Talk:Zero no Tsukaima:Volume1 Story1 Chapter1

Chapter One

Page number

I'll keep the page numbers for now, until we get the first half of the chapter.

Onizuka-gto 08:31, 19 August 2006 (PDT)

Actually just keep the page number, the other groups will need it for the scans.

Onizuka-gto 17:12, 19 August 2006 (PDT)

Page 12

The girl looked into Saito's face steadily, with the blue sky which seemed like it would fall out behind her.(1) She seemed to be around Saito's age and she wore(2) a white blouse with a gray pleated skirt under a black cape. She crouched down, looking at his face as if she was disgusted.

Her face is... Cute. Her reddish-brown eyes danced, with her strawberry blond hair and her flawless white skin for their stage.(3) She seems like a foreigner. Well... She is(4). But she is such a cute foreigner girl(5), like a doll. Or is she a half?(6)

Anyway her uniform, I wonder which school it belongs to? I have never seen it before.

Saito seems to be lying with his back on the ground, he lifted his head up to look around.(7)

There were a lot of people with black capes looking at him as a stranger.(8) There, on an endlessly rich grassy plain, he finds a huge castle with stone walls in the distance just like he has seen in those European trip photographs.(9) This was just like a fantasy.

Okay. Everything I highlighted and numbered in bold are points I'd like to bring into attention.

(1) This sentence seems rather odd. How does the sky fall out behind a person? Is the girl looking at Saito's face, staring at Saito's face or looking/staring into Saito's eyes?

(2) Wore –> was wearing. If I’m not mistaken, the word “wore” is strictly reserved for anything described in past tense. The story so far seems to be told in present tense.

(3) I'm not too sure about the phrase "...red eyes danced..." but I think it may be lacking in description. It might sound better if written as "Her red eyes danced about". The rest of the sentence: "...with her strawberry blond hair and her flawless white skin for their stage" does not make any particular sense. What is "for their stage" supposed to represent? Her age?

(4) Is "Well... She is" the actual statement? I assume that "Saito" comes to this conclusion since she does not appear to be of the Japanese ethnic (presuming Saito is Japanese).

(5) foreigner girl -> foreign girl

(6) This sentence on its own is ambiguous since the noun that should follow the word "half" is absent. While this would seem clear enough to people well versed in Japanese "pop-culture" (and for people who think about the options of what the girl could be half of), I think that this should be clarified slightly. e.g. "Or is she half-Japanese?

(7) I moved the sentence down since I noticed a change of writing style (from the first person, to the third person). This however, may be the unusual manner of writing that the author chose to use.

(8) Under normal circumstances, the vast majority of people are strangers relative to oneself. In this case, assuming that it is common for people to wear black capes at that particular school (or that Saito looks like an alien compared to the others), a more appropriate sentence would be: "There were a lot of people with black capes looking at him as a though he were a stranger".

(9) Unless Saito was specifically looking around, I don't think the word "finds" is appropriate. I would suggest words such as "sees", "saw", "spots", "spotted", "notices", "noticed" .etc

Again, due to the somewhat ambiguous transition between the past and present tense (and that I haven't looked at the Japanese script yet), I can't decide on an accurate substitute.

Da~Mike 17:07, 21 August 2006 (GMT)

Page 26

Maijis those flew away from here and those fantasy word connect.

Maijis?

Mages perhaps?