https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/103299303

Perfection is the enemy of improvement. If you see any translation mistakes, or other errors, please let me know and I'll correct them in the next release.

If there is any moral to this tale of woe, it is: "Keep your sister away from your dick!"

Ironically enough, the author will probably get around to doing a machine translation of this on pixiv in the next year or so. But frankly, I wanted something better and sooner, hence here we are.

Version 2 Changes

1) Changed font to the Wild Words family almost everywhere
2) Removed most of the Japanese punctuation, and replaced with English punctuation
3) Fixed quite a few mistranslations

Version 3 will be coming Mid January.

My brother in Christ, please use a real font to typeset. Literally anything else, Wild words, komika slick/slim, Victory speech, Spinner rack would all be an enormous improvement over this.
Also, don't keep the Japanese punctuation man. We don't have vertical ellipsis or dashes in English. If you want to indicate a pause just do it the normal way.
Eg: Page 1
"Will you stop doing that... It's embarrassing..."

Don't correct them in the next release, just correct it now.

Base +3, qwedfawerffa23 +5, Coledas Ukgent +5, Hamjameter +6, mali888 +16

@Kyuume I'll consider doing that. I used the different fonts to give a flavor of the original. Considering how this is going over, its probably not a bad idea, though I don't know. A lot of translations will keep the Japanese punctuation, and I prefer it.

Edit: Considering the lukewarm response this work is getting, I think I may have gone a little overboard with the Japanese punctuation, though personally I like it and think it improves the work. I'll remove most of the vertical ellipses, and consider using a different main font, though I'm going to keep Yuuto's freak out font, and the handwriting font on page 6. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Last edited on 28 December 2022, 18:56.

Base +5, qwedfawerffa23 -5, Coledas Ukgent +5

@Asmither

I don't know what you mean by "a lot of translations will keep the Japanese punctuation" seeing as anyone worth their salt will not keep the Japanese punctuation.
Quite frankly, this is barely above the level of a MTL job if even. So if that's what you were going for you definitely succeeded in accomplishing that.
I could harp on and on about everything wrong here but it most likely will not be productive for either of us.

All I'll say is, if you're serious about wanting to improve and keep translating, the least you can do is pay attention to how your work stacks up to everyone else's translation works, both SFW and NSFW.

Base +3, qwedfawerffa23 +5, Danjian +6, Coledas Ukgent +5, Hamjameter +6, mali888 +16

If you want to improve your typesetting (and considering your uploder comment you really should) here are some typesetting tutorials and other resources for you:

https://www.insidescanlation.com/etc/the-idiots-guide-to-editing-manga/guide/main
https://mangadex.org/title/08e1f85a-bb12-4fe4-aec5-0d7a80b3a261/anonblack-s-typesetting-guide?tab=chapters
https://www.ruinevil.com/rawr/editguide/index.html
https://quicksandscans.wordpress.com/resources/

Base +20, qwedfawerffa23 +5, IcyHot32 +6, Coledas Ukgent +5, mali888 +16

@Kyuume I am quite serious about wanting to get better, that's why I'll follow the suggestions of anyone whose polite about it. Rome wasn't built in a day, and Caesar didn't start at the top. A list of things wrong would be fine.

This is the first work that I've done that has failed. In general the number of stars given directly correspond to the quality of the artwork, so I was expecting this work to only get 2-2.5 stars anyway, as it's pretty niche. The fact that it's currently gotten .67 stars tells me the community doesn't care much for my editorial decision to duplicate the puncutation in the original, so I'll remove it. Also, I'm not all that happy with the main dialog font, as I didn't notice the funky question marks till the second or third page. I don't have access to the other fonts you mentioned, so its unlikely I'll choose one of them, more likely I'll pick one of the business fonts.

Finally, I'm doing this mostly for the English only readers. Those who already know Japanese don't really need translations, and I'm sure the story is better in its native language than in a translation.

@Ancient-Alien I will review those pages and see what I can learn from them. My resources are quite meager, so I can't layout real money to get a better image editor, or I would. Fwiw: I'm using paint.net, gimp just pisses me off to much to use, and I can't afford paintshop.

Base +5, jhvscjhfkjasa +8, qwedfawerffa23 -5, Coledas Ukgent +5

Don't give up, good job buddy.

I'm still hoping someone tackles uploading

https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ398109.html

or

https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ341445.html

Base +6, Coledas Ukgent +5

While the typesetting is certainly a problem, if we look at the actual translation, it's tons better than machine. Grammar is correct when it needs to be, and appropriate drops are used in the other places.
Do you guys understand how hard it is to read the later translations of Unemployed Wise Man?

Base +6, Coledas Ukgent +5, LunaCat +6

My comment got deleted. I do not know if it was due to mass downvotes or a mod, but if a mod then, instead of mods deleting harsh comments they need to start deleting MTL'd uploads, or shitty Japanese translation. I hope my comment doesn't get deleted this time. Fuck you, Asmither, you disgusting scum. I remember in your first upload you said you barely know any Japanese, so why are you translating more content? It is obvious this just an edited machine translation. Your life is a monument to stupidity. I hope that whenever you wake up and look in the mirror that you realize how worthless you are. Feel free to downvote this if it hurts your feelings like the bitch you are, but you know that deep down it is true.

Base +9, qwedfawerffa23 +5, Coledas Ukgent -5, TheUnknownable1234 +9

@ wickedzerx I think those two will show up here eventually. Someone (not me) is promising to translate The Cousins Story and one other in the none too distant future.

@MagicalJuko Contrary to the opinions in some posts, I am quite fluent in English and I believe the number 1 job of a translator is to make work enjoyable to read for the audience. The biggest mistake I made this time was copying the punctuation and fonts of the original. While I think it was cool as hell, the world disagrees with me. I'm working to change it now. I just browsed "Unemployed Wise Man" and yup, someone got a little carried away with their typesetting.

Last edited on 29 December 2022, 10:24.

Base +6, qwedfawerffa23 -5, Coledas Ukgent +5

@Asmither you believe wrong fuckwit. The number one job of a translator is to produce an accurate translation for the reader. Their job is not to make it enjoyable. Holy fuck you are retarded. Your biggest mistake is not knowing Japanese. By your retarded logic, you are okay with with rewrites because as you say " make work enjoyable to read for the audiance. " and as long as there is some lobotomized retard out there that finds it enjoyable to read, then there is an audience. Again you are vermin scum that needs to be taken out of the gene pool. You don't even take the time to right click your wrong spelling of audiance to change it. Why would anyone expect quality out of your work?

Base +9, qwedfawerffa23 +5, Coledas Ukgent -5, Ruckkus1411 -7

Page 1.

Your TL: Are you sure…? Yes, it says pinch the tip like this!
RAW text: こんな感じかな．．．？えいーえいー！
Author’s intent: It’s the sister talking, not a conversation between the two, you’ve misunderstood. “[Do I do it] like this…?/Something like this…?” and the えい’ｓ are just like sounds of exertion.

Your TL: You need to be brave!
RAW text: 我慢しなさい！
Author’s intent: I understand what you were going for, but ‘being brave’ and ‘to endure’ are a little too dissimilar in my opinion. If you were going for something like, “You need to brave this out!”, that’d probably make more sense, but literally just saying, “You need to be brave” doesn’t really convey the meaning of the RAW.

Your TL: Damn…How did all of this happen? Here’s what happened…
RAW text: くそ．．．何でこんなことに．．．
Author’s intent: The “Here’s what happened” bit is made up, you shouldn’t of included it.

Page 2.

Your TL: …what was he looking for?
RAW text: ．．．なぁにこれ？
Author’s intent: Too liberal, just stick with “What’s this?”

Your TL: I wish she hadn’t seen it…
RAW text: あれを見られなければこんなことには．．．
Author’s intent: “None of this would’ve happened if she hadn’t seen it…”, just wrong.

Your TL: Let’s see now, it says to use steroids, to help stretch the foreskin…
RAW text: えーと次は．．．’ステロイド剤を全体に塗って包皮を伸ばしやすくする’．．．
Author’s intent: “So, uh, next…it says to “spread the steroids over foreskin to aid/help/make easier the stretching process…”, can’t just leave it at “use”, you’re oversimplifying it way too much.

Your TL: You might need surgery. But, you know, if you do that you’re gonna have a scar on your penis, right?”
RAW text: 手術なんかしておちんちんに傷跡が残ったりしたら大変だよ？
Author’s intent: “If you really went through with surgery you’d end up with a scar left on your penis, you know? That’d be a big problem, wouldn’t it?”, she’s trying to talk him out of surgery, not say “you need surgery and also your cock will be scarred bro”.

Your TL: I’ve heard of people being tricked into having foreskin surgery, and what if it failed? I’m worried about you!
RAW text: 騙されてる包茎手術受けて失敗したって話もあるし．．．お姉ちゃん心配．．！
Author’s intent: “There’s been/I’ve heard stories about people getting tricked into undergoing foreskin surgeries and them ending up in failures…! Onee-chan’s worried about you…!”, the “...and what if it failed?” part is the real issue here, everything else is right.

Your TL: Yuuto’s foreskin is…sis will cure it for you. Leave it to me!
RAW text: ゆうとの真正包茎はおねえちゃんが治してあげるから任せておいて！
Author’s intent: “Onee-chan will cure Yuuto’s phimosis for him, don’t worry! Just leave it all to me!”, too liberal, left out the phimosis.

Page 3.

Your TL: Sorry…I can’t peel it right now…!
RAW text: の．．．覗かないで．．．！
Author’s intent: “Don’t peek down there!”, he’s telling her not to look down his foreskin hole.

Your TL: It’s not everyday someone checks and plays with my penis…
RAW text: ちんちんを見られるのは日常茶飯事．．．
Author’s intent: “Having my penis being seen has become an everyday occurrence…”, literally the complete opposite of what you said.

Base +17, sliverd +6, qwedfawerffa23 +5, Coledas Ukgent +5

@Asmither

Good job on the changes, now we're actually getting somewhere that I can more or less give you actual feedback without just saying that everything is wrong.

Typesetting
This may be due to the image editor that you're using (paint.net) but you fell into what I at this point consider to be the "newbie trap" of trying to fill each bubble with as big of text as possible.
First of all, there is no need to do that. All you're accomplishing is digging yourself into a typesetting hole that ends up affecting every single page. Looking at the raw and your TL side by side, I would say that your text is oversized by a factor of 2.

My process for achieving a consistent look throughout all of my pages is by choosing a page with a decent amount of text, usually the first page.
Next, I eyeball an approximate font size that I think will serve as my "base" in this example I will say 16pt. Now use that size for every text bubble in the page. Is it too big or small for any bubble?
If too small / big, increase / decrease by 2pt and reevaluate. Now look at text on the raw, which text is bigger and smaller? Those texts on your TL should now be increased / decreased accordingly to match. Again work in small increments of about 2pt. (In some cases where you are using single digit font sizes then you may go in .5 steps)
Now that your 1 page is typeset / sized correctly you use that as a reference point for the rest of it. This helps you stay in check because suddenly going from 12pt to 20pt will stick out like a sore thumb.

Now that that's covered, next is formatting / punctuation. On page 1 I can still see that you left some Japanese punctuation. Remove all of it. (This applies to text bubbles with 6 dotted ellipsis, you re-typeset those into a 3 dot ellipsis) You want your work to be consistent. To put it one way, you can't just arbitrarily decide half way you're going to stop spelling words correctly because you like it like that.
Pauses in Japanese are not the same as in English, we do not need big gaps between phrases or sentences. This isn't some sort of children's book where you need big spaces because you're assuming the reader can't differentiate between 1 sentence from another. Just keep the whole thing together. This is exactly why punctuating and using full stops / periods + commas are important. Also, it again leads to sloppy typesetting because you're heavily limiting yourself.
If you really have to use one like I've done here: https://e-hentai.org/s/889292f264/2358496-16 then I advise that you at least lower the leading space so it still appears connected albeit with a small gap.

Rotating the text is correct if it is present in the raw. However, if you are just rotating for the hell of it like you've done quite egregiously on Page 2 then that is just plain wrong. Again you should have no problems fitting the text the majority of the time if you simply size your text correctly and accordingly. Also, while you can change fonts to add additional emphasis try not to go wild on that. It can be very jarring if done seemingly randomly or with a janky font like you've done on page 3 (What? Every day?!) < on this note, stick with using "?!" in place of "!?" like you see in the raws. As for where you should use a different font, you should use a visually different font for narration boxes. In my case, I use Victory Speech for my main dialogue and CC Samaritan Tall for Narration boxes. Usually a slimmer font such as Samaritan Tall allows you to work better in the cramped narration boxes as they are more compact and closer together.

Another big aspect is shaping but I cannot review that here with how chaotic the text already is. What I can say is, don't randomly change the leading space between lines. Seriously, you go from normal leading space to extremely compressed and then randomly huge gaps between lines. I really don't know why you decided to do that since it's not even present in the raw.

Translation
Page 1:
Your TL: Like this
Raw: こんな感じかな...? えいっえいっ!
You're still missing the tone / かな part of it that expresses uncertainty > Something like this...? / Maybe like this...?

Your TL: You know... Hey sis!
Raw: あの...お姉さん...
Your tone here is completely wrong, he's embarrassed as you can see in the next bubble so you should reflect that. > Uhm... Hey sis...

Your TL: No way...
Raw: ダーメっ
You've missed the mark here again, she's being firm with him and telling him that she won't stop even though he's asking her to

Your TL: I'm doing this for you Yuuto... You know what I'm saying?
Raw: これもユウトのためなんだからね?
Your "You know what I'm saying" is very awkward and out of nowhere, you should've phrased it like "This is all for your sake you know?" Unlike Japanese there's no need to excessively mention their name if it's obvious that they're speaking to them.

Page 2:
Your TL: Where is... He's not here?
Raw: あれ...? いないのー?
あれ should've been translated to "hmm...?" or "huh...?"

Your TL:"I'm more worried about her "helping"... but...
けど should've been translated to "though" > "I'm more worried about her "helping" though..."

Page 4:
Your TL: I just got an erection and she's staring!
Very awkward phrasing, should be reworded to be more like "She saw me get hard"

Your TL: How many times have we stretched the foreskin just this far? and then...
The narration speaker doesn't change. In this case it's Yuuto so it should be from his POV. It should've been "Again and again, she came to check the progress of my phimosis"

Page 5:
Your TL: Oh no sis! You've stretched the skin too much! It's all your fault!
The rest of your TL reflects the tone of "look at what you've done" but your "Oh no sis!" is completely out of place. (Also on this page you've decided that he now refers to it as his dick even though he was using penis 2 pages ago)

Your TL: Yuuto gets so angry all the time... I mean... Your penis
Misinterpreted, "Whenever you get angry, your uhm... foreskin... Because this connects to the next bubble and you have the context there's no need to use penis.

Your TL: Yes you're right! That's the answer! Surgically cut off the tip of the foreskin.
The raw gives off the tone of her suddenly getting the idea but that doesn't mean you need to have it twice. A more apt translation would've been "Oh right! if you just get an operation to cut off only the tip of it, it'll be fixed!"

Your TL: Why didn't you just get a foreskin in the first place!
Misinterpreted, it's Yuuto speaking. "I would've been better off just getting the operation done in the first place!"

Page 6:
Your TL: My sister's is gonna... grrr!
He's being angry at his sister > This is all her / my sister's fault...!

Simply put, that's far too many translation mistakes to be making. Especially if this is already after a first round of corrections. You need to be comparing your translation with the raw and making sure the intents match up. You're consistently getting the tone / speaker wrong it seems like. Along with that, on top of the weird gaps you come up with very strange wording that doesn't even line up with one another even though they're all in the same bubble. Stop trying to stick to the Japanese expressions especially with the pauses. Sometimes you can keep the beat the same but most of the time you have to rewrite it to fit within English grammar structures as well as making it sound natural. You can't do that if you try to stick to the commonly seen "これ..."

In Japanese it's perfectly normal and acceptable to simply say すき but in English you can't just say "I love it" without context. You have the context of what's happening in the story as well as the actual art in front of you. You need to learn to explicitly mention and describe what "it" is and help the reader along. In that same vain, you should be reading your whole translation start to finish. It should flow from one bubble to another bubble seamlessly. If it doesn't then you messed up. To help you avoid writing convoluted lines in the future, you should be reading it while also thinking if there is any way to shorten / condense what you've written whilst maintaining the same meaning and intent.

Lastly, to make your life easier, I can get you photoshop. Just message me on discord: Kyuume#9874

Base +3, Origa_Lilia +6, Coledas Ukgent +5

@Kyuume

Thank you for taking the time to respond to me and for giving me a lot of food for thought. In particular I had been working under the assumption that text bubbles should be as close to full as possible. The majority of my typesetting issues are a direct result of this misunderstanding. The reason I'm constantly setting text at an angle is because a slanted line is longer than a level line, and a couple of extra characters can be squeezed onto a line without blowing through the border. I'm going to study how other people size their text, I'd never really realized how small text typically is. In the next update of this work, I'll try to get the text sized more properly (i.e. smaller). My method up till today has been to pick a text size that I thought would work for the majority of bubbles, and then using that size as a target size, to hover around by adjusting size, angle and AR, as conditions warrented. By choosing a smaller text size right off the bat, most of these issues will disappear.

I'm going to study what you've said about reformatting/punctuation in commercial manga translations. I had come to the conclusion that having sentences in their own text block was desireable, though I don't know where I got that idea from. You're right though, that is how children's books are laid out. In the next update, I'll stop doing this so much, unless it was in the raw. It may well turn out that I like it. I was really impressed by how much using the Wild Words font improved the look and feel of this translation, I didn't think it would make so much of a difference. I'm going to see if I can't track down the other fonts that you mentioned, and devote some thought to making the narration boxes different without being distracting. I also want to use a different font for when Yuuto freaks/panics. In this revision I switched from WW to WW Bold, but I'd like something a bit more drastic.

TL tone: I understand what you're saying here. This will be difficult for me because I look upon situations and human emotions differently than most people. I've noticed that I interpret many anime series and episodes quite a bit differently than my fellow viewers, I tend to add gravitas to situations that possibly don't warrant it. In particular in a number of the translation mistakes you pointed out, I understood the intent correctly but I expressed myself cumbersomely. I really need to think about how to phrase these things with the viewers in mind, rather than my own internal dialog. A good example is your suggestion for pg 6, my tl was suppose to express the thought of him being angry, but I can see how your suggestion of making it more explicit is a great improvement.

I've learned a great deal from the exercise of translating this work. In particular, I've learned I was working under some false assumptions about how typesetting should be done. I'm going to focus on improving my typesetting skills, as I think that can be rectified quickly. As for the actual translation, I need to work on doing it much harder. In my initial translation, two errors have been pointed out that were very serious and changed the meaning of the overall piece, I don't have an answer, about what to do, about serious errors, other than to stick to obscure works (like this one) to gain experience. Also, I want to work on making my translations flow better, from page to page to page.

Finally, thank you for offering to help me get photoshop, I may end up accepting your offer. But, first I'm going to see if I can't find a cheap copy online somewhere. I'm looking forward to graduating from paint.net even though I suspect there will be a steep learning curve associated with it.

Base +6, Coledas Ukgent +5