Berserker's chapter is now done; part 1 (just 2 pages) of Assassin's chapter is up (****************************download/iew06w4sjyog09f/). New content starts on p. 42. Food already translated Assassin (and the next chapter, Caster), so there won't be any new (i.e. hitherto-untranslated) content for a little while. Thoughts, comments, etc. appreciated.
You are making good progress. That is basically one of the best compliments you can get from the content update starved pack known as the internet.
Araya, what do you seek?
「アラヤ、何を求める」
------True wisdom.「――――真の叡智を」
Araya, where do you seek it?「アラヤ、何処に求める」
Only within myself.「――――ただ、己が内にのみ」
Araya, what is your favorite color?「アラヤ、好きな色は？」
Blue. No, ora-- Auuuuuuuugh!「青、いや、オレンジイイイイイアアアっ！」
Good stuff. As always. Didn't find anything that struck me as wrong.
We want more
I've been feeling productive, so the rest of Assassin's chapter is done (new stuff starting on p. 59) (****************************download/3yc868yn3fy02gi/).
There should be some zalgo text on p. 62. Please let me know if that doesn't render properly for you for whatever reason. I'll change it to something else if this turns out to be an issue. (This shouldn't be an issue, given that PDFs are meant to be... well, portable, but I want to double-check anyway.)
I've been feeling super-productive, so here's Caster's chapter, too (****************************download/zs13z0r34zif94r/). It's pretty short.
At one point, Caster's Master refers to Gilgamesh's 無名の剣 ("nameless sword(s)") as being one of his Noble Phantasms. I don't think this refers to Ea, seeing as Ea has a name (i.e. "Ea"). If so, then this phrase should presumably be interpreted as a plural, referring to all the _other_ swords Gil can pull out of the GOB, which are, to my understanding, nameless prototypes. Does this reasoning seem sound?
yay productivity \o/
Pretty sure the nameless sword is meant to be Ea.Originally Posted by Gilgamesh
Exactly how a named sword can be nameless, I don't know.
<_< really?
Sigh. Okay, I'll fix that. Chalk it up to lolnasu, I guess.
Learn to true name. If it's name was really Ea then he would be yelling Ea and not Enuma Enlish.
Araya, what do you seek?
「アラヤ、何を求める」
------True wisdom.「――――真の叡智を」
Araya, where do you seek it?「アラヤ、何処に求める」
Only within myself.「――――ただ、己が内にのみ」
Araya, what is your favorite color?「アラヤ、好きな色は？」
Blue. No, ora-- Auuuuuuuugh!「青、いや、オレンジイイイイイアアアっ！」
Thanks, nakulas!
Uh, I never thought about that.
Isn't Enuma Elish just an activation phrase/incantation like abra kadabra or sim sim sala bim?
Not in the context of Nasu land because abra kadabra is a spell which means self hypnosis. Noble phnatasms work when you invoke their true name (except for those few times when they don't). For whatever reason Enuma Enlish is the true name of the Noble Phantasm, which is somehow separate from the God forged weapon that Gilgamesh calls Ea.
Araya, what do you seek?
「アラヤ、何を求める」
------True wisdom.「――――真の叡智を」
Araya, where do you seek it?「アラヤ、何処に求める」
Only within myself.「――――ただ、己が内にのみ」
Araya, what is your favorite color?「アラヤ、好きな色は？」
Blue. No, ora-- Auuuuuuuugh!「青、いや、オレンジイイイイイアアアっ！」
No, actually your theory seems sound too, without context it's hard to tell. But I'm inclined to think it's Ea.
Last edited by aldeayeah; June 6th, 2013 at 02:10 PM.
Enuma Elish isn't even a true name either, it's just what he calls the super-attack you get when you overload the sword before firing.
...
... it doesn't help the fact that Gilgamesh points Ea at the enemy, like a magic wand...
my first theory upon the Ea/Enuma Elish thing was that the sword suffered from power incontinence and if gilgamesh even jokingly utters the words Enuma Elish without trying to attack, the sword still shoots out pink hurricanes that would mess up his hair...
Does that mean it can be fired without overloading?
That's what he did vs Shirou
Here's Rider's chapter for you fine folks: (****************************download/oy1m7oqiyftyovl/).
Re: nameless sword(s) - I've gone with "nameless sword" in the singular since the lolnasu arguments for Ea being the object of this reference seem reasonably compelling.
Moving on: I'm honestly somewhat unsure about my identification of Rider as Pestilence here.
The relevant lines are the following, from the end of Rider's chapter:
風に乗り、水に乗り、鳥に乗り、人に乗り―――。
それこそ世界を制覇したといってもいいその存在は、確かにライダーのクラスを冠するのが相応しいとも思えた 。
だが、それよりも何よりも―――。
人々がその『災厄』に与えた二つ名。擬似的な人格こそが―――彼をライダーとして顕現させた最大の理由にな るかもしれない。
かつて、黒死病《こくしびょう》の風を吹かせて三千万の命を奪い、
ときにはスペイン風邪という名目が五千万の命を奪い、
様々な風を起こした『災厄』という名の騎手。
Clearly, Rider is strongly identified with the notion of "disease" (as we see here, and through the rest of the chapter). He is also identified as a 騎士 (typically translated as "knight", but in a more basic sense, "horse-riding warrior"). That's a good starting point.
We come upon an issue now - in Christian eschatology as I understand it, the Four Horsemen do not materially exist (or at least, they do not have any impact on the world) prior to the opening of the seals during the Apocalypse. Yet, Rider is described as causing all sorts of plagues and pandemics throughout human history, so this raises the question of whether we should even be treating Rider as a Horseman of the Apocalypse. (Note that there are no references to Christian eschatology in the original text.)
That said, if we don't take Rider to be one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I don't have any idea what he's supposed to be, so let's assume that he is one of them. Given the standard names variously assigned to the four Horsemen (Pestilence, War, Famine, Death, Conquest), we can quickly rule out War and Famine, since those are specific things that aren't really related to the notion of "disease".
This is where things start to get fuzzy again, though. The only explicit appellation applied to Rider is 災厄, which literally means "calamity / disaster". This doesn't map onto any of the Horsemen well. The term 災厄 is also not used in Japanese-language descriptions of the Apocalypse of John (the book itself is 黙示録 [黙示~"Revelation"]; the key word for the white horse is 勝利; for the red horse, 戦争 and 殺害; for the black horse, 秤; and for the pale horse, 死; and 災厄 does not appear in Revelation 6, which is where the horsemen appear)*. I did stumble upon a Chinese-language site that I think used 災厄四騎士 to refer to "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", but I don't speak Chinese, so this isn't really helpful.
All things considered, I think Pestilence is the mostly likely option (again, because of the heavy emphasis on disease, both thematically [e.g. the hospital] and explicitly [e.g. Tsubaki's parents being done in by Rider]), but it is entirely possible to also interpret Rider as being Death in this case (seeing as disease brings about death and all that). I would've ruled out Conquest, except that Rider is described above as 「世界を制覇したといってもいいその存在」, i.e. "one who could be said to have conquered the world", so. In light of the Chinese thing I mentioned, one should wonder if it might even be appropriate to call Rider an incarnation of the "Apocalypse" itself.
Also - and this is probably a red herring; at best, a very obtuse reference - immediately prior to the lines I quoted above appears the line 「だが、それ故に―――そのサーヴァントは強力な力を有し、少女をこの聖杯戦争最大にして最悪のダークホー スへと仕立て上げた。」, which basically says that Tsubaki is the dark horse (as a gairaigo - ダークホース) of the HGW. We already ruled out the dark horse's Horseman (Famine), so I don't think this is relevant, but I thought it was worth noting anyway.
(Aside: I saw something floating about the internet that describes F/SF Rider as "the Pale Rider". This is not true - at no point is Rider explicitly described as riding a horse at all, let alone one of any given color.)
* Bible information sourced from <http://www.biblica.com/uploads/pdf-files/bibles/japanese/nt/revelation.pdf>, which is the only Japanese-language Bible I found online.
Last edited by nakulas; June 7th, 2013 at 06:05 PM. Reason: Apparently the forum doesn't like CR LF
Lancer's chapter is ready: (****************************download/36p56skgs8i5lt9/). Note that part 2 of the chapter was absent from the original Fake/states night, and the other three parts have all been changed to some degree.
At one point, Enkidu's body is described as follows: 「ヴィーナス像に絡みつくように生えた滑らかな木を思わせるその英霊の姿」, which roughly translates as "the Heroic Spirit's form was reminiscent of the soft/smooth trees that wrap around the picture/statue of Venus". Maybe I'm just stupid at art, but I can't find any depictions of Venus/Aphrodite in which a tree or other plant wraps around her. Certainly, none of the most famous depictions (including: the Venus de Milo; Botticelli's Venus; Venus of Urbino; Venus de Medici; Venus Genetrix; Manet's Olympia; or Canova's Venus Victrix) depict Venus in that way. As such, my current translation of that line ("Eir body was like the velvety boughs that enwrapped the statue of Venus.") is kind of vague because I don't know what I'm actually describing. Some help here would be appreciated.
Note that I have used Spivak pronouns <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronouns> in this chapter to refer to Enkidu. I think Spivak pronouns are the most logical and natural choice of gender-nonspecific singular third-person pronouns (except for singular _they_, which I don't really like), seeing as they are constructed by just chopping off the "th" from the plural third-person pronouns. Let me know if this is a confusing or otherwise bothersome practice, and I'll think about switching to singular they or just using male pronouns.
(Also, I just remembered something else that was bugging me - in Nasu's foreword segment, it says 「絶望的な四つのルール、絶対的な無力感が、幾度となく君を１４番地に誘うだろう。」. I have no idea what １４番地 means in this context, and there are no references to it anywhere else in F/sf. Is this some sort of Nasuverse reference or something?)
That stuff aside, here's my list of things remaining to do:
-Finish polishing up the epilogue and afterword (+omake)
-Translate the original Fake/states night webpage, plus the F/sf page from Pieces of Type-Moon
-Spend 9000 hours in mspaint to scanlate the images in the novel that have Japanese text on them (and maybe the Pieces of Type-Moon page depending on if I have another 9000 hours free)
-Add a translator's afterword and a page of acknowledgments
I should have a final draft of the novel ready in another week at most, with the supporting material to come within a week after that.
EDIT: I'm also drawing up an approximate timeline of the events occurring in and described in F/sf, to come with the supporting material.
Last edited by nakulas; June 8th, 2013 at 04:13 PM.
thank you
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