Dress for the manga you want, not the one you have.

Dragon Ball - Chapter One

Seed of Might’s Kanzenban scan, in English

I was really impressed with how good this new manga scan looked. The group HAO did their own translation of the Kanzenban awhile ago. I’m sure the scan quality was considered fine at the time, but you can tell it looks rather low quality with blown out colours compared to the new Seed of Might scan. I thought it would be easy enough to “port over” (let’s be real folks, copy and paste) an English translation onto this. I got curious and asked myself “What is the best English translation fitting for such a release?” If you were wondering the same thing, I looked into it so you don’t have to.

Before I just copied this HAO translation, I checked some other sources. The official English version of Dragon Ball is published by Viz. Viz took some… liberties with the translations. Now-dated English slang was frequently used that turned things like this into that. Gross. I checked some other fan versions and found a group called Horny Council (Yeesh… I’ll call them “HC” for short) that uses a translation for the full colour manga that’s pretty darn close to HAO. The only major difference I could find are in names and certain terms. For example, HAO uses “Buruma” while HC uses “Bulma”.This seems fine and I thought I would be good using either translation and picking the names and terms that made the most sense. I didn’t want to give up my search yet in case there was something better.

Stumbling around the SoM related spaces, I found another translation attempt by a group called Tracksuit. They said their project starts with the Viz translation but includes “Tracksuit Retranslation Fixes” of “character names, made-up chapter titles, viz-invented jokes, poor translations, etc.” I was curious what kinds of fixes these included, hopeful that I found the perfect translation. Colour me surprised when I flip to the first page and see this.
They start right away keeping in a Viz joke. By the way, for a more accurate (though not perfect) translation, this is how HAO/HC did it.
Maybe I’m not being fair to Tracksuit, it’s just one panel. I check a few more pages and…


In case you think these jokes are right, the HC version uses a non-bastardized translation

The translation, in the currently available state, keeps a few too many noughties slang from Viz to be something I would want to use. How about visuals then? The group claims here that they started with the Japanese full color base, and employed a light upscale that makes sure not to oversharpen or introduce too many artifacts. Moreover, when artifacts did emerge, they were hand-removed!. Let’s check the title page compared to HC…

I do generally like the Tracksuit version over HC, but TS has either introduced upscaling artifacts or missed hand removing this artifact from the source they used. I wish them the best but if they managed to make a flat black texture look that awful, I cannot recommend this release in its current state.

Edit/Update

The Tracksuit version is ongoing as of the 23rd of February, 2025. All assumptions are based on the release currently and may not reflect any updates after today. Hopefully these translation and visual issues can be resolved since TS is still working on the manga. It be wonderful to have the best version of the full colour release.

Final Results

After that slight detour, I stuck with a mostly hybrid HAO/HC translation (with small adjustments such as referencing Kanzenshuu for chapter titles) that even a first-time reader can use to understand the story. I think it looks great with a text size that makes it easy to read. Here are some examples.

The Seed of Might pages remain at the same resolution in lossless PNG format. I did straighten a few pages just a little bit. I also moved the chapter titles from the end of the Kanzenban to the start of the chapter (with the exception of chapter one, where the title page is the second page). This is collected in a standard .cbz which can be unzipped if you want to check each page individually.

Feedback

I’m willing to learn and take criticism on choices. I have .psd files of the pages so fixes should be easy. Things that are helpful:

1. State the page and describe the problem you have
2. Point out objective errors (spelling mistakes, missing words, etc.)
3. Grossly misleading translations with correction
   We have a Discord now if you want to learn more or help https://discord.gg/JxCz2m5Y

Things that do not help:

1. Saying “This translation/HAO/HC is bad” without explaining how a line should be.
2. Subjective translation changes that don’t alter the meaning of the line. If a line is “I just ate a bear earlier…” changing it to “Just had a bear the other day…” isn’t a meaningful change.

Thanks

Thanks to Seed of Might for the scan. Thanks to HAO and HC for the translation. Thanks to Kanzenshuu for chapter titles. Believe it or not, thanks to Viz for about 5% of lines that work better in Viz.

What’s the Other Zip?

Have a personal problem with the font, size, name choice, etc.? Better yet, do you want to translate the series to French, German, etc.? The second zip contains all the PSDs with text layers. You have the pages with cleaned text bubbles and the text in the right spot. If you want to translate, you can start with these files while you reference the original Japanese. This should save on time. All I ask is a credit to “Tuxedo Time” if you do so.
If you have no interest in working on manga and just want to read, you can either delete the PSD zip or just don’t download it.

Next time?

Chapter two here https://nyaa.si/view/1942255