Recently, I went to New York for 2 weeks, to visit family there and witness the state of New York, including New York City and upstate New York. It was a nice place. There seems to be an unfortunate lot of poverty in New York, including in the upstate region, who are shouldered by rich communities. It would be nice if they were all rich.

G.G.

I was having a conversation with a fellow the other day about Chinese, as he had studied Mandarin, and naturally giving that I have studied Japanese, the topic came to it.

Shortly after introducing the topic, we dawdled onto the usage and purpose of katakana within Japanese. To my misfortune, the individual I was discussing katakana with grew so inflamed by my insistence that he was not understanding neither the origin nor the development of katakana's role in Japanese, that he ended the discussion abruptly and left.

This sudden culling of a conversation I was enjoying so much left me with a desire to continue talking about the subject matter. I will leave my thoughts here, and if anyone reading has an opinion on the matter, I would like him to send an e-mail to the WafuWafu group e-mail about it.

The most original purpose of katakana within Japanese seems to me to be the writing down of pronounced sounds, to differentiate between them and real parts of speech. To compare with English, the difference between writing the 'A' in apple and the sound 'Ah' of apple. This can be seen in the writing of onmoji and onomatopeia.

Katakana eventually, most likely with the introduction of Chinese characters (thus kanji, onmoji, etc.), became used for foreign words, much like in English the origins of the words barbarian - 'bar-bar' being an onomatopeia (syllabary translation, in other words) for foreign words.

With America's heavy involvement in Japan after World War 2, part of a de-nazi-fication of Japan, the Japanese began to adopt many loan words from English, which naturally became expressed in katakana. What was few loan words quickly became many, and eventually the usage of English, bastardized sometimes far from its original pronunciation, became an ordinary mixture in otherwise full Japanese sentences. The reason for the prolific spread, I suppose, would be the usage of English in manga publications - which were just starting at the time and put English in the minds of many children as being 'cool' - and the usage of English in business, where most Japanese companies were partners with English ones.

Thus, katakana is not a method of translating foreign words for the Japanese, but simply a method of delineating and expressing foreign words in the native Japanese palate.

And it was at this final conclusion that the fellow I was conversing with disagreed. From his perspective, which was on the other end of the lens, today backwards, katakana was a method for directly translating into Japanese. As he saw it, it was a semantic difference, but it was a truthfully a difference in mindset. To him, there was no Japanese other than the current: anything conducted by them was and is traditionally Japanese, and if there was an English identical, it was because the Japanese had 'translated' the English into Japanese, adopting and assimilating it to a native Japanese equivalent.

And to him I say, and continue to say, that a word, unchanged but for shaping to the palate of the speaker, cannot be a translation, for it is yet the same word, with one meaning, one idea behind it.

If you have a comment, please write to the group e-mail.

Thank you,
G.G.

Hello again, everyone. WafuWafu Translations returned from a brief hiatus of approximately one month. During that time we brushed up on our Japanese and otherwise, spent time with our families and enjoyed some Summer vacation.

But now, we have returned to resume work on our translations, most notably Rokudenashi Blues.

As always, we are open for commissions, but do note that due to the return from hiatus and the desire to finally bring to a close the yet fully-translated story of Rokudenashi Blues, commissions may take a little extra time.

If you do want a commisioned translation from WafuWafu Translations, we would like to do at this time JP<->EN or SQ<->EN.

WafuWafu Translations is now open for accepting commissions!

If you would like something translated from or to Japanese or English, please reach out to us at our email!

Prices are based on the type of commissioned work, and WafuWafu is committed to a fair pricing model so we can do our best supporting the community around translating.

Yay! We finished translation of Volume 36 of Rokudenashi Blues. Now onto Volume 37!
The break between Volumes is a good time to fix any issues with the scans. I was made aware that one person dislikes the way the scans look.
I personally like the off-color background and obvious book texture, despite the paper texture making it harder to block out the original text.
But, in an effort to make it 'higher quality,' the scans have had their contrast increased and brightness adjusted, to give a more crisp, digital look.
Please let us know what you feel about the change by sending us an email at fuwafuwawafuwafu@outlook.jp.

As an aside, Mother Parasite is being translated right now, but it's taking a little longer than expected. The chapters are fairly large and it's running subordinately to Rokudenashi Blues. We'll try to get a chapter out this week.

Hello all. WafuWafu Translations plans to return in full-swing with daily releases of Rokudenashi Blues after Christmas.
But in addition to Rokudenashi, "Mother Parasite" will also be translated into English. Unfortunately, Mother Parasite is still on-going, so Wafu Wafu will only translate the existing chapters into English, and stop once the translation is caught-up to the publication.

Hello all. Wafu Wafu Translation's friend 544m.net has released an update for his lightweight image viewer, "dUstloop," and asked us, as one of his hosts, to announce its update.
Hopefully soon, he will find a proper repository instead of relying on a translation team's itch.io :|
For now, you can find his program on the Itch.io linked on this post.


LINK:
Itch.io - dUstloop

Hello everyone,
I'm proud to say the translation of the remaining ~100 chapters of Rokudenashi Blues are over 10% complete.
Thank you all for all your support - every message you send, I read :)
I will appreciate your support going forwards as we increase the quality of our translations.

Thank you!!!

Hello! I noticed a lot of comments on Mangadex. I am so glad that Rokudenashi Blues has so many fans! I love this series and it warms my heart to know so many other people love it too.

In case you were, wondering, the manner in which I translate the series is so:

First, we start with a raw, which for Rokudenashi Blues, seems to be direct scans of the tankobon chapters.

Then, we increase its brightness, to make it seem like it wasn't scanned in a dark room on yellow paper. We do this with a technique called 'gamma correction,' which allows dark pixels to stay dark and bright pixels to pop out. We carefully balance this correction, so that the Morishita's detailed art isn't lost, but the image is still palatable.

A lot of the 'pure white' you see on scans, is really just a huge increase in gamma correction - but a lot of the time, it kills the nuanced detail of the mangaka. Some mangas don't suffer when this happens - I believe Rokudenashi Blues does.

Then, we blot out the existing Japanese text using boxes of the same color as the background. Because it's not pure-white, sometimes the boxes are off-color.

Then, we fill a box on top of that with our English text.

This process is tedious on normal image-processing software, because it's built for general image-editing. So, to make the process more efficient, we are instead using custom software, built through SDL and C, to do the translating.

The custom software generates 'images' of text, so sometimes the text looks squashed or stretched. Since my first upload, the program has been improved, and now it has the ability to keep uniform text.

Likewise, I can now select different fonts, quickly paste a blank square behind existing text, toggle background-transparency, and quickly swap between translated and source images.

As this software is custom, I can put in the features I want. The next feature, is probably to make background selection easier, by averaging the pixels around the cursor in a small radius, to make a good mean color.

Once Rokudenashi Blues is done, I will release the program with source code for others to edit.

Thank you for your continuous support,
Eiishi of Wafu Wafu Translations

Wafuwafu has finished chapter 335. Our progress is expected to be one per day. Please enjoy. Linked in our 'releases' section.

Wafuwafu has finished the first untranslated chapter, 334.

Wafuwafu has begun translating the remaining chapters, starting from chapter 334, of Rokudenashi Blues.

Wafuwafu has produced a new software for the purpose of downloading the original Japanese web novel for Mushoku Tensei. Please enjoy. Only for Linux.

LINK:
Itch.io - Mushoku-DL

In collaboration, wafuwafu has helped produce a "lightweight, minimalist image viewer, with strong sorting options and full command line support." You can get it on the wafuwafu itch.io.

LINK:
Itch.io - dUstloop

A game has been released during the development of the space game. It's also written in C and using SDL2 and it's a visual novel (hi Lux-Pain). The title of the game is "Mourning Musashi." It details a one-night experience between a man and the foreign cook at an izakaya in Japan. Written in English. Wafu wafu will not be translating it unless there's someone to ask for it. Please enjoy. If it doesn't run, please leave a message.

LINK:
Itch.io - Mourning Musashi

It's been a while since the website has been updated. Today it is being announced that a game is in the works. The tentative name is Kabushi. It's a space game. More will be posted as more is done: right now only the very bare bones are in place. The idea was generated a long time ago and a good amount was made in Unity, but Unity is terrible and C is a more flexible environment. It's being made with SDL2 now. Hopefully you will all enjoy the game. I am also putting translating on hold until it is finished. See you in space?

It was decided that deSPIRIA is one of the games that should be translated. I am not really sure how to read the data from .bin files of Dreamcast games - my current idea is to find text from in-game and search for its binary-equivalent in the .bin data, but if it's compressed somehow that won't work.
If anybody knows how to hack dreamcast games or read the data from them, please reach out to WafuWafu translations! I would really love to talk with you.

A

Finally, WafuWafu translations is open! Feel free to join the Discord, send an e-mail, or reach out through Kofi or Patreon if you're interested in translations. Commissions are open and any form of media is accepted so long as it gets through vetting.
To request commissions, please join the Discord or send an e-mail so that it can be discussed sufficiently. All the contact information is located underneath of "Contacts" above.