There are some extra-wide spaces between panels where long translated lines used to be. These aren't needed anymore and I should have made them uniform, but I was too lazy to. Some sound effects I redrew, but some I thought were too complicated or integrated into the artwork to redraw without it looking out of place, so I just left an explanatory gloss in a footnote. Similarly, I was hesitant to redraw any speech bubbles, and this actually kind of affected the translation itself as I tried to choose shorter lines if a better translation couldn't be squeezed in without shrinking the font too much. I'm having second thoughts about this now, but eh. Gamila speaks in Kansai-ben. This is typically translated as a Southern US accent (in most anime dubs, for instance), so I tried to convey something similar to some extent using eye spellings and contractions and such. Gamila uses a word like "board/sheet" to refer to the canvas, among other word choices that make it clear she is either not familiar with painting or is deliberately describing the painting process as mechanically as possible. Choco ribbits in Katakana, implying it sounds more like a sound effect. Gamila repeats it in Hiragana, saying it more like a normal word. I translated the former using italics, no spacing, all lowercase so she sounds more 'in the flow of it'. When Choco says "I want a bf", she is literally saying "I want to experience romance". But that doesn't sound like something an English speaker would casually blurt out. I went with the latter phrase in the next comic despite the original text's wording being very similar, because she uses a slightly more formal word for 'romance', indicating she's a little more collected when speaking here. Kaeru literally exclaims "What did you say?!" or "Goodness me!". In the context of the scene, Pixel's translation "How could you say such horrible things!" is indeed correct, but not very natural-sounding. Kaeru knows that the cake isn't good, but doesn't want to admit it to Sasuke, so I tried to convey the protestation with "Of course [it's] not!". Admittedly, this loses the nuance of commenting on Sasuke's wording directly, and reads more like a response than a reaction. But I couldn't find a better solution. Some alternatives I considered were "How could you?!" (a shortened version of the more prosaic "How could you say something like that?!"), but this sounded too confrontational; and "What did you say?!", which would more readily be interpreted as Sasuke's observations coming as a genuine revelation to Kaeru, which I don't think was the case here. The "gesture with no particular meaning" was not given any further explanation in the original text. I am as mystified as you are, and I assume so is Pixel. Ame is an enigmatic character indeed. "Every review counts..." was literally "Even 1 more review will... [help]". I do think the former carries the same meaning while sounding more natural. What exactly 1 more review will do was cut off, but the context makes it clear, so hopefully making it explicit in the translation is not too big a deal. Isao's speech pattern involves contracting the sentence-final copula "desu" to "ssu". This invokes a feeling of trying to be formal but not really going all the way. I don't think I was really able to pull that off, but I tried retaining at least the sound of it at the end of comic1400 with the sentence-initial "It's" -> "'s", which is a bit awkward in text but not that weird in speech. When Gamila says "That's sure to-", she's meant to be cut off mid-word with the "OW!", but there wasn't enough space to denote that in the speech bubble. If you're making a dub of this comic, you could continue her line a little before getting cut off (e.g. "That's sure to land"). Also, later, "Hol-" is short for "Hold up!" In Japan, floors are numbered starting from 1, which is equivalent to the ground/street level. Also, the number 4 is considered unlucky in much of East Asia, since it is homophonous with 'death' in Chinese. This may be relevant to the story. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Meunière, a French loanword, is the same in Japanese as it is in English, so I'm not sure why Pixel ignored that in his translation and went with "pan-seared" instead. "Aitsu..." does literally mean "That person..." in an exasperated tone, but that doesn't sound like something an English speaker would be likely to say in this situation. Perhaps "God, that woman..." or "That woman, I swear..." sound natural, but were too long to fit in the speech bubble. I hope "Ugh, she..." does the job here, but I'm not too happy with it, especially considering it is more explicitly a cut-off sentence than a generically hanging, ellipsis-bearing phrase. "Wasurete" literally means "forget [imperative]". The phrase "forget it", while correct, could be interpreted as something like "never mind", which would miss the mark. Constructions like "Forget I ever said that" or "Delete that from your mind" were too long, so I went with something short and punchy that conveyed the fact that she's embarrassed: "Just kill me". Hopefully it doesn't sound excessive. Y'all have NO IDEA how LONG it took me to settle on a good candle-blowing onomatopoeia for Sasuke. Pixel's translations were pretty much spot on for the last several comics, I barely did any touching up at all.
