About This Translation

Welcome to KoreZombie the Translation. This site contains the NanoDesu Translations English version of the Light Novel Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? I will try to update it as much as real life allows. But I’d also like to say a few words about how I’m translating this title.

Translation is a bit of an art. It’s not only transporting words from one language to another; it is also transporting meaning. This distinction is especially appropriate in this case, since Japanese and English are two very, very different languages.

In lieu of that, my translation philosophy is to be as faithful as possible to the original meaning of a work, even if I have to change a few words around. I want to be able to convey the novel’s character and atmosphere in English, and not have it sound like I just copy and pasted the entire thing into Google Translator. When I take significant enough liberties, I will add a translator’s note to alert the reader, but otherwise, I will not detail every single change I make. Ultimately, I really want to construct a reading experience that both flows well in English and also best encapsulates the original intentions of the Japanese authors.

Thank you for reading my translation.

– NanoDesu

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Novel Summary (adapted from Wikipedia):

Ayumu Aikawa is a zombie resurrected by a necromancer named Eucliwood Hellscythe after being killed by a serial killer. As he tries to make the best of his undead life, he encounters a Masō-Shōjo named Haruna and inadvertently takes her magic powers, being forced to become a Masō-Shōjo (and thereby crossdress) in the process. With Eucliwood, Haruna, and a vampire ninja named Seraphim living with him, Ayumu helps battle demons known as Megalos while trying to figure out the mystery behind his own death.

KoreZombie Team Biographies:

Translator and Site Administrator – NanoDesu:

NanoDesu doesn’t actually know any Japanese; he does all his translations through judicious use of an Ouija board and a headless chicken. In fact, NanoDesu doesn’t know any English either. Warble warble warble warble.

Alright, let me actually write a bio with some substance in it. The above paragraph I wrote just for the sake of keeping this somewhat in line with the bios of my editors below (I told my editors they could make their bios as silly as possible and apparently one is a hallucinating penguin and the other is just an anthropomorphized ball of sarcasm. And the last one is a butler zombie?).

My Japanese is completely self-taught, and my translations are partially motivated by my desire to improve fluency in Japanese. As a non-native speaker of Japanese, there are still some obscure phrases and idioms I might mistranslate, so while I’d like to claim my translations are flawless, please forgive me if I occasionally miss something in the translation (Really, Haruna? Another damn pun referencing some obscure s*** I have to Google to high heaven?).

My tastes in anime were born and bred in the modern era, a time when mecha and explosions are being increasingly usurped by emotional content and moe. It should come as no surprise, then, that my favorite anime genre is slice of life, a category Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? draws heavily from (albeit admittedly less than the shows I usually watch). Indeed, my favorite anime all draw heavily on slice of life themes, and include Spice and Wolf, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, and Bakemonogatari.

Editor – Mithradates

Yeah, so, I saw a story that I really liked, but it was in terrible form, barely readable.  After that frustration, rather than offering to help edit that translation, I went and started editing for another group (Nanodesu)……clearly the logical solution right?

 

With this piss-poor reason for joining a translation group, I gladly step onto the battlefield!

 

Editor – ZeHaffen

Fluency, spelling, and everything grammatical. These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little editor. But Professor Grammar Nazi accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction — Chemical Weeb. Thus, The Powerpuff Editor was born. Using his ultra-super powers,ZeHaffen has dedicated his life to fighting errors, and the forces of unreadableness!

 

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DISCLAIMER: The work translated on this website is the legal property of its original copyright holder. It is translated here without monetary incentive solely for the purposes of promoting domestic interest in the work and improving personal language proficiency.

Any or all content of this website will be deleted upon the establishment of an official license for translation of this work into English or upon request by any of the original copyright holders for this work.