Status Update: Gentle Demon V1C9

So, I figured it was high time to tell you guys/girls/cats/CIA-Agents-disguised-as-lolis what the progress was on Gentle Demon.

It’s about 25% done.

You in the back, don’t “Ehhhhh??????!?!?!?!?!!1!!/1?1!?” me. That’s what you get for leaving this work in the hands of someone without a schedule. Go search for a proper translator for this work. Seriously. Do it. I want to read this just as much as you guys do, but it’s difficult to translate, you know?

The reason for this chapter’s status is partially due to its length (7,272 characters when compared to the last chapter of Sword-shisho’s double-length 5,661 characters), but mainly due to… Hm… How to put it…

“The desire to do it right”, I suppose?

Just listen for a minute. Gentle Demon is a really good work. I could tell that early into reading it — call it reader’s intuition reinforced as a writer myself. That’s the reason I wanted to translate it so much that I pushed myself to MTL it, after all.

Also, just to note, the fact that Yuru was adorable had little to do with that judgement.

And so, because I saw and still see a lot of potential, I want to be as accurate as possible in my translation… But because it’s very well written (supposedly — I can’t read Japanese, so I can only guess due to its difficulty), it’s hard to do that. I’m constantly finding myself being sure of a line’s translation, only to find that a couple lines later said past-line makes no sense in the context.

There’s also the fact that it has deeper meaning in words — something that you don’t find a lot in webnovels (add that to the reasons why this work’s so good) — but that meaning is hard to put into English, because it can (and usually will be) lost in translation.

Hopefully that makes sense.

I won’t deny the fact that I’ve been slacking on this work lately (especially compared to sword-shisho), but that’s because I’d rather play games than do a bad job representing what is definitely going to be one of the best works I’ll ever read (and if not, it’ll rank pretty darn high at least). I’m also doing this for myself, so anyone with complaints can… I dunno, cry?

 

And so, fly my minio— I mean, er… Go find a proper Translator, you bunch of digital hippogriffs! I won’t accept anyone more half-assed than me, and no, putting the whole thing into Google-sensei isn’t enough.

Until you do, I’ll keep translating… But it’ll be at a speed similar to delivering a glass chalice across a field of pins. It’ll be slow and painful (for me), but that’s for the sake of the chalice. It may also have to do with foot blood.

So yeah!