#translation project

[rowanisawriter]

swiss army knife prayer

chapter 1 of the quran is an opener that all babies learn and say before sleeping and at the beginning of each of the five prayers. there are other times you should say it but i can’t remember now. it’s only a few lines and one of them is at the top of this page. the translation is: guide us on the straight path, the path of those you’ve blessed, and not the path of those who have angered you or have been led astray. i like that line and wrote this poem out of it. the rest of this chapter is the same old stuff you’ll see throughout, praises, requests for preemptive forgiveness, a reminder of judgement day, the same words used for everything. the words “what if” have a letter in common with “god” and if you say it fast enough it sounds very similar. i remember more of arabic than i thought i would and it’s a pretty language. it’s hard to read though lol maybe that’s just me. It’s hard for me to read it

[paperandsong]

Légendes rustiques by George Sand, completed English translation

Original French at Project Gutenberg

Les Légendes rustiques is a collection of twelve creepy French folk legends gathered up and written down by George Sand and illustrated by her son, Maurice Sand, published in 1858. These stories were collected in the Berry region, but there are connections made to legends from Brittany and Normandy as well.

I came across a mention of the Rustic Legends a few years ago and realized there was no official English translation available, despite that George Sand is a very famous author. It turns out, Sand was such a prolific writer that much of her work has never been translated into English. I ordered a "translation" from Amazon and was disappointed to find that someone had just run the text through translation software without any editing or providing any cultural context. It was unreadable and I threw it in the trash.

I asked some fandom friends if they would be interested in trying to translate all twelve legends into English on our own. It has been a few years and each story has had several revisions and rounds of editing. This was a challenging translation project - there are many words in archaic French or not in French at all. Thanks to everyone who helped - I am really proud of the results here.

The purpose of this project is simply to make these twelve legends accesible to an English-reading audience. They have been available in the original French at Project Gutenberg for a long time. Use this post as a table of contents - each line will take you to a new story published on Tumblr. Sometimes they are creepy, they are often funny, and Sand's rambling style is cozy, making you feel like she is sitting right across a candle from you, telling you a story she once heard from someone else, a long time ago. Enjoy!

Introduction

1. Les Pierres-Sottes

2. Les Demoiselles

3. Les Laveuses de nuit

4. La Grand’Bête

5. Les Trois Hommes de Pierre

6. Le Follet d’Ep-Nell

7. Le Casseu’ de Bois

8. Le Meneu’ de Loups

9. Le Lupeux   

10. Le Moine des Étangs-Brisses

11. Les Flambettes

12. Lubins et Lupins

[indigozeal]

Stuff I liked in April 2026

Belated! Last month was, as previously told, rough for me. Let's look at some of the good.

Playing: I've been replaying Secret of Mana, which I've wanted to do for a long while. I don't think I've appreciated in previous runs how this is genuinely one of the most beautiful games ever made. Every village is pure pastoral bliss. The adventure has the palette of a vibrant yet pastel spring. It's also a thoroughly childlike game, and I mean that in the best, thoroughly-positive sense: the graphics are big, friendly, and bursting with (expertly-chosen) color, and every action is so rambunctious, with characters jumping and tumbling their way through the world, shaking treasure chests above their heads and throwing them down with such exuberance they leap off the ground. The early journeys through bright green, waving grassland pathways against Hiroki Kikuta's summer score bring to mind the best of late-July backyard adventures. The combat can be lacking in ways I didn't remember - there are times, by accident or design, when your weapons just will not hit, and times when you're frustratingly taken out of the action as an enemy winds up a spell. But this remains far and away the best of the Mana series for me, and I'm glad I revisited it.

Watching: Supergreatfriend's runs of Biorand, a randomizer for OG Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3. I've never been big on randomizers, but this one has features that give it passive entertainment potential: a) it puts in PS1 polygonal versions of most every major character in the series (complete with voice acting) up to RE8, which is a kick in itself, and b) it classifies character lines by tone (excited, sad, explanatory, etc.), and while lines are randomized in cutscenes, they're substituted by lines of like tone. This makes the conversations more coherent and allows, on occasion, for true magic to occur - like Steve Burnside going through Silent Hill-esque trauma processing over being separated from Claire, or Lady D and Wesker forming certain…alliances, or some characters with a very limited number of lines popping up everywhere. And then there are randomizer hijinks like five Mr. Xes in the main hall of the RPD. Always fun.

(I also appreciate the run of older, well-known titles Game Grumps has been on - Mickey Mousecapade, Golden Axe, Altered Beast. Arin's a bit heavy with the rewind & restores, but it's neat to see their reactions to full runs of such familiar games.)

Not much DbD or Hello Kitty last month, but I have a different illustration of that dynamic in the next two entries:

Forgotten from last month: Hitman featured Milla Jovovich as a Elusive Target in a take on her Resident Evil movies, complete with a Red Queen analogue crossed with the narrator from The Stanley Parable. I don't play Hitman, but the bit is appreciable even if you don't. Stick with a YouTuber you like for a solid playthrough of a basic run (there are a lot of folks producing Hitman videos with unfortunate commentary out there), then hit up this channel (no playlist; you have to scroll) for a lot of alternate takes and little details in the margins. I never thought Hitman my type of game, but the puzzlebox design on display here is making me reconsider that.

Reading: The Complete Brambly Hedge, a collection of a children's book series vintage 1978 following a community of mice who live in a field, illustrated with vibrant storybook watercolors. This was a random library find from the "to be reshelved" section; I later learned that the librarian herself had borrowed it and was very happy that someone else had discovered it in turn. The watercolor + hand-drawn illustrations make nature look wild and beautiful but simultaneously a cozy home for the mice. The sense of scale is done very well - the world is still big and daunting and untamed, particularly to the mice, but they have their own little niche in it. The mice live in strong harmony with nature: weaving spherical homes out of wheat & reeds, making dyes from lichen. (I liked the sea chapter, where a few of the mice sail down the river to replenish their salt stores and the sea mice's home is made of seashells.) There's also a strong sense here of a community pulling together and taking care of their own - many of the adventures revolve around, say, a few mice taking a journey to bring blankets to a couple old voles who live in a faraway field, or remodeling a cottage for a new mother. There's no human presence, and while it could be because they simply don't show up, it all brought to mind slightly (if only personally; this may not be intended at all) a touch of something like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, where the world has moved beyond humanity's influence and is more peaceful for it. I will be a bit unkind here and say that I do think it's missing that something to make it truly classic. The illustrations of the little mouse world are packed but don't have any real surprises hidden in the corners; a sparkle of wit would have picked up the straightforward stories. It's very unassumingly twee, at least to me. (Also, I find the little scamp mouse whose antics we're supposed to love kind of a pain in the ass.) But it does enough right where I'm comfortable in putting it here, and I think the right audience would really love this. Maybe you're part of that audience!

I took a cue from Tiny Bookshop last month to start the manga Monster, which I've long wanted to read. I've plumbed only Vol. 1, but that was superb. You're likely familiar with the premise: a deeply moral doctor defies his money-grubbing hospital to save the life of a young boy, an act that runs him afoul, in a twisty way, of a serial killer. I was familiar with Naoki Urasawa's earlier work, particularly the judo manga Yawara!, through its use in Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics and Japanese the Manga Way, which were very helpful in teaching casual speech and how manga uses language when I was starting out as a translator. The glimpses of Urasawa's stories there helped paint manga as a more expansive storytelling form, with more room for nuance and humanity, than the traditional showcased superhero fights. Urasawa's use of the manga artform in Monster is master-class: the nuance and range of his character expressions; the dramatic timing; the panel composition & framing…it's absolutely on another level and makes the story read like a top-tier live-action drama. (The line strength and use of black and white in a certain pivotal scene reminds me of Vheen Hikuusen, which is, as you might expect, high praise coming from me.) The plot is labyrinthine and thrillingly paced, an engaging mystery on several levels…but I also appreciated how it gives equal weight to the mindset of its protagonist, a man of very strong moral character, and how what he discovers challenges his fundamental views on the world. Lesser stories would relegate this to a simplistic, derisive "naive man discovers the world isn't sunshine and roses!"; this manga takes as its centerpiece, and takes very seriously, this man who's very committed to doing the right thing in the world but is thrown into situations where it's increasingly hard and unclear how to accomplish that. It simultaneously has a huge heart and is fiercely intellectual about the dilemmas he faces. I'm not sure about the twist in the last chapter of the manga - it was obvious something like that was in the works, but I found it more fascinating when the protagonist was driven pure by his moral imperatives than partially by plot needs. I'm absolutely eager to experience the rest of this story, though. (I just wish there were digital versions.)

Real life: I bought new birdfeeders to replace the old ones I had that were broken (squirrel jumped on them). I don't have a picture, but they're the clear plastic type that suction-cup onto the outside of your window so you can watch the birds eat (and vice versa). When I first started feeding the birds, I got mostly chickadees, but now, it's a bunch of finches (house, gold), a few song sparrows, and a pair of cardinals. It's nice to have an ongoing source of nature near my workspace, particularly since it is, as I write this, the middle of May, and we still had the threat of snow just yesterday.

Translation project updates: There was, to put it mildly, a good deal of disruption this month, but save for one file that needs special care, I'm done with the revisions for the new formatting. Now it should be just a matter of translating files, so in the future, I'll be reporting in with numbers on that.

I end with a clip featuring a movie I do not like but a joke I very much do, where the very different vibes of the two principals play perfectly off each other:

[exyustuck]

napravila legenda Noiretwink na twitteru

[solace-in-the-deep]

Is anyone interested in the translation of this novel?

I Delayed My Death Because Of a Will

Other names: Because of the Will, I Delayed My Death for a While ; Mission: Save the Hunter ; 유언 때문에 죽는 건 잠깐 미뤘습니다

-

I have a small team working on getting an English translation to go up for this and wondering if there are many more who are still looking for this story's novel. We're currently up to chapter 50 of the novel, and no, we have not posted it anywhere just yet.

As of now, we have all the RAWs from the main novel to the two side story volumes. We have also done an initial translation of all of it through AI/MTL, but we're editing the entire piece to be readable and as accurate as it can be.

If anyone's interested in helping the translation project (mostly beta-reading what has already been edited by the main translator), please shoot me a DM.

[juspion25824]

🌊The Chess Move That Explains Why Giyuu Will Never Forgive Himself

🧐a worldbuilding note for "The Funerals in Summer"

So a few readers asked about the Chapter 1 subtitle—"Checkmate by a Dropped Pawn (打ち歩詰め)"

—and what it means for the story. Here's the shogi symbolism I'm working with in this fic!

(Quick note: this is my fic interpretation, not canon psychology. Just the emotional framework I built for this particular story.)

🈚️打ち歩詰め (Uchi-fu-tsume): The Illegal Move

In shogi, this is a move that looks like it should work—you drop your cheapest piece (a pawn) right in front of the enemy king and deliver instant checkmate.

Except you can't. It's forbidden. Too easy. Too cheap. The win doesn't count.

That's exactly why it became the emotional shape of Giyuu's trauma in this fic.

📝How It Maps to the Tomioka Tragedy (in this story)

In The Funerals in Summer, I write Giyuu as someone who learned shogi young—it was how his father taught him to think（and this is actually a canon setting）. So when he's about ten and can't process what happened that night why he pushed Tatsuko away, in the hospital, his brain reaches for the only framework it has: the rules of the game.

He sees himself as the pawn. He sees Tsutako as the other major piece in Shogi. He sees his survival as a move that should have been illegal.

A forbidden exchange. The kind you're not supposed to win from.

📝Why This Matters for the Fic

This isn't about canon Giyuu—it's about the version of him living in this story, who grows up unable to forgive himself for a move that "shouldn't have worked."

He didn't just lose his sister. He won a game he believes he had no right to win.

And that's the weight he carries into every chapter.

📝Why Every Chapter Title Is a Shogi Term

Because in this fic, shogi isn't decoration—it's the lens through which Giyuu interprets everything he can't say out loud. Each chapter title is another move, another rule, another way of measuring the distance between what happened and what should have happened.

It's the architecture of his guilt.

If you're into fic-worldbuilding posts or character studies through symbolism, let me know what else you'd like to see! (I have thoughts about the wisteria/funeral imagery too.)

[jikanetamagi]

.hack//Link -English Fan-Translation Patch- ver. 2.0 has been released!!

𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀!!🎉🥳

The latest patch of .𝗵𝗮𝗰𝗸//𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗙𝗮𝗻-𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 has been released!!!

After 12 years of development and progress, the game is completely translated into English!!

For the latest info and tutorial, you can check on his website, here:

.hack//Link

Welcome to the official page for the English fan translation of .hack//Link! Since the game’s release in 2010, it has not been released outs

𝗠𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗞𝗮𝘇𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿 (𝗱𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲) 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱:

After much slow work, the patch is released! It's not perfect. There is one known freezing issue but it does not affect the core gameplay.

The font still needs work.

Overall, it's basically a complete translation. Please play it thoroughly and let me know of any issues you find. Then I can make further corrections in a month or two.

Join dothack translate discord community for more updates and info:

Check out the .hack//Translate community on Discord - hang out with 169 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

[yarrystyleeza]

So, today I was hired as the head leader of one of the graduation project groups. I was literally praying for this role, and I hope I don't disappoint myself before anyone else. I will have to translate, edit, supervise and submit the whole group work by May 3rd—along with an individual research paper. We're going to translate a book about translation.

Am I excited? Yes. Am I nervous? Hell fucking I am. But I really wanted this and I don't wanna ruin it. Wish me luck, I'm finally gonna do something I want to be proud of.