@strixplayer
@cillbosby
Guess I'll take this one point at a time.
1) There is no "To be continued" in the Japanese.
First of all... th... there is. https://imgur.com/a/vgLtlnY More specifically, it's both! The left side says "to be continued in"
while the left and right say what issue of Gessan it will be in, and when it will be released.
So, a full translation of the box would be as follows: "To be continued in the April edition (of this magazine), releasing on 3/12"
2) "To be continued" is misleading
"To be continued" is a highly established phrase used in all kinds of English-speaking entertainment mediums regardless of whether they
are episodic or not. This phrase is also a very normal and common translation of 続く, which is how the text is normally written in comics,
although it depends on the magazine for how the full phrasing works.
Obviously, Takagi is slightly different since it's "to be continued in X issue releasing on Y date".
This is the first time the phrasing has misled someone into thinking the plot would directly continue in the next chapter in the three years
that we have being doing this series. Or at the very least, it's the first time someone has mentioned it, so I'm a little skeptical of how big of a problem it actually is.
However, it's impossible for us to address the idiosyncrasies and English levels of every reader, so there's not much we can do aside from
trying to do what will make the most sense to the most amount of readers.
The way the phrase is typically used doesn't make people assume that the addition that follows it will, without exception, be a direct continuation.
This is honestly standard practice, so I'm not sure what else to say here.
3) Why?
---A: It's a lot of work to format
Firstly, to format the English to look good and, most importantly, be easily readable in a space that small (and the size of this box changes every chapter. Sometimes it's minuscule!)
with that amount of information can be a challenge. To top it off, the Japanese formatting is not consistent for how the box is stylistically partitioned, which adds
another layer of work we'd have to deal with.
---B: The information is not useful to readers when looking at the big picture
Secondly, this information will be useless to readers who are not reading along with the monthly updates or to someone
simply archiving the files. It's hardly useful to people who DO follow along.
As someone with access to raws, I'm sure you'll have noticed that we ignore almost every piece of magazine text. This is because for most readers in Japan,
they don't have the desire or the means to buy a copy of the magazine every month, so they just read the volumes as they come out.
The volumes include 0% of the magazine text, including the "to be continued" box. We prefer to cater to an experience
that the majority of readers of the original language are experiencing, so we always remove magazine text, or in the case of the "to be continued" box,
simplify it. The information of when and what issue the next chapter is coming out is not relevant to anyone reading the series months or years after the chapter
has been released.
Edit: clarity, added the translation of the "tbc" box.