This post is more or less an excuse to establish all of the manga-specific category filters for this blog, but at the same time there’s no harm in talking about each of them for a bit. I’m never one to hold myself back from running my mouth.

Ueno-san wa Bukiyou

I was working on chapter 35 earlier tonight; it’ll likely go up tomorrow. Many of the recent chapters have been getting easier, both in terms of the translation work and the cleaning/redrawing difficulty. Chapter 35, like many, did not even have any redrawing required. I still can’t believe how lucky I was to have chosen such a perfect beginner’s project.

There’s supposed to be a special anthology book bundled with volume 6, but I’ve not found many leads on it in my light searching. The list of authors really caught my eye, so I’d be happy to hear more about this soon, and hopefully work on it should the opportunity present itself.

An-chan no Aan

I like working on An-chan because it’s so bite-sized. I don’t have to commit to doing any more of it at a given time than I feel like. That being said, it’s pretty much impossible I’ll ever be fully caught up to live updates, and that’s not especially what I’m trying to do anyway, so I apologize if you happen to be a superfAan. Japanese updates just started again today, which means I’ll be falling further behind.

Kare to Karetto

Working on the first couple pages for this manga has already made me laugh quite a bit, so I’m feeling optimistic about this one. The Japanese appears to stay around the same level as in Ueno-san, so I don’t anticipate I’ll have any unreasonable amount of difficulty with the translation.

That being said, the raws I’ve procured are somewhat all over the place in terms of resolution and quality. All of them should be workable, however, so no worries there. What sucks is that volume 1’s are the worst and will require the most tuning-up in ways I don’t have much experience with. It’s all a learning experience, I guess.

Hshs Sasero!!

Sasero remains my biggest regret… the result of my early hubris. I enjoyed this manga a lot and I see a lot of potential in the story, but I maintain that the Japanese in it is way beyond my level. I’m also not especially networked – I don’t know anybody working in translation at a high or professional level whom I could regularly ask for help, or a dedicated translator for the project. Expanding the team was never something I planned on doing when I picked up this hobby, but I would not be opposed to it for one manga, especially one that’s entirely complete when begun.

In fact, this manga is still the benchmark I use for gauging the difficulty of whatever I’m working on, lol. When I encountered some unfamiliar language in one of the pages of Karetto, I thought, “Well, at least it’s not as bad as Sasero yet…”