As of today, all 27 manga chapters and 43 episodes of Saint Tail have been fully retranslated from scratch! Please click here to check it out!

This project started at around the beginning of July, so I have to admit that it's quite the feeling to have finally finished all of the translation work! To be honest, I was a bit self-conscious about how the unusual release schedule and the abnormally extensive documentation would be received, but we've gotten quite a few supportive comments, so thank you so much!

(Look, it's just really hard to make a claim like "almost every page of the manga has wordplay or some kind of metaphor, meaning previous English translations lost almost a whole half of the plot and made the entire ending and epilogue come off as saying the opposite of what they're actually supposed to" unless you have sufficient evidence to make a case for it...)

It may not be exaggeration to say that this has probably been the most challenging translation I've ever tackled to date, even though the deceptively simple plot doesn't make it come off as that kind of series at first glance, so I hope all of the effort that the rest of the team and I put into it can come through and that people can enjoy it as much as possible.

In regards to future plans: I want to take a look at some more of Tachikawa's works (I made a post about this earlier, but none of her other work has been treated well in translation), as well as perhaps some other magical girl series that need translation love. But I can't make any explicit promises, especially since I'd have to juggle it with a huge backlog of other stuff...and also, I need a break after almost six months straight of this 😅 I'm off to enjoy the rest of the winter holiday, and I hope you all do too. If you do decide to check out the series with the new translation in the meantime, I'd definitely be really happy if you posted reactions 😊

(Link leads to download links, script file, and translation notes)

Here’s some context for why we did this: the official English subtitles for this movie are dubtitles, or in other words, the English dub script with names and terms swapped out and pasted on as subtitles. There are a few lines changed here and there, but almost all of the lines are a dub transcript in practice. Dubs are a very different form of adaptation that have their own unique requirements, so doing something like this is really bad translation praxis, and to be honest, it’s disappointing to see yet another major piece of Digimon media be stuck with subpar translation standards, again.

Since I figured that it would be helpful to have a more precisely done translation out there, if at least for reference, I went ahead and retranslated the entire thing from scratch.

As far as casual viewing goes, I’ll fully admit that there are a lot of places where the official version is punchier and has better flow than mine, since they had license to adapt things more freely than a fan translator like me would. But once you go beyond that, the official subs have the following issues:

Originally, I was only planning to release a script file to be used with Blu-ray footage, but it seems that all of the official English subbed/dubbed releases have animation errors that were corrected only in the Japanese Blu-ray, so I went ahead and put together my own encode based on the latter. I’ll take the encode down if they somehow decide to put out an updated release that fixes all of these problems, but…seriously? In 2024? And after the disaster that was LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna‘s official release, too? Come on.

Sadly, I don't think it's likely I'll ever be able to get around to them. As interesting as the novels are, some of them are really long -- we're talking more than 70 or 80 pages -- and with the limited free time I have, I'd rather use it on things that have higher urgency (things with high franchise lore impact, etc.). I won't say 100% no because I don't like to definitively shut down any possibilities, but I also don't want people to get their hopes up 💦 Sorry!

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

And that’s the final chapter of Dream Eater Guide! This took a lot longer than I’d hoped, especially since I had a major schedule upheaval in the middle and ended up with a lot less free time, but we do hope you enjoyed it.

I’m going to have to reconsider how I’m going to go about it with my much tighter schedule, so I can’t provide any updates on future plans just yet. But I do plan on continuing to translate manga one way or another, so I’ll try and keep regular updates going in some form (even if it takes a month between every release at this point).

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 8

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Read online: MangaDex Project page and more information

…And I said we’d pick up the pace, but that clearly did not happen (in my defense, it was because we were using physical scans this time and I hadn’t figured out a workflow yet). But in any case, here’s the penultimate chapter, which was published in RunRun without a title and wasn’t included in the volume release. Hopefully we managed to clean it up so that the quality drop wouldn’t be too jarring compared to the volume releases.

Only one more chapter to go!

A translation of a series of articles posted on the Digimon Partners website between February 2022 and October 2023, detailing information about Digimon animation production and planning, especially in regards to Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure 02, and Digimon Adventure 02 THE BEGINNING. All of them were written by Eri Shimomura, producer for THE BEGINNING.

As of this writing, updates for the series seem to have stalled, so I have posted all of the available parts released up until now and may update the post retroactively if more appear.

A translation of an interview with Digimon Xros Wars lead writer Riku Sanjou regarding the newly-airing Digimon Xros Wars, included in Otona Anime Vol. 18 (released October 2010).

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 7: Snow White’s Mirror

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Read online: MangaDex Project page and more information

I mean, the mirror wasn't actually Snow White's, but never mind that.

This was the last chapter to be included in a volume, hence the "The End" at the end, but there were two more chapters that were published in RunRun, so those will be coming up next! They're some of my personal favorites, so I was very insistent on not letting those slip by. We did obtain the original magazines and are doing our best to process the scans, but given that magazine scans are some of the most difficult sources to work with (let alone ones that are thirty years old!), it may take a while and we may not be able to get it quite up to par with the digital scans. Thank you for your understanding 🙇

On the other hand, we probably won't be putting out another manga release this month, since August 1 is coming, and...well, if you know about what I do on The DigiLab, you'll know exactly what that means 😅 But we do plan on picking up the pace again after that's done, since our members (myself included) have managed to square away a lot of things that were being a little obstructive. So hopefully we won't be going as slowly as only one chapter a month again 💦

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 6: Mermaid Drops

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Read online: MangaDex Project page and more information

We're back! I'm so sorry for the delay (in fact, we've been working on more than just this in the meantime, but it'll probably be a while before we can announce anything related to those). As usual, I can't guarantee that we'll be going back to a regular schedule, but hopefully we'll at least be able to put things out at a regular pace!

Hello! Yes, I would absolutely agree the official subs are a mess to the point I can't even recommend the movie with them. Personally, I think any of the fansubs should be fine; the one I personally had a hand in was the L Subs version (which I did not translate myself but was lightly involved with the subbing process for), but to my understanding, there is at least one other well-done one done by a fan who clearly knows and loves the series.

(I actually am tentatively interested in maybe trying it out myself in the future for the hell of it, but I'm not super pressed to do it ASAP because there are so many other things with higher priority. Other than subs of the movie itself, I also personally translated the Shueisha Mirai Bunko version of the novelization, which doesn't have a 1:1 transcription of the dialogue but is still more accurate than whatever was going on with the official translation, or at least I would like to believe.)

I haven't made a proper post breaking it down yet, but what I will say is that, as someone who has spent a long time translating for this series and has gone through the movie's dialogue multiple times (way too many times?) in Japanese, it is absolutely, 100%, for sure, not supposed to be a cynical movie. The official translation had butchered a number of things related to that, such as:

In general (well, this has very little to do with your question, but I feel the need to vent about this anyway) the official translation is just plain klutzy about everything. There's no conscientiousness about character voice, one of the most important things in translating Digimon works. References to the original series' plot points or lore don't match up at all, and I don't get the impression the translator or editor was familiar with the original series. (Adventure tri. and The Beginning's subs had this problem too, but not to the same degree; in the case of Adventure tri., the lore was vaguely referenced or contradictory in Japanese to the extent a compliant English translation probably wouldn't have even been possible, and in the case of The Beginning, the issues were less common and less plot-relevant.) Even beyond just plot-important lines, there are far too many lines that are semantically mistranslated. All of it makes the movie an unpleasant experience to watch in terms of sheer vibe, and that's something I think is far more important than people tend to treat it as.

I will give a disclaimer that I feel obligated to give during these situations: if you did not like the movie, while I think it is highly likely that you'll enjoy it better with a properly done translation, I cannot guarantee that it'll turn your opinion over 180 degrees and make it your favorite movie ever. I am a translator before I am a literary critic, so while literary analysis is important for a translator, there is a point I have to hold back before it starts turning into my own fanfiction. But it's exactly because of this that the official translation is so poisonous, because a translator's job should be to maximize potential for readings and interpretations for others. If a work could potentially have a "nonsense interpretation" and a "sensible interpretation", and a translation outright invalidates the possibility of having the sensible interpretation because of how sloppy and nonsensical it is, it becomes a perfect example of what I've referred to as "insidiously bad translation", where it looks passable on the surface but is far more poisonous than it seems.

The best way I can put it is that I'm "keeping an eye on the situation". The fact it's MTL offends me on a theoretical level for sure.

But the part I want to keep an eye on is the question of "how much damage will there be if it's not retranslated?", because regardless of how much something annoys me in principle, going as far as retranslating something with an official translation means doing it to counter practical consequences. So for instance, I will do this for things like Megumi Tachikawa manga because no matter how conscientiously or not the official translation was done, the fact is, the final product is misleading to dangerous levels that misrepresent the source material. Likewise, my problem with Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna's official translation is not about whatever process they used for the translation as much as the fact that all of the mistakes and shaky wording had to impact the parts where the movie's themes are most important. Same goes for The Beginning (to a lesser degree, but it's still a problem). All of these are human-translated, but all of them have problems in a way that I felt were dangerous when left unaddressed.

So what I want to look out for is exactly how damaging this translation is going to be to the final product, and how people are reading it (especially since I know I'm not the only person keeping tabs on this). Of course, there's going to be some damage; there's no way of avoiding the fact that a lot of the character personality doesn't feel right by vibe. Ideally speaking, this should have been properly translated from day one. But in regards to the issue of whether it's worth actually getting the team together for this and setting up a workflow to keep up with the entire thing...that's not something I can decide until I get a better pulse on how necessary I would be.

I'm sorry I can't give a more positive answer than this! If I had all the time and energy in the world, I would gladly do it anyway, but since I don't, I have to make sure it actually is more necessary than other priority projects first.

When I made that last post, I wasn’t expecting it to be almost a month until the next update, but don’t worry, we’re still around! Things just happened to be a bad mix of:

…so it was just a really unfortunate confluence of events. But don’t worry, we’re all still around and actively working behind the scenes, and we’ll be back to providing Dream Eater Guide (and hopefully other projects) as soon as possible!

Sorry for the sudden lack of updates -- on top of multiple Hudie team members being busy, I also happen to have a cold now 💦 We'll be back in full force once everything's together again!

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 5: Cinderella's Ribbons

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

Up until now, we’d been releasing these at a pace of about one chapter a week, but multiple of the team members are going to be busy in the upcoming weeks, so I apologize if anyone had been expecting us to be making this into a schedule. We’ll still try not to fall too far behind, though!

Up until now, we've been releasing a Dream Eater Guide chapter around once every week, but we're going to be a bit busy over the next few weeks, so I can't guarantee we're going to keep up that exact pace. (But we'll also try not to fall too far behind!)

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 4: Ice Lenses

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

When I was looking over Saint Tail's 2001 Tokyopop translation during the consultation stage for the retranslation project, one of my biggest gripes with it was that it had an insensitive way of handling things to the point it would even add offensive nuances that weren't in the original Japanese dialogue. Dream Eater Guide was never officially translated into English, but among Tachikawa's works, it's on the more overt side when it comes to its social commentary aspects, so one of my personal priorities with this translation is to be careful and precise so that it doesn't pick up unintended implications.

As you can probably see by the synopsis, this chapter is a particularly loaded one, and I'd also say it's heavier in tone than most of the other chapters in this series. I'd like to give a shout-out to the other members of the group who were watching my progress and giving advice, especially our QCer, who managed to get through this quicky and efficiently.

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 3: Wish Upon a Star Candy

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

This is where I personally believe the series starts hitting its stride, since now that the formula's been established, the series gets to play around with it a little more. Enjoy!