4komas and Joint Projects

So, now that the first chapter of the Houkago Play joint project came out without incident, I thought I'd share my thoughts so far on this and the Imouto wa Shishunki project.  It's really interesting to work on the two of them, especially since I started on them both at about the same time, because despite both being 4komas, they require wildly different translation styles.  Houkago Play is probably my most literal translations to date, since a lot of it is specific detail reference - ie, not much to do when she asks why the hell a PSP has a stylus in terms of style and prose.  Imouto wa Shishunki, on the other hand, is much more what I expected from working with a 4koma - this one is my most liberal translation I've ever done.  Preserving the essence of a sexual pun when translating takes... creativity.  For example, there's a word in Japanese that can mean both 'son' and 'penis,' while there really aren't any good direct translations that carry the same double meaning.  The chapters of Imouto are really short, but it ends up taking me forever, since I sit there and rack my brains for a way to stay faithful to the original and still have the humor carry over.  The other fun thing I've gotten from Houkago Play is lots of sites to look up Japanese PSX and PSP shit on, since I'm not much of a gamer in the first place, and the references a lot of times are talking about shit that never got ported over here...  yeah, fun...

These two joints are also the first time we've done a joint where I'm doing the translating, everything else so far has been our raws, image editing, qc, etc and the other groups' translation, so it's a bit of a different experience this time.  The one thing I've really learned so far is that despite disliking IRC, I am glad as fuck our group uses it, since it's a real pain in the ass to do everything over email.

I told someone I'd share my thoughts on this season's shows (at least the ones that fall inside our shared interest in TG/trap type stuff), so I guess I'll do that now before the season ends up halfway over without me getting around to it.

Kore wa Zombie-kun:
I'm not really sure what to think...  this show is such a mash-up of elements, it's kind of hard to figure out what to expect from it.  I guess it's supposed to be comedy more than anything else, and it makes me laugh, so I guess it's a success on that front.  As far as the trap content goes...  I wouldn't claim there is any.  The MC getting forced into a skirt in order to access his magical girl powers is pretty amusing, but he isn't passable and only does it out of necessity.  I'm going to keep watching this one, because I figure that even the worst case scenario is that this show turns into a somewhat less generic than usual harem comedy.

Hourou Musuko:
Really good adaptation.  Really good.  I'm still not sure how well it stands on it's own for people that haven't read the manga, since they skipped so much of the beginning and kind of rushed the character introductions, but since I did read the manga, that isn't an issue for me.  I'm still not fully on board with how shiny their heads are, but other than that the art style is gorgeous, and fits with the way Shimura draws the manga really well.  I'm not very critical of things like seiyuu, but I think they did a pretty good job casting for the adaptation, no one stood out as sounding off, really.  The OP sucks.  No real way around that one.  They cheaped out on the visual side of it, it's really boring and uneventful, and the song itself is somewhat of a failed Spitz knock-off.  The ED is ok, and next to that OP, it seems amazing.  I'm really disappointed that they only gave this 11 episodes though, I'm anticipating being ticked off at the way they end things, pretty much no matter what they do.