Between Linux and Anime

The title sums most of it up. I’m not dead. The blog got pretty close to being dead, but isn’t quite yet. This translation endeavor, also, is still alive. And thanks in part to the little kick delivered by this fine fellow’s comment, we have a release!

Summer Specials 3 and 4 are the last strips in the long string of specials that go in between “Episode 12 (see it here)” and “Episode 13 (see it here)” of the original 4-koma-style strips. I’d recommend taking a look at “Episode 13” again after reading these two chapters since there is a little bit of continuity between the story at the end of Summer Special 4 and Episode 13.

As again, a reminder here that these strips weren’t released freely online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.)

Look for previously released translations in the category archives.

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

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Originally announced (aeons ago) here. Not much to say but enjoy!

(Reminder here that this strip wasn’t released freely online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.)

Look for previously released translations in the category archives.

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

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Here we go! Summer Special 1 (originally announced here). Translating this chapter took more effort than expected because of the bizarre references, so I ended up releasing just one instead of two chapters as I had hoped to. Not too much more to say this time, so I’ll keep it short for once :)

(Reminder here that this strip wasn’t released freely online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.)

Look for previously released translations in the category archives.

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

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Oh Mein Gott it’s been five months! I’ve been very preoccupied for much of this year (hence the long hiatus). Still, I’m glad I managed to get this out this month as I told myself I would. I owe this in part to my brother who has volunteered to do the cleaning – and he has done a fantastic job, putting my previous amateurish work to shame :)

This strip is Apple’s chapter, about the iPhone 5. In the manga volume I was sent, this came immediately after the previously released Summer Expansion Edition, although from the weekly ascii site it looks like it was chronologically released much later.

After this will come the four two-paged Summer Specials. Now that my life has regained some semblance of order (and with my brother blazing through the cleaning work), I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to make the next release happen much sooner than it took for this one to get out. I apologize as always for being so insufferably slow.

Reminder here that this strip wasn’t released freely online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.

And finally while we’re on the topic of supporting authors, if you haven’t already, please go over to the Animator Dormitories for Start-ups indiegogo page and consider making a donation, or at least help spread the word. Not only would it be cool to cultivate budding animators and help them live a difficult dream – I’m convinced it’ll also be good for us (foreign fans) in the long run if our Japanese content creators are more aware of us and think more about engaging us directly.

That’s it for the rambling! Look for previously released translations in the category archives.

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

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Wow how far have I had to trim my ambitions for a Christmas release. I originally wanted to release two chapters PLUS an anime editorial blog in time for Christmas, but difficult circumstances as well as the decidedly higher difficulty of translating this chapter forced me to trim it down to just releasing this chapter. Believe it or not, even getting just this chapter out on time cost me some sleep. I think the result is a quality release, though, and hopefully that makes up for things a little bit.

There is quite a lot to say about this chapter. Firstly: Chronology and chapter names, which got pretty confusing after Weekly Ascii released a bunch of “specials”-type strips to disrupt their original, incrementally numbered 4-koma “episodes”. Only some of those specials are actually freely available online, so I was myself a little confused for awhile. Using the non-free manga volume given to me by friendly neighbourhood reader Elaine Nguygen though, the chronological order appears to be as follows:

1. The first 12 “episodes”
2. 4 “Specials” (Which I briefly mislabeled “Summer Specials” for awhile)
3. 1 “Summer Expansion Edition” strip
4. 1 “Apple’s chapter” strip
5. 4 “Summer Special” strips
6. “Episode 13”
7. New, apparently manga-volume-exclusive material

Edit: Apparently there is only one summer expansion and the second is called “Apple’s chapter” and is about the iPhone 5. Very confusing -_-

Of these, the first 12 episodes, episode 13, and the 4 “Specials” are all freely available online and have all been previously translated and released.

This release is for the what was originally branded as “Summer Expansion Edition”, and is also the first release of a strip that is not freely available online. This strip was originally published in a printed copy of Weekly Ascii, and is now also part of the on-sale manga volume (which contains all previously published material as well as new original ones).

With that out of the way, the next thing is character names. People have pointed out to me that the names I used disagreed with other online sources. For my part I have always tried to maintain a close transliteration of the names in the raw, but this will hopefully be settled once and for all now: apparently they eventually confirmed and settled on an official set of names, AND also published an English article which contains all of those names romanized, so from this strip forth I will start adopting these new “official” names in accordance with the raws.

Also, with the released strips starting to go up on manga aggregation sites, I will henceforth burn TL notes and credits into the images themselves so they also get transmitted when uploaded to these external aggregation sites.

Whew! That was quite the mouthful. Lastly I would like to remind you again that this is the first release of a strip that is not freely available online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.

I think that’s all I have to say. Hit the jump for the translated strips, and remember that like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom. Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Pic mostly unrelated, but AIURA was great.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Between Linux and Anime!

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And these are it: the last of the Android Gakuen manga strips freely available online. I originally planned to close the curtains on this whole translation endeavor with the release of these last strips, but it turns out that a friendly neighbourhood reader Elaine Nguygen has volunteered to send me the raw strips in the first Android Gakuen manga volume, and so I now plan to work on those too, which means more Android Gakuen translated strips to come! Of course, those may not stay up as the raws aren’t freely available, so I may have to take them down if the authors/copyright holders complain, but at least for now the plan is to go on with that for as long as I am able.

While I’m at it I’d also like to apologize a little to anyone who may be actively following my translations for being so incredibly slow at the whole thing. Unfortunately this isn’t something I am able to fix, since necessarily this pet project must take lower priority to a lot of the other stuff I’m responsible to. These strips really should have been out two or so weeks ago, but stuff came up and I ended up swamped for quite a while and only managed to put everything together now.

Anyway, I’ll continue to do my best. If I can’t work fast I’ll at least try to ensure my translated strips are as high quality as my inexperienced self can make them :) In the meantime, enjoy Specials 3 and 4! Shoutout to JX for his help with the translation.

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

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

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It’s been a really long time I know. Unsurprisingly, I got busy, and the knowledge that Android Gakuen will no longer be available as online strips was basically fatal to my motivation for a long time. For those who are not aware: after 13 initial strips plus 4 ‘Specials’ that were made available at the Weekly Ascii website, the rest of Android Gakuen is basically print-only, which means that I can no longer translate and make them available here unless someone could provide scans.

I still however do get a lot of hits from people seeking Android Gakuen translated strips, so I’ve decided that I should at least finish translating everything that is available. So I went to work again, and here’s Special number 2! I’ll try to get Specials 3 and 4 done within the next month, and with that finally bring some deserved closure to this whole endeavor :)

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

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

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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.

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And with this I catch up with all the published strips at the source site. Notably the last published strip there is dated May 15th, so no new strip has been published in sometime. Not sure what’s the scoop on that.

Anyway, enjoy three new chapters of translated Android High School Girl antics.

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

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

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And here’s some Android high school manga translations as I continue to, in between work, procrastinate on writing about the seasonal shows, and on Kara no Kyoukai 04. Ah well, post is better than no post right?

Actually it’s been some time since I did any of these anyway. The Japanese manga is up to like chapter 11 by now, so I needed to do some catchup anyway. As usual the quality isn’t the greatest, but I’m a one man team!

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

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

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