Hana no Android Gakuen 13 + Special 1 English Translated!

Edit: okay, there apparently is a series of ‘Special’ strips, and a series of ‘Summer Special’ strips. This is from the former. To the best of my knowledge, the ‘Summer Special’ strips are not available online beyond some teaser material.

First, an update regarding the status of this manga right now. So far as far as “regular episodes” (the stuff I’ve been translating) goes, only one extra chapter (13) has been released. In the interim, a series of Summer Specials were also released (yes, over the summer. I am aware that it is almost winter now, but it really should be common wisdom by now that I’m an incurable slowpoke. Plus, where I live, it’s still summer, and forever will be). I have decided to just go ahead and translate the specials, so here’s the first one, alongside the strip branded as chapter/episode 13. Note that chapter/episode 13 was published at the end after all of the summer specials. I’ll post the rest of the summer specials once I’m done translating them.

Across November through early December, “vol” 1 through 4 of Hana no Android Gakuen have also apparently been released. If I’m reading the site right, the comics will be available in print in the Japanese “Weekly Ascii” magazines dated 13 Nov, 19 Nov, 27 Nov, and 4 Dec, and are, to the best of my knowledge, not available online (not counting the sneak preview strips the source site publishes), so it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to work on those unless someone could provide scans.

Next, an update on my translating efforts. Some time ago I decided (probably partly from discovering the happily surprising fact that I’m on Baka-Updates) to try an up the quality of my work, so alongside this release I’ve made two changes to the way I work here. Firstly, I’ve outsourced some translating work to my friend JX, so I now have someone with better moonrune training on board as well as an extra pair of eyes on the final result pre-publish. Secondly, I’ve decided to put a little more effort into my cleaning and typesetting, where I actually do try and clean texts not enclosed in speech bubbles instead of just slapping a semi-transparent white box over them. Perhaps most visibly, I have also switched to much more appropriate fonts, and man, it’s amazing how much just a change of font can do. See the results below for yourself! Hopefully these changes improve the reading experience :)

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the new stuff. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

Notes: So Soni Eri/Moba is Shinagawa Sonia now? Maybe something in the Summer Special will explain this. Also, for context in case people forgot, Moto-rora is supposed to be married to Google-sensei (hence the more fun than when she’s with me part).

Now for Summer Special 1:

Notes: Interestingly, Soni Moba is still Soni Moba here. Also not sure if there’s a specific meaning to being in Spain in particular. Observant folks would notice that the first strip reuses an omake strip from last post. Also for folks who need the reminder: Matsushita Pana-chan is Panasonic, “Matsushita” apparently being the company’s former name. And yeah, they apparently have a lot of patents.

Sources are here and here.

These translations are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.