Okay, volume 50! We have finally gotten through volume versions in the 50’s and beyond and we’ve got 4 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here.

Not really much has happened since the last one of these. We’re using some tools to quickly find typos and minor errors and fix them so we’re just finalizing the remaining volumes. And then just checking them over with a couple people and then they’re done. I’m also going through the Gintama volumes we already checked and released with that tool just to be extra safe on those. I’m also using it on some other series we’ve worked on recently to fix any issues in those. I did it on the first few volumes of Kokou no Hito already, since that series has not too much text, so I figure it will take less time to go through.

This volume has the whole gender-swap/Yagyuu Juubei arc. Then a few one-off gag chapters, then the beginning of the Snot Diamondz 48/Hanakuso Diamondz 48. So lots of memorable stuff in this one. I’m really hoping we understood all the jokes this time.

There’s a bunch of stuff almost done, then there’s a new Jojo and 3-Gatsu no Lion coming out sometime soon as well. See ya later!

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 50 (Ch437-445)
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Okay, volume 51! We’ve got 5 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here.

So, one thing I did between this volume and the last one is I found a couple of tools I could use to help automate checking a little. I found a python library I could use to extract the text from the PSDs and then take that extracted text to find spelling mistakes and typos of the sort you’d get a squiggly green underline under in Microsoft Word, this way it’s a lot easier to find mistakes. I’m using this in addition to a Github project we’ve been using for a while called PanelCleaner which you can use to get basically accurate OCR’d text from the manga into an excel file. So it becomes a lot easier to then check the Japanese text against the translation for each page. I’m hoping this speeds things up a bit and makes checking easier, not just for this series but for doing checks on other ones too. I mentioned this in the last few posts but basically this project is a giant mountain of busy work, the sort you’d like to automate but even automating as much as we can it still takes a good few minutes per page and there’s about 4,500 pages total across these 25 volumes. Anyhow using that seems to have helped, hopefully everything was caught and I found all the jokes I had slightly wrong cause I misread them or whatever, but if anyone notices any other mistakes in these let me know and I’ll try to fix them.

This volume is the latter half of the Snot Diamond’z idol group battle, the short arc about Hijikata winning the lottery, the whole Kurokono Tasuke and Gin-Katsura-Sakamoto reunion arc, and then a single gag chapter about hiding erotic books. I’m not sure about you all but I basically forgot some of these arcs existed. Well I would have probably if I didn’t spend so many hours on this series that a blur of every chapter I worked on is permanently seared into my brain and will be for the rest of my life.

Besides this, all the other of V46-50 are in progress and being finalized. I’m also using the tools mentioned above to find any mistakes from the volumes we already released and fixing them which requires some manual work to check. And I’ll be doing that for a bunch of our other series, too, once I get to it. It makes things a lot faster but I still need to go through every suggestion and make sure the typsetting didn’t get messed up. Also The JOJOLands volume 9 and Executive Managing Director Shima V3 are almost done. And there’s a 3-Gatsu no Lion chapter in the next Young Animal and the next new The JOJOLands chapter comes out in 8 days. So a lot going on at the moment. But we’ll get through it all.

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 51 (Ch446-455)
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Okay, volume 52! We’ve got 6 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here.

The thing with doing these is I essentially have to do a translation check on every single line. And doing a translation check is a really grueling experience. You basically need to translate the whole thing from scratch just you’re saved the effort of typing it out if what was already there was correct or good enough. But if I can think of a more natural way to write a line I’ll entirely rewrite it.

I’m finding lots of little mistakes which were a result of one of two things. Either due to it being a weekly series, the outcome of a twist or story revelation hasn’t been published yet, so I need to go off of the little information given in that chapter which is slowly entertaining the audience while explaining all the plot points, making it hard to be sure I picked the right interpretation of a line. And then the other is because I was needing to finish these all in a day and it’s very exhausting to need to translate a series like this that fast when I was also doing a slew of other projects and working a full time job. So basically I couldn’t afford to take more than a day to translate it and then I would check it over at the end after it was typeset, and then I’d release it. That’s because I was going to have some other thing occupying my time so I couldn’t spare another few hours considering alternate possibilities for what lines meant or making myself a glossary to keep terms consistent or re-read the last few chapters to see what I did before and refresh my memory as an arc came out over the course of 2 months, stuff like that. And honestly even now when I’m way more experienced going through these it’s still quite exhausting, though I can check/edit a couple chapters in a few hours. Getting everything “perfect” or as close to perfect as I can requires a huge amount of time and energy for a series like this.

Anyhow, this volume contains a couple gag chapters, the Kagura’s fake funeral arc, the Kondou in a cockroach mask at the festival on a date with Otae arc, and the first half of the Yaemon/Asaemon executioner arc. I tried really hard to make sure all the lines flow better and the typesetting is nicer in addition to fixing any typos or minor translation mistakes. I’m pretty happy how it’s turned out. But back when I started this project my plan was to just give them a quick read through and fix any obvious mistakes. What I’m doing at this point is really overkill. Regardless, I hope folks check it out! We don’t have too much left, and then it’s on to doing some of the V32 and earlier volumes. We’ll see how that goes.

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 52 (Ch456-465)
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Okay, volume 53! We’ve got 7 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. So yeah, going through and editing the volumes that are primarily gag chapters is proving to be a much more time-consuming effortful task than I expected. Each one is taking several days to do. I’ve tended to notice lots of little minor mistakes that don’t really alter the plot or anything but are slightly wrong and if I want all these good in the end I need to go through every chapter and every line with a fine-toothed comb.

Like for example this volume has the end of the Executioner Ikeda Asaemon/Yaemon Arc. And part of that arc involves Sougo and Hijikata investigating the crimes of tsujigiri that have been going on. And basically they’re totally peripheral to the main plot regarding Gin, Yaemon, and Asaemon. But there’s a thing at the end where they have to wrap up their plot and explain how the Hitotsubashi faction isn’t taking the blame, and someone has to be blamed, so they blame Asaemon and Gin and they make it seem like Asaemon committed seppuku, but they really mean Asaemon is adopting her new identity as Yaemon the 19th and Gin is “executed” but not really. It’s a very convoluted thing to setup the ending scene which is easy to slightly misunderstand if you’re trying to do this in a few hours so you can get to the 500 other things you need to do that week and didn’t pay a ton of attention to the side plots. So for a few sentences I had like, the subject of the sentence wrong or my eyes glazed over a kana or two the first time. Along with fixing various typos because there’s just so much gosh-darn text it’s hard to catch them all. I hopefully got everything fixed for this version. This volume is the end of the executioner arc and the rest of it is the Gin and Hijikata switching bodies arc. Both pretty good ones.

So to update you all on the other stuff I was talking about last time, I finished scanning all of volumes 24-32. We also ran all our automation scripts, setup all the color pages, and whited out all the bubbles for all volumes. All those need is uhhh all the translating and typesetting. Which of course takes the vast majority of the time. But I did get all the early steps done. A couple people have volunteered to help typeset so we’ll see how that goes. If that works out they could end up getting done way faster than I expected.

Once I finish all of these volume versions (V46-72) of stuff we’vr ALREADY released once, I’ll start on those ones we’ve never worked on before at all and work backwards from V32 towards V24. I dunno how long it would take to do each one, I dunno if I’ll ever finish it all, and I’m gonna have to take breaks cause I can’t do all 79 chapters in a row (it’s chapters 203-282 plus the Thirteen one-shot and all the extra pages/interviews). So maybe we get one finished every couple months or something. I’ve said this in a lot of these posts, I’m trying to keep these projects from taking over my life and also I’m not sure how many people would read fixed up versions of old Gintama chapters to begin with. A lot of this is me being a perfectionist. So it feels like taking hours and hours of my free time to do these may not be worth it if I’m gonna keep going for months and months. But like a lot of these projects I do, I figure I’ll start on it and see where life goes and keep working on it bit by bit as I have time and try to pace myself. And I can always stop if I don’t feel like doing all of them. Aaanyhow, I hope folks are reading all this. Enjoy!

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 53 (Ch466-476)
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Okay, volume 54! We’ve got 8 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. God I remember what I was going through when I was working on these back in like 2013-2014, I was doing way too many projects every week back then. I would have like 3-4 weekly projects and monthly JoJolion and a bunch of other long-term do-whenever projects I was doing in all my spare time besides then. I went through this whole thing multiple times now so I was hopefully able to catch every little mistake we made the first time around. This volume contains the Sakamoto-Mutsu meeting/flashback arc, that weird art style essay manga chapter, the Etekichi Kozou monkey dude story involving Kondou’s childhood arc, the time-stop arc, and that gag chapter about Street Fighter-style special techniques. As usual it’s also in higher resolution and has all the extras translated and all that. Holy shit a lot of work went into each of these. Probably way more than it’s worth to just have a fixed up version of something we already released, but well it’s already done and now I just gotta check and finalize 8 more.

I was thinking about what we wanna do after this, given we’re nearly done with this project of redoing the Jump Raw chapters which was for volumes 46-71. After that, Volumes 33-35 and 72-77 could be like *slightly* redone with higher resolution and fixed fonts and we can add in any SFX we didn’t do. Those were all ones we did around 2019 so that would basically be it, it wouldn’t take too long, maybe a couple days of work on each. We’d use the same automations for cleaning and stuff and transfer everything over but some stuff would need to be redone manually. Beyond that, Volumes 36-45 would then require more work where I’d have to check through all the old translations because I did them so long ago. The first ones were done only a year or so after we made this group (Some of V36-ish was done with Shounen Jump scans and then fixed up for volume versions already but they resolution isn’t at the 2560px height we’re using now and doesn’t have the fonts updated). All that would take a little longer each volume but would be another thing we COULD do if I felt like it. But we’re getting into really low-return, being a super perfectionist stuff here. And then if we did all that we could then work on going further back to completely new volumes from scratch for volumes 24-32, and we’d just work backwards like we’ve been doing. The official Viz releases end at V23 so I wouldn’t go earlier than V24, there’s really no point, I think those versions are good enough even if they’re not amazing. Of course doing any volumes from scratch would take WAY longer than fixing up any of these ones, each one would take like 3 weeks of work or something around that. Which I’m not so sure is worth doing for 9 volumes tbh.

My thinking right now is I don’t really wanna spend all my free time forever trying to make this series perfect, I started working on the series I September of 2009 to give you all some perspective here. So basically I’m focusing on just finishing up the other 8 volumes we got left for now. But then I’ll probably slowly work on some of those other things every once in a while. Even if I only did one or two pre-V33 chapters a month we’d still get a volume done every once in a while. And sometimes it’s fun to revisit stuff like that I haven’t read since I was like, a senior in high school. But also I could use that time to just work on a *totally new* series. I could probably translate quite a few entire series faster than I could translate Gintama Volumes 24 to 32. But I dunno, we’ll see where life goes. So yeah that’s it for now. I guess I’ll start working on Volume 53? Nothing much else happening until the next Jojo chapter/volume come out.

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 54 (Ch477-486)
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Okay, we made it to volume 55! We’ve got 9 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. So now we’re past the Shogun Assassination arc, which means now every volume has a lot more text generally speaking and they’re made up of shorter gag arcs and semi-serious arcs. This one contains chapter 487 which I think was never animated in the anime? I heard somewhere it wasn’t, I haven’t checked personally. It also contains the Saitou Shimaru arc and the Aizen Kou/Love Potion arc.

Because these last bunch of volumes have a lot of text it takes me longer to check them, and a lot of this I’m just doing on my own. One other person is helping but that’s it. So it’s a lot of dull work, it’s a really long slog, and it’s not particularly rewarding to spot typos and tiny translation mistakes or rewording lines I translated back in 2014 or so. But ya know I wanna get this done and there’s not a ton left now. All the cleaning and redrawing and all that are done. Now I’m reading through every line in English and Japanese and making sure it all looks good. Hopefully I caught all the typos. Oh also this volume had a popularity poll results announcement, one where in the magazine it only had like the top 15 or so, but in the volume it had all the rest of it, which took forever to do in addition to the rest of the extras for this volume. I hope somebody somewhere reads all that at least once, cause god, I’m getting a headache just remembering doing that a couple months ago.

Anyhow, there’s new 3-Gatsu and The JOJOLands coming out soon. I’m working on more Executive Director Shima as well. I have to take breaks between these Gintama volumes because it’s just like torture doing lots of it in a row. Anyhow, enjoy folks. We’re almost there!

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 55 (Ch487-496)
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Okay, we made it to volume 56! We’ve got 10 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. This volume is the one where the Shougn Assassination Arc starts and it also has a bunch of gag chapters in it. Because now we’re back to the regular arcs before the series became a bit lighter in text, there’s more stuff to check so I’ve been putting it off. And working on Shima and other stuff the last few weeks. But all that’s left in the last 10 redo volumes is to check them over and fix any mistakes we can catch. This is mostly comedy chapters but also includes a few serious arcs and some kinda-jokey but kinda-serious sort-of-important-to-the-overall-plot arcs.

Anyhow, there’s not much work left ultimately. Each of these volumes takes a few hours to check and finalize maybe, and it’s just me and Teppy doing it. So I’ll try to get one done every week or two, something like that, unless something really takes up all my time and I can’t for a while. But I’d like to finish this project of doing volume versions of all the Gintama releases done with only magazine raws in the near future. Once it’s done we may do volume 32 or release some of the other volumes in higher resolution where we just transfer things over, maybe also redo the sound effects, or something like that. I dunno it kinda depends on my mood at the time. We’ll see! I do think I generally prefer working on new manga though rather than doing this perfectionist, making all my old stuff perfect stuff.

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 56 (Ch497-506)
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Here we are, the next one, volume 57! We’ve got 11 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. This volume is the middle part of the Shogun Assassination arc, which is basically the 2nd half of 56, then all of 57 and 58. This one is the climax of Zenzou’s story in the arc and also the beginning of the fight with Takasugi and Kamui.

Like I said in the last post, everything is done but checking over the remaining volumes. Me and Teppy are working on that. These last couple didn’t take very long because this part of the story is very action-heavy. From the first half of 56 and earlier there’s a lot more text because it’s largely more of the comedy arcs.

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 57 (Ch507-515)
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Hey, we’ve made it to volume 58! We’ve got 12 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. This volume is the last volume of the Shogun Assassination arc, it’s the one with the big Gin VS Takasugi fight with a bunch of Shouka Sonjuku-era flashbacks.

So today I finished translating and typesetting the last of the extras. And as I mentioned in the last post, we finished all the cleaning/redrawing a few weeks ago. So all that’s left for the remaining 12 volumes is to check them over and finalize them. So I’m hoping to get these all out pretty soon and get back to doing some other projects. Once I’m done with these I’ll probably at some point scan the other 9 volumes of Gintama after Viz stopped (Their last volume is volume 23) and I’ll try to get one of those done every once in a while, but it’s not gonna be my primary focus for months like this project has been. I’m probably mainly gonna go back to trying to finish Managing Director Shima Kousaku immediately after at least.

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 58 (Ch516-524)
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Hey, here’s the next one of these, volume 59. We’ve got 13 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. This volume is the one right after the Shogun Assassination arc ends and the beginning of the Farewell, Shinsengumi Arc.

I mentioned this in the last few posts but we finished cleaning and redrawing all the remaining volumes and I’m working now on translating the rest of the extras and then checking through the volumes to see if we can spot any mistakes or anything we think we can improve over the original versions. I already made all the major changes I wanted to do so besides that we’re just gonna have a couple people giving these a once-over and releasing them. So the remaining ones should hopefully be done in not too long. Translating the extras is kind of dull work because it’s mostly translating Sorachi-sensei’s long jokey rants that take up whole pages of text but I’m getting it done. Right now I’m in the middle of volume 55 working backwards, so there’s like 9 and a half volumes of extras left to do and I’m finishing one every few days. Once they’re all done we’ll probably end up releasing the remaining volumes pretty quickly.

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Gintama Volume 59 (Ch525-533)
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