Important Announcement (14/1/10)
First of all, apologies for my usual holiday bad habit of getting behind on pretty much everything without warning. And apologies also for completely failing to catch up on the monthlies ever since the previous holiday backlog incident.
As the situation with the monthlies shows, I've been struggling somewhat to keep up with my translations ever since the summer. This is by no means a new thing - I've been behind on Sket Dance since approximately forever for essentially the same reason - but it has become more pronounced recently. This is partly because I was spending quite a lot of time on certain highly addictive video games, but I think the issue reaches beyond that.
As such, I've been doing some thinking, and have come to the conclusion that the volume of series I currently translate is simply too much for me to handle. With the exception of the holidays, when I tend to allow myself a breather and as a result end up getting behind, there hasn't been a day in recent memory when I haven't felt pressured by the translations I need to get done. It's reached the point where I feel like my day-to-day schedule is dominated by translation, at the cost of having any free time to do other things that I should be, or would like to be, doing.
There's also the imminent issue that I will shortly be beginning the second semester of my final year in university. Thanks to an uneven module distribution, I will be taking twice as many credits this semester as I did last semester, so if I felt pressured last semester, God knows what this one is going to be like. And what's more, partly as a result of my translation schedule, I've been doing pretty much zero work towards my course outside of class time lately. I really feel like I ought to do something to rectify this fact.
As a result of all this, I've decided that I have to make a definite move to reclaim some of my free time. As such, I've taken a long, hard look at my list of series, and reluctantly decided to drop all of the monthlies, and a number of the weeklies.
So that's the deal. Effective immediately, I will no longer translate the following series:
Ao no Exorcist
Claymore
D.Gray-man
Mahou no Iroha
Soul Eater
Hunter x Hunter
Katekyo Hitman Reborn
Kyoukai no Rinne
Naruto
Sket Dance
A lot of these are series that I love, and I intend to continue reading most if not all of them, but I simply can't go on translating as many series as I have been doing. (Kyoukai no Rinne, incidentally, I decided to drop quite a while ago, but I include it here anyway, because I never actually told anyone about that decision.) Hopefully without these, my weekly translation schedule will feel much more manageable, and I'll have more time to devote to other things.
I apologise to everyone who read my translations for these series, and particularly to the few people who have been waiting for me to get around to catching up on Sket Dance. I'd like to say that I'll leave the possibility of carrying on with it open, but I know that if I say that, I'll feel just as haunted by the pressure of wanting to get around to it as I always have, so for the present at least, this is an absolute decision.
That said, I'm not saying for sure that I won't change my mind at some point in the future. I don't know how exactly this will turn out; it may be that I ultimately feel it is necessary to drop even more series, or that I ultimately decide to resume one or more of my dropped series. But for the moment, this is how things stand.
So just to summarise, the following are the series that I will continue to translate:
Bleach (A quick and easy series to translate, and I've been following it for longer than any other, so I don't want to stop now.)
Fairy Tail (Possibly the series I enjoy translating most these days - it's simple enough, it never feels like too much work, and it's just consistently entertaining.)
Mahou Sensei Negima (Easily one of my favourite series - if it wasn't, it would have had to go, since it's also easily the most work out of any series in this list.)
One Piece (As any reader would probably tell you, this manga is just on another level. I couldn't abandon this one even if I abandoned every other manga I read.)
Gantz (I don't love it as much as some of the series on my drop list, but it has so little text I'd feel like an idiot dropping it. Plus it's only fortnightly.)
xxxHOLiC (Because it's beautiful. Just... beautiful.)
Oh, and though I'm still not promising anything, this increase in free time does increase the chances that I'll get around to translating the remaining Gantz Minus chapters at some point. Maybe even soon. Who knows. =)
Thank you to everyone who has followed my translations in the past, my apologies again to those people who follow the series I will no longer be translating, and I hope that you all continue to enjoy the translations that I do produce.
Regards,
cnet128
Hey Cnet, how are you? I'm re-translating a drama at the moment, can I ask you what do these book covers say? I want to make my fansub quality higher ^^
