Working!! – Animate Store Exclusive Drama CD Fan-Translation Project

Trying out something new for the blog as well as to add some variety of content to my youtube channel. This will actually be my first ever fan-translation project to a drama CD. I had always thought about doing one for some time but never really got any motivation to go through with it until now.

To start off, when the DVD’s were being released for the first season of Working!! in Japan, there was a campaign from four of the major anime retailers (Animate, Gamers, Sofmap & Toranoana) having their own special Working!! drama CD given out to those who would purchase all 7 limited edition volumes from their store. I was importing the DVDs from Animate so I received their version of the special drama CD. The other three were obtained through Yahoo Japan Auctions over the time, but they didn’t come cheap of course, especially when it has to do with store exclusives.

The same campaign was applied to the second season limited edition DVD/BD releases of the anime as well and so far I’ve only got Animate’s version since I imported all the 2nd season anime BD volumes from their store. Still have yet to actively acquire the other three store exclusive drama CDs for this season and it’s not a high priority for me at the moment.

Anyway, the original plan for this was that I’d upload just the audio onto youtube for people to listen to and post a short translated summary of the story for you guys to get the basic idea of it. However, I wanted to challenge myself and make an attempt at actually translating an audio drama for once and to actually make use of my youtube channel. Below is a just a short sample of the work I’ve done so far for this drama CD as I’ve yet to complete the whole thing (Animate’s 1st season store exclusive drama CD runs for slightly over 23 minutes).

I will update the video link to the full thing when I finish translating it.

UPDATE (27/02/13): Finally! After putting it on hiatus for 7 months, I’ve completed translating the entire CD. Link to the full version below.

Probably the most hard thing I found starting this project was actually setting up the visuals and adjusting the size and placement of the logo and characters on the screen. That took quite some time to get it looking right without losing the image quality from the re-sizing and focus adjustments. Once I got that done, it was all a matter of translating and timing the subtitles to each character’s voice. All of the editing was done with Sony Vegas Pro 10.0 by the way.

In no way do I believe I’m 100% accurate in the translations though since some of the lines required me to look up the meanings and pronunciations as I wasn’t sure what some of the lines were implying. Please feel free to send in corrections if you think I’ve got some of them wrong or if you feel like I’m missing something in the translation. I’d appreciate it.

Once I’m done with this project, I may consider translating some of the other Working!! store exclusive drama CDs if I feel like it (have yet to even listen to Gamers and Toranoana’s versions from the first season!). This one already feels like a big task, especially when you try all the editing, translating and subtitle timing by yourself :P.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

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