Kusuriya no Hitorigoto ~Maomao no Koukyuu Nazotoki Techou~ - Vol. 11 Ch. 44 - The Empress Dowager

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Mar 10, 2021
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But yeah, PLEASE don't speed up your releases now, there is no point to any of this if your scanlation ends up being worse than the one released by the "sniper"/"thief".

I'm sure a lot of people (including me) would be willing to wait for your version rather than deal with name changes, as long as yours is higher quality.
 
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Dec 24, 2024
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I missed the て, my bad, but it shouldn't change the general meaning all too much.

I don't see myself as an expert in Japanese, but disagree with your translation in this case. If it was "wanted", the sentence would have something like 売りたがった
売ろうとする implies she tried or attempted to sell the towel to the quack. I don't see anything in that sentence that suggests that she had "wanted" to do this, instead it was that she had "made an effort" to do so. So, yes, "was trying..." could be a valid translation, but not "wanted to."

It would be great if anyone else who knows Japanese could help me confirm or deny my interpretation.
Yeah, I'm trying my best to not be a Kevin, so if you see anything other issues, please let me know. Thanks.

Edit: I also double-checked with this: https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/売ろうとしてた

I'll change it to "was trying" to account for the tensing.
This is just my two cents on the matter. I think the TL "wanted to" is more likely to be valid than "was trying." I would even argue that the latter is actually incorrect in this case.

Your stance is that the line suggests Maomao attempted to sell the handkerchief to the quack. However, when you consider the context, the quack is a Jinshi simp, which is made obvious even in the anime. If Maomao had indeed tried to sell the handkerchief to him, it would no longer be in her possession. The fact that it is still in her possession means either the quack is too poor to afford it, or she never approached him about it. The latter makes more sense in this case. In the next panel, she mentally thinks that Jinshi came in handy, even though she didn't intend to use the handkerchief like that. She wouldn't think that way if she had already tried to sell it to the quack. Instead, the line should have been something like, "I had failed to sell it to the quack, so it's good that I found a use for it elsewhere."

Ultimately, I couldn't find a convincing example that correlates to this line. The original line is confusing on its own. In the end, I think it feels incomplete, and adding something like つもりだった would improve it significantly. Oh well.

As a side note, I just put a ???? on this page. What does "okay" even mean?
image.png
 
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I agree that some things in the story don't make much sense, but if this is simply a sniper who took no content from NGS, then what reason would NGS have to wait a whole month before responding to the snipe and releasing in bulk?

Even for the time constraints you assumed that they started at the same time, in which case the quality difference obviously makes no sense, but the simpler explanation that NGS started rushing completion of the chapters only 6 days ago is right there
There seems to have been some sort of initial agreement between both teams for Isolation Scans to release up to Chapter 53. That much I can believe. But this could have been the result of a simple snipe instead of anything being stolen. And I still don't understand what happened behind the scenes that made Isolation Scans keep going.

Based on what I see, if the other team had indeed stolen NGS’s cleans and translation, all NGS had to do would have been to refine their translation and correct any mistakes made by the other team, right? But we are left with a vastly different translation here that is way more difficult to read. And as I and other users have already pointed out, this translation has several flaws, so I question whether their translation really is more "correct."

If NGS's intention was to give us a more "correct" translation and a higher quality release, I have to say this was a failure. Why even do a rush job? That doesn't make sense to me when you want to prove a point. I think IS calling out NGS's rough translation led to this kneejerk reaction, and all this bulk release did was proving that everything they said about NGS's translation was true.

IS's release not only reads better, they have completely new translation notes for the Li Empire's character and Jinshi's name, which I really appreciate. It makes their claim that they translated these chapters on their own, rather than relying on stolen work, much more believable. As I mentioned before, IS have cleaned and replaced all SFX (which I personally like much more than just subtitling them), so saying "they stole our cleans" looks unsubstantiated to me. I also do not think there wasn't a way to replace the Japanese SFX without "preserving their impact", it sounds more like NGS didn't know how. IS demonstrated how to do it, making me question even more how and why the falling out happened.

Aside from the stark differences in translation and the SFX, there are also smaller things I appreciate a lot in IS's release, like the Table of Contents at the start of a volume:

NGS
4jdcvkbler4.png


IS
46acqnz22q7.png

When you compare it to NGS's ToC, this just shows to me that IS put significantly more work and care into this. From the translation to the font choice, the font size, the centering of the text, the arrangement of the character entries - everything is different and better.

I agree that NGS should not rush things if this is the result. I am usually not a fan of snipes, but if the sniping team is faster and better, then I am looking forward to their release more. And now I'm rather interested in NGS's Chapter 54 release. There should have been enough time for a higher quality release since we are well past the holidays, right?
 
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Group Leader
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Jan 19, 2018
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6
I missed the て, my bad, but it shouldn't change the general meaning all too much.

I don't see myself as an expert in Japanese, but disagree with your translation in this case. If it was "wanted", the sentence would have something like 売りたがった
売ろうとする implies she tried or attempted to sell the towel to the quack. I don't see anything in that sentence that suggests that she had "wanted" to do this, instead it was that she had "made an effort" to do so. So, yes, "was trying..." could be a valid translation, but not "wanted to."

It would be great if anyone else who knows Japanese could help me confirm or deny my interpretation.
Yeah, I'm trying my best to not be a Kevin, so if you see anything other issues, please let me know. Thanks.

Edit: I also double-checked with this: https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/売ろうとしてた

I'll change it to "was trying" to account for the tensing.

My Japanese is pretty rusty so I had to look it up but ようとする can also mean "about to do something."
https://jlptsensei.com/learn-japanese-grammar/ようとする-you-to-suru-meaning/
https://learnjapanesedaily.com/japanese-grammar-ようとする-youtosuru.html
https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/43013/what-is-the-use-of-ようとしている

It might make more sense to translate it as "She was about to sell it to the quack."
 
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Aggregator gang
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My Japanese is pretty rusty so I had to look it up but ようとする can also mean "about to do something."
https://jlptsensei.com/learn-japanese-grammar/ようとする-you-to-suru-meaning/
https://learnjapanesedaily.com/japanese-grammar-ようとする-youtosuru.html
https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/43013/what-is-the-use-of-ようとしている

It might make more sense to translate it as "She was about to sell it to the quack."
Thank you! This makes sense. I've changed it to "was going to..."
 
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We have been working on this manga series since the beginning and now that the series is popular because of the anime, a usurper comes in with a version of your work that he only needed to improve on, capitalising on this current wave of popularity just to flaunt that he could do better than us, and some of you readers jump ship to support him, while this whole time he hasn't shown himself to give his side of the story so you make up a story to explain his actions in a better light for some reason, then I'm sorry to say that you're not the people we are translating this for.

That being said, this is the first and only work I've ever worked on, so I apologise that it's not up to standard as a fan translation. I am doing my best to improve, but again, without much feedback, there's no way of me knowing what I need to work on. I am also aware that I am very prone to mistakes, careless or otherwise, so I hope you can be patient with me as I work through this.

Also, I'm not going to read too much into the fact that a few of the criticisers and their emoticon reactors have accounts that were only created on Christmas Eve last year, or that they have really similar writing styles. You might be the same person or you might be a bunch of people who share a mind, I don't know nor do I care. I'm here for a discussion so I'll still engage with you as a person. You may poke holes in my argument and tire me out by making me repeat myself, but I think I've said enough regarding this topic so we'll leave it here. I get your point, Doge and friends. If you have the time, I'd appreciate it if you could compare it with the other chapters as well and tell me what else I need to fix, thanks.

Maybe I shouldn't have brought attention to translation accuracy, because there is a degree of creativity and interpretation into this art. It's perfectly fine to prefer a more liberal approach, but there is a limit to saying that someone's work is inferior while full-on praising a usurper's work, which is again based on someone else's work that he only had to improve on. This guy claims that his translation isn't based on mine. Fine, I'd like to meet your translator who can translate ~500 dense pages in under a span of two weeks, accounting for the time you needed to edit and typeset and letter in your sfx. They're wasted as a fan translator, imho.

Anyway, this is the last I'll speak of this topic, especially if the other party doesn't want to say their piece. I was waiting for him to say something since I don't have the full side of his story either, aside from a third party (reason why we left out some details; didn't want to drag them into this incident. They did nothing wrong) telling me that he was feeling upset from how we treated him (which was why I felt bad enough to let him do his thing at first) and later him gloating back and saying that he's a very angry boy and that I deserved what I got with all the power a gas lighter has.


Well, he can continue to ride on this popularity and show off he can do a better job since he's had years of experience under his belt as a fan translator, and we'll continue to translate for ourselves and share it with the rest of you guys who have been patiently waiting for us. I thank you guys again. Really appreciate it.

Sorry for rushing these chapters but I really just wanted to get rid of these chapters from my stockpile. They felt icky ever since they'd been touched by the sniper. We've been working on stockpiling so we could release at a faster rate later on, which is how we could drop three volumes (of varying quality I admit since I didn't give all the chapters the same amount of attention) in one go, but that plan is out the window now…
 
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Oct 31, 2019
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I have to say. I really did miss the chinese names for this version of the series in the other scanlation. It really does help me mentally seperate the two series and go, oh yeah, this is where i am not in the other series.
 

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