The Revival of Sekai Game

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

This entry was posted by kuropiosu.

• May 25, 2021
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