Intermission -- Not A Chapter

This is not a chapter of Tondemo Skill. (Well, duuuh!)

I thought I'd say some things about how I do this stuff, why I do it and other things now that I've completed more than sixty chapters.

Hi, my name's Albedo. Yes it's a pseudonym, it's one I've used for a long time doing stuff like scanlations. "Long time" means over ten years or so. I'm a one-man band because collaborating with people in this sort of endeavour is a pain and always ends in flames and regrets (been there, done that, got the flouncy email). I'm British so the English text I produce tends to have British English spellings ("colour") and colloquialisms. I do this for free, I don't have a Patreon or even run ads on this blog no matter how easy Google make it for people like me to monetise my efforts by doing so. I have added a "buy me a coffee" button recently but that's as far as I want to go.

How did I get into translating light novel series? Well, I decided my grasp of Japanese was now good enough to cope with pure text rather than speech bubbles in manga. Scanlating is a lot easier in that regard -- there was one manga scanlation group who claimed to translate by facial expressions. It helps, a lot, to have graphical visualisations of what's going on. Since the manga release of Tondemo Skill has now reached the point in the Web novel's storyline when I took over translating it's going to be fun to see how the visuals match up with my fevered imaginings of what the moonspeak runes actually say. Or not.

I use the word "crappy" describing this series and actually it is pretty crappy in both storyline and textual structure. I clean it up a lot when translating it into English. I also add bits to improve the text, and enhance descriptions and scenes but only where it doesn't affect the flow of the story or the plot. Japanese LN writers tend to leave stuff out because they're writing fast rather than well and Eguchi Ren, the author of Tondemo Skill is no exception.

Future plans -- I'm looking at bundling up my translations and "publishing" them as an e-book to make them easier to read off-line. That will come at a convenient breakpoint in the story, probably a few chapters from now. I will not do this with the first 40-odd chapters translated by someone else since that work belongs to them.

I am also considering picking up another series which is suffering from the current translators going to college/graduating and having to work for a living combined, I suspect, with a whole lot of "I don't want to do this any more". See my reference to collaborations above. More news later or I may just drop the first chapter on you here without warning.