgar and Vermillion, but that doesn’t really matter. What does is that I’m here to tell you we’ll be bringing this project back to life over the next few weeks. While I haven’t worked on any light novels recently, I’ve been doing proofreading and quality checks on VTuber translation videos with a number of translators and groups and I managed to convince one of those translators to pick up this project for us. Welcome Agagus (aka Kusogaclips on Youtube), a translator that usually specializes in making clips of Murasaki Shion of Hololive.

So, what’s the plan? Currently, I’m re-reading the first two volumes of the story myself to get a fresh feel for Jon’s writing and especially some of the important and frequent word choices that characterize his translation as I would like to keep parts of this intact as we go forward both for consistency and out of respect. In addition, I am editing the old chapters as I go through them and updating them.

Originally the idea was for the translation to be written in the first-person present tense, but as I was reading through it, I noticed many errors in the tense, and after much discussion and a few trial runs just to see what true present tense would look like, we determined that it would be far too much work to change everything into that tense properly, so instead, I’ll be changing everything to first-person past tense (the vast majority of the writing is actually in that tense already).

And, it’s not just about present tense being more work, but it doesn’t really work well when you’re telling a story where there are lots of stories about the past like when Souma tells us about the bugs that exist in the game. In addition, I’ve never really read stories in proper present tense or edited anything in that tense and the new translator also hasn’t worked with it, so we are not confident in our ability to get that tense right without missing things. In order to deliver the best and highest quality translation possible, this was the conclusion we eventually came to, with Jon’s permission. And since we’ll be starting v3 in that tense, it only makes sense for me to change everything as I read through the story now to be consistent with that.

In addition, I’ll fix and improve anything else I notice (my skills have improved a lot over the last 6 years) to try and make things read nicer and flow better in English. It’ll be a nice warmup since I haven’t worked with a novel for a while before we actually start the real work on volume 3. Jon also mentioned that he would probably finish the short story at the end of volume 2 if we’re going to revive the project, but if something comes up and he can no longer do that, we’ll probably go back and do it.

As for why v3? While I’m aware that Clown World translations was working on it (I haven’t read their work myself, but I don’t have the required skills or interest to look into it), I’ve heard the accuracy of that project be called into question by some people, but, more than that, we’d like to do the whole series ourselves. So rather than making people go to another site for one volume and then come back to us, we’ll do our best to do that volume up to our standards here as well. I’m not exactly sure when you can expect the first part of v3. Agagus is currently reading through the first few books in Japanese to get caught up, and it’s probably going to take me a few weeks to go through everything that’s currently up (maybe a little longer) so to be safe, let’s say late June, and if it shows up before that, then consider yourselves lucky. We both have a crippling VTuber addiction, so we have to fit that in there too.

I would like to say that releases will be larger or more frequent than they were before, but this will be Agagus’ first time translating novels and our goal here is actually to hone our skills to eventually possibly get jobs in translation and editing respectively, so we’ll be taking our time to try and give the highest possible quality we can in order to show off our skills; that will take priority over everything else. Agagus also has school to worry about, and I will begin job hunting shortly here so I’m not sure what our time will look like at the start of summer. If you want to be kept up to date on our progress, you can follow me on twitter (@Kuropiosu) and I’ll tweet each time we update or upload a new part, but please note that we probably won’t create a hard schedule. Quality is our goal here, and to that end, one other person has offered to take a look at our drafts when we can no longer find anything wrong with them. holokuso117 will be proofreading for us (hopefully I’m not doing badly enough that he needs to do more than that).

This is already really long, so I’m going to sign off here. If anybody still checks this page, look forward to the revival of this project and tell your friends!

-Kuro-pi

It might be. I have no idea when I’ll be able to get back to doing this. I still want to though.

If anyone wants to pick it up do go ahead. You don’t need my permission to really.

Edit: It seems Clown World Translations has picked it up starting with Volume 3

https://clownworldtranslations.home.blog

I’ll see if I can finish up the short story in Volume 2.

I wanted to post an update about what’s happening.

First of all, sorry for the long delay. Lately, I haven’t been able to find the time / didn’t feel like translating even when I had the time, and that’s why there’s been no updates.

I am still 100% intent on continuing this project though, but I don’t know if I can keep to regular releases going forward. I think what will likely end up happening is that I will just release things when they’re ready without a set schedule.

Thank you for reading the translation, and I hope you can be a bit patient with me.

-jonathanasdf

Greetings everyone, your favorite digital scribe DevilHands coming to you from somewhere in the world. I want to thank everyone for their patience while waiting for this completed volume. Also text here on the site should be updated as well to the most current version. Please enjoy.

• DH

After a rather long break, we are now resuming this project with the first release in volume 2. This volume follows some of Souma’s adventures in the capital together with a sudden mysterious new character (?!!?!).

The omake for volume 2 was supposed to be posted today, but there were some last minute fixes that needed to be made, so they will be posted within the next few days. Edit: It’s up!!

PDF/EPUB edits for volume 1 are still being worked on. Thanks to xIceArcher for their work so far; the edited version reads so much better! The pages on the site as well as PDF/EPUB download links will be made available once the volume has gone through this final editing pass.

I think that’s everything from the administrative side. Please let us know if you have any comments/suggestions, and I hope that you have been enjoying the story so far as much as I had. And don’t worry, the story just keeps on getting better!

-jonathanasdf

Volume 1 may be over, but Souma’s journey, as well as ours, has only just begun.

We will probably be taking a few weeks to get everything ready and set up for Volume 2, but I hope you will all come back (with your friends) and join us on our adventure in the capital.

See you again soon,
-jonathanasdf

Thank you for visiting! This series by Usber, Kono Sekai ga Game da to Ore dake ga Shitteiru (I am the only one who knows this world is a game) is an epic(?) story filled with action(?), adventure(?), mystery(?), humor(??), romance(???), and nekomimi. Please join us as Souma travels through the world of Nekomimineko, training to defeat the Demon Lord(????) and building his harem(?????), all so he can ultimately go back to his own world(?). I hope you will enjoy it!

-jonathanasdf