I am a devoted fan of Naoki Urasawa's manga/anime
Monster, and have tried unsuccessfully for about 3 years to spark a discussion of his sequel novel,
Another Monster. Unfortunately, the person doing the translation I was reading abandoned the project and no one in the world seems interested in picking it up. I think there was a Spanish language version published (which I could readily translate), but I can't find it anywhere, just a couple of mentions of it on Spanish anime boards. The book's English publishing info says it was first published in Austria, but I'm pretty sure that's part of the fiction of the novel, and that neither a German language edition nor the co-author Werner Weber exist. But I am so desperate to know how the novel ends, that I bought the book and have embarked on the fool's errand of trying to translate the last ten chapters.
Problem is, I don't know any Japanese beyond a smattering of words.
But after a
very slow start, I've gotten fairly good at transcribing the text into Word (despite apparently being dyslexic with the kata), and have managed to translate the first chapter using a combination of Google, Babelfish, Japanese Excite, and the Monash WWWJDIC site, plus a few others (you would not believe how long it took me to figure out how to key in 々, let alone what it meant).
But sometimes, all three of them either can't agree on anything and I get three, completely
different sets of gibberish, or they seem to just throw up their hands, spit out a string of pronouns followed by a string of verbs, and say, "Here, you figure it out." And sometimes I can, and sometimes I can't.
So I'm asking for occasional help when I get completely stuck.
I don't need perfect translations since this is just for me. I had at one time hoped to find someone who was actually a fan of Monster and would have fun doing this instead of just helping me out of the goodness of their hearts. But since I can't find anyone interested, let alone an interested person who reads Japanese, well, here I am, though I'm not sure I belong on a forum for people actively trying to learn Japanese. It's not that I don't want to learn (I love all the stuff I've picked up so far), just that I can only wrap my head around one utterly impossible quest at a time.
