goodScrapped Princess
Since we had started working at TokyoPop, we had always made it a point to finish translating everything really fast. I'm not sure exactly why this is--whether it was because Jake wanted us to finish Fruits Basket and Ai Yori Aoshi at lightning speed, or whether we liked that we never heard anything about a deadline until it was time for DN Angel 4, but the idea that they might need something really fast and would then come to us must have been a factor. Come to think of it, there were a few times where we witnessed editors go to the Japanese intern (for lack of a better term--we're really not sure he was an intern, but he didn't seem like a fulltime employee) and say things like, "We need this whole book done by tomorrow. Can you do it?" And we wanted to have that happen to us.
Scrapped Princess was the series when it finally happened. I'm not sure how long we had to do it, but I know our boss asked for us to get it in as soon as possible. We were more than happy to, because we had seen the anime and liked it, and because it was a good chance to prove ourselves even further.
To clarify, we worked on the Scrapped Princess manga, not the novels. So far we haven't figured out how to prove we can do novels. It was kind of annoying when
baranoneko pointed out that... I think it was Seven Seas was hiring translators, and we contacted them, and the guy said, "Actually, I've been trying to get in touch with you for a while, but right now we just need novel translators, and that seems outside of your skillset." Ugh. But right now, we've got enough to do with just manga that it doesn't bother us too much. So we're like, "Fine, you keep your novels, and we'll keep our sanity! Hmph!" But if anyone ever gets the rights to the Saiyuki novels, we might have to start doing some begging or something.Aaaanyway. It was kind of weird translating the Scrapped Princess manga, because it was all side-stories. It's just not the same somehow, and it didn't have Chris or Leo. We had a difficult time figuring out how we wanted Shannon to talk. I wonder how the fans think we did. For Pacifica, we just thought of Celeste, because the two are very similar. I think on the translation difficulty scale, we'd give it a four. It was mostly full of sound effects, but we did have a hard time grasping the characters' speech patterns and figuring out some other wording stuff, to make it make sense.
Scrapped Princess volume 1, we think (but we're not sure we remember correctly), was the first book for which we got paid by the page. Before, we got paid per book, but then when our contract came up for renewal, our boss asked if we wanted to be paid by the page instead. We're unsure of everything, so we're afraid she might have gotten a little annoyed at us because we were like, "I don't know..." and then she would be thinking, "Hello, it's much better for you this way!" And for the most part it is, though sometimes Kadokawa makes us wonder.
My favorite Scrapped Princess characters are Chris and Leo, but they're not in the manga. The manga is mostly just the Casull family, and we like all of them, so they're all our favorites of the manga characters. There was another girl that showed up, and she was nice enough, but from what I remember she seemed pretty average. Maybe one of these days we should go back and read the stuff we've translated.
I actually had more to say about that than I thought I would. I hope it's as interesting to anyone who reads it as it was to us.
Today I'm thankful for getting an early start, our anime downloads actually downloading, finding Brain Age (we thought we'd lost it yesterday), less arm sliceys, and no songs yet that we haven't already translated.
