Translate project: novelization of Gunnm (1997)

[45-n]

I have the novelization of Gunnm's manga (1997). Someone can help me translate it from Japanese to English. Please contact me

[jjaquinta]

I bought it too, with the express desire to do a fan translation of it. My process was this:

• * Scan the pages of the book
  * Clean up the scan of each page
  * Do an OCR of each page
  * Do a machine translation of each page
  * Do an edited version of the machine translation

I got some of the way through the first chapter. The problem was the OCR stage generated enough errors to really mess up the machine translation. I had my daughter going through and spotting the errors in the OCR. She doesn't know Japanese, but she's learning Chinese, and can spot differences in characters much better than me.

I was committing the results up on GitHub: https://github.com/jjaquinta/BattleAngelAlita

Do you have the novel in print form, or in electronic form? If you have it in e-book form, that would really cut out the most error prone steps.

[45-n]

I have it scanned

[jjaquinta]

How do the scans compare to the ones in my repo? Those are 2,550px × 3,510px, but not the cleanest. Have you tried OCR on any of them?

[45-n]

I have it in good quality, but the process of ocr, is difficult because in the translation of it there was no sense in some parts of the work.
For now I have had the first chapter translated, but I still need to edit. I send you the link.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

[45-n]

I just uploaded the raw and illustrations, with respect to the pictures, I need someone who knows how to edit them since the book paper gets noticed in the scans.

I refer to image 9 and 10 in the illustration folder.

[45-n]

I have even contacted a translator who can translate a Spanish. But I can't afford to pay because the dollar has a high price here in Peru.

[45-n]

I can accept donations. By means of a private message.
For now I will send the price list of the chapters. Luckily I got a lower price, but I still can't afford it.

Chapter 2: 120 dollars
Chapter 3: 138 dollars
Chapter 4: 192 dollars
Chapter 5: 42 dollars
Chapter 6: 120 dollars
Chapter 7: 96 dollars
Chapter 8: 42 dollars
Chapter 9: 84 dollars
Chapter 10: 180 dollars
Extras: 12 dollars

[jjaquinta]

Wow. That's a surprisingly good translation of chapter one. Must better than what I got with mine.
Is it a computer translation? If so, which software.
If it's human, well, I guess that's what you are paying for.

I've (self) published several novels. I even started a fan novelization of the manga, which I posted here on the forum somewhere. (The general reaction was "meh" so I didn't continue.) I'm happy to help with editing. Truthfully, though, that translation is pretty close on its own. It doesn't need that much. But I'll see if I can look at it over the next few days.

I can pass the illustrations on to my daughter. She's the family artist. They look pretty clean to me as-is. But I'll see what she things.

[45-n]

No problem, I leave you the task of being able to edit the images.

[45-n]

Regarding translation. At first it is human, because I send to translate in Spanish.
Then I send it to translate into English, through deepl.

[45-n]

For the moment i think i can pay for the translation of the extras and chapter 5.

[45-n]

I also started with the translation of chapter 2. But in my own opinion it is not good and has certain words that did not make sense at first.
I will save money to translate it into Spanish and then into English.

[45-n]

But you're probably wondering why I translate it into Spanish and then into English.
It is because I am a native Spanish speaker, so correcting mistakes in Spanish is easy for me. But it is not so easy to correct mistakes in English.

[45-n]

Thank you jjaquinta Deckman I will put you in the credits of the book.

[45-n]

I will also upload my Spanish edition, to know your opinion. But I have to add the images 9 and 10. Because the ones I put in the word are different from the ones in the novel. To view the document, I recommend you download the preview is not good.

[jjaquinta]

I've made a start of it here.
It's a bit tough going. It's all in the present tense, which is probably faithful to the original, but most novels in English use the past tense, so I'm switching to that. I can see that the word order and some of the phrasing is close to the original Japanese, which, again, doesn't make for smoothing reading in English. I'm also making the language a bit more idiomatic, rather than literal. (Chests "heave in and out" in English, rather than "inflate and deflate".)
But, no worries. My original idea was to use Machine Translation to get the "gist" of the text, and, pretty much, re-write it. So this is better than that. It's going to take me several passes to get it right. I'll try to get a bit done each night.

[45-n]

Thank you very much. For the moment I will be saving money, so that I can have more chapters translated.
Please let me know when you finish editing the first chapter.
At the moment I have approximately 150 soles, which would be about 41 dollars.

[jjaquinta]

First pass of Chapter 1 complete. It doesn't flow as smoothly as I would like. But I'll go back and do another pass when more chapters are done.

Your paid translations are way better than the machine translations of my scan. But that's not a small amount of money needed to translate the rest of the book. I'm happy to contribute, but I think we'd need a lot of people pitching in to make it possible.
I might have access to better machine translation now. But I would still need good quality OCR. I'll have a look around and see what is available.
(Of course if anyone can find an e-book version of that we would be well ahead!)

[45-n]

Good news. I have already had the first part of chapter 2 and chapter 5 translated into Spanish.
Within one of these days I will be uploading it to the drive, already translated into English, so you can edit it.
I would also like to know how the images (9 and 10) I mentioned before are arranged.

[45-n]

jjaquinta, I send you the link to chapter 5 (unedited)

[jjaquinta]

Thanks! I've got the translation. I'll look at editing it in the next day or two.

As for Illustrations 9 and 10, those appear to come from pages 6 and 7 of the book. The equivalent raw scan in my project is:
https://github.com/jjaquinta/BattleAnge ... 06-007.png

A first I thought you wanted them pieced together. But I pulled out the book and it is clear they are separate drawings.
I've cleaned up my scan a bit and posted it under the scans_clean folder. It isn't the best scan to start with, and I had to crop it a little bit. I have the book and can make a new scan. I don't have that scanner anymore, but I can try it with my phone.

https://github.com/jjaquinta/BattleAnge ... 06-007.png

[jjaquinta]

Sorry, been away for a bit. Yeesh, four years? Wow.
Anyway, I've been playing around and it looks like ChatGTP is a lot better at translating this stuff than what I had been doing before.
I just wanted to check in first and see if anyone else has translated this light novel? If not, I'll start up working on it again with these new tools.

[DarkStarBeacon]

Sorry, been away for a bit. Yeesh, four years? Wow.
Anyway, I've been playing around and it looks like ChatGTP is a lot better at translating this stuff than what I had been doing before.
I just wanted to check in first and see if anyone else has translated this light novel? If not, I'll start up working on it again with these new tools.

Hey there.
Not translating myself, but interested in the translation. I bought a copy myself to either try machine translation on my own or upload scans to be translated by someone else.
I'm a huge Gunnm fan and want to see this one piece we English speakers never got beyond image scans of the art.

[jjaquinta]

Things have come a long way in 4 years. Here's what I got for raw machine translation of the first page the last time I tried:

"Ki Hiiri"
The man ran away running the night the moonlight was illuminating.
Alley of darkness without street lights. Squarre of a crap that dropped occasionally into the wall burned the darkness with a pale white light. The appearance of a man who runs in the blinking light and darkness floats like an animation, and it disappears.
The man was a half-body cyborg who mechanized part of his head and his left arm. In the machine arms there was an old naught of a big swing, and a dark blood glucose was stained in it that glowed bluntly.
Here is a zone away from the entertainment district of Kuzu Town, where only the dirty alleys, which are not popular, surround the gaps of buildings like capillaries.

Compared to now:

"Shiiiiing—"
The man ran, fleeing through the night illuminated by the moonlight. It was a dark road with no streetlights. A cable that had snapped from a wall dangled, and sparks from the frayed wires flared in white light, illuminating the darkness like an animation. The light flickered, and the man's crazed figure dashed through the shifting light and shadow.
The man was a half-cyborg, with part of his head and his left arm mechanized. He was gripping an old, worn machete, which gleamed faintly. Blackened blood clung thickly to the blade. This was a desolate, filthy part of town, far from the entertainment district of Kuzu Iron Town, and he was circling through the narrow gaps between the abandoned buildings, like a rat through pipes.

It barely even needs much post editing.
Unfortunately, some of my scanned pages had a slight tilt to them. And since it is vertical text, the OCR is picking up later text first, and rather messing things up. I think ChatGPT did better, but they only let you do two OCRs for free. I have a developer account with some credit, but they only let you do that from the subscription account. I'm OK paying for that for the quality, but I want to make sure I have everything ready to go with good scans before I start the process.
I have access to a better scanner now, but I've spent three days turning the house upside down trying to find the book. I'm almost on the verge of buying it again. If you were willing to do scans, that would be wonderful. I got as far as page 49 in what I have.
I've been coordinating the files in a git project here:
https://github.com/jjaquinta/BattleAngelAlita