Zub Tales

Happy New Year everyone! I hope your New Year’s Eve went well and that you’re all looking forward to better things and prosperity in 2005.

I spent a quiet New Year’s here at the apartment relaxing and actually went to bed around 1:30am. I’m trying to get my internal clock back on track for teaching again this semester and shake the grogginess away so I can really buckle down on upcoming projects.

We got in our print copies of the Street Fighter: Eternal Challenge translated art book and it creates a weird mixed bag of emotions as I look it over. The break neck pace we produced the book under was hellish at times and I’m proud of the final product. But flipping through it a few times over the past day, I’ve caught annoying mistakes that make me want to kick myself. They’re not crippling and don’t detract from the beautiful art or design, but I see them so clearly, just like people said I would. With 300 pages of material, we knew mistakes would creep into the final and it’s something I’ve got to accept, even if I don’t want to.

Working from translations and rewriting them without losing the intent or structure of the original text is a very hard and counter-intuitive way to work. The sentences didn’t always read the way English-speakers are used to and the paragraph structure of the original Japanese bounced around like crazy at times. By the time we got more comfortable with it we were 3/4 of the way through the project. We went back and reworked some of the earlier parts of the text, but re-reading it now I can still see stiff sentences or odd wordings I wish we could fix. Sigh, maybe Erik will let us tinker with the 2nd printing we think will be required by this summer after 1st print sells out.

Looking at the terrible events unfolding on the other side of the world, it’s a wise time to really look at our lives and appreciate how good we have it here. The things we’d consider a bad day like a few text errors in an art book pale in comparison to the devastating hardships the tsunami disaster has brought like lack of shelter or food and the massive potential for disease. Look to your loved ones and be thankful.