Shakugan no Shana
Why I bother: Thanks to dragonite_dx, I have text files for the main series up to Volume 16, as well as image files for almost all the novels. I later found the rest of the text files for the main series. This is the series that I first tried translating, as it was the first show that really got me interested in anime. I plan on finishing up some volumes and then translating the short stories (some of which were never adapted in the anime) and Volume 0. Unfortunately, I don’t have the final short story (Shakugan no Shana Light Novel Volume SIII) which occurs after the series. I’m still searching, and if I really want to translate it, I’ll buy it.
I have the old translations (from unknown people at Baka Tsuki) for several Volumes which I’ll re-release (as you’ll see in the Shakugan no Shana table of contents).
I won’t translate Volume 1 or 2. Volume 1 can be checked out with an account at archive.org’s public online library. I have no idea where Volume 2 is, but it was translated by VIZ media so it’s hanging around somewhere. Volumes 3, 4, and 7 can be found at my old site.
Likelihood of being picked up by someone else: Basically 0%.
About (from Lord Wikipedia): Shakugan no Shana is a Japanese light novel series written by Yashichiro Takahashi with illustrations by Noizi Ito. ASCII Media Works published 26 novels from November 2002 to November 2012 under their Dengeki Bunko imprint. The story focuses on Yuji Sakai, a high school boy who inadvertently becomes involved in an age-old conflict between forces of balance and imbalance in existence. In the process, he befriends a fighter for the balancing force and names her “Shana”. The series incorporates fantasy and slice of life elements into its tale.
Gamers!
Why I bother: I have EPUB raws for Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8. No need for OCR. The anime was a nice watch and funny as hell (from my very subjective viewpoint).
I only have image files for Volume 5-7, so it will be annoying to OCR those. However, I did discover some 2008 software that does OCR much better than Tesseract (shoutout to those guys nevertheless, hope they train up some better traineddata files).
Likelihood of being picked up by someone else: I’d give the novel a 5% chance. Confused Translations hasn’t done anything with it since 2017 (only doing Volume 2), and I don’t see that they have any incentive to start again. Skythewood did a teaser of Volume 1.
Synopsis (from Wikipedia’s glory): Keita Amano, a high school boy who enjoys playing video games by himself, is approached by the beautiful school idol Karen Tendo to join the school’s Gaming Club. Keita tries it out, but finds it is about competitive gaming, so he declines her offer. This rejection sets off a trigger of events in the lives of Keita and his fellow students in matters of both video games and romance with no small amount of misunderstandings along the way.
Potential future Translations
henneko (Hentai Ouji to Warawanai Nekohenneko)
One of my favorite anime, and something I consider extremely underrated (probably cause of the word “Hentai” in the name which only means “perverted/bizzare sexual desire or act in Japanese… but most people are familar with the other definition ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ).
The series ended with 12 volumes has 13 volumes (anime covered 5), so there’s no second season incoming there can be a second season… but it’s very unlikely. I don’t even know if it’s ongoing but the Henneko discord says it is so who knows.
I only have image scans, so I’ll need to do a lot of work with the OCR, which is why this is in the “potential” section.
The first novel was licensed by Digital Manga Guild, resulting in the suspension of its original fan translation by NanoDesu (which took down all of the PDFs). However (as you can tell by the link), it has been stuck on its “Upcoming titles page” for who knows how long.
Aoi Haru no Subete
If I’m ever going to learn Japanese (and it’s probably not going to happen), this will be the seires that I will translate. The only reason I found out about this novel is because it was written by Sadanatsu Anda, the author of Kokoro Connect (one of my favorite series, thank JNC for the translations). The synopsis seemed fine and I liked the illustrations from the scans I have.
I can’t find any in-depth details about this novel, so I must have some basic knowledge of Japanese terminology, as there wouldn’t be any references to help fix/figure out machine mistranslations.
The Poor Man's Scans 