I figured I might as well start a blog here to occasionally post an update on things I am working on. Gonna be kind of hard, since I had to agree not to post anything sexually oriented in order to get this blog. I'm going to go ahead and assume that was unedited generic ass-covering ToS and doesn't exactly apply to these blogs, though I'm not going to post anything on the shady side if I can help it.

That said, if you are looking at anything I'm doing it's likely because you heard I was trying to translate Zettai Reido in my free time. It's true. It's also true that a sizeable chunk of Zettai Reido contains content I can't share or describe in detail here. We'll figure out what to do about that when it comes to it. I like it here, and I'm not gonna break any rules if I can help it. Well, let's go ahead and talk about the project.

So to start, the existing transcription (extracting the text from the scans) had been eroded (replaced) by translation attempts. I could probably either find the transcriptions in the history of the wiki page they were on, or else OCR the book again myself, but instead I have decided to transcribe it as I go. It's good practice, honestly, and half the reason I'm working on this is as a study activity. That does mean I have to go slower, but I was going to be slow no matter what.

As for the translating itself, I will often find myself with one sentence in a big section that I can't figure out (having not learned that particular expression), or sentences I can read but can't really find a way to naturally phrase in English. So I'm thinking in addition to working on a proper complete translation, I will also keep a mock-up of paraphrasing and the general gist of things without an accurate phrase-for-phrase flow. Since the least expressive and most mechanical sentences are the easiest, that should mean the actual crunchy mechanics needed to play the game get done before anything else.

In the past, I wandered from passage to passage and translated what caught my eye, like the estrus rules or the pain golem or the cursed armor description etc etc. That was fine when I was just chipping away at a community translation like the one we had, but I think I'm going to be much more methodical now that I plan on starting from the raw scans. To that effect, I started with the Table of Contents, then I started working through the bold points on the player rules section, after which I'll paraphrase all the mechanical instructions, and so forth. Dialogue, fluff, backstory, roleplay excerpts, character history, and everything else not explicitly needed to play the game will be assigned a low priority, so in the event I do burn out it'll be after the game is a playable skeleton at least.

Some of the people discussing this game brought up expansions, both the one we have scanned and others we don't. It's way too soon to set my sights on those, but I'm not saying no.

Anyways if I hear from you people who are also interested in this game from time to time, it will definitely help me stay motivated. So feel free to send me a message.