This is devastating... 💔

I love D Gray-man ❤️

No worries! I only did the book release. The translation on manga UP is by someone else!

This is the first book where I had to translate two languages at the same time. But the challenge is incredibly fun... I am so grateful I got the opportunity to work on this book and experience such a beautiful story. 💖

Some people might say this is a dumb thing to get hung up on...but I REALLY hoped that the 1% of people who would read this AND know sign would appreciate the little bit of extra work put in.
And it just feels good to see how nicely the sign and the english text come together!

At first, I thought of keeping all of the sign speech formal and stiff, but realize that would never work.
Sign is just another language. The way Fujinaga was waving his hands and the look on his face made me think, yeah, if this was any other language, he'd be speaking casually!

This first panel, too. He's finishing off his sentence about how he's happy he got to do all those things with Keito. I had to add extra words in to make sure I have "all of that" and "happy" in there and still make it flow well in English.

I had to use a lot more text than one simple sentence (which, thank goodness the letterer could fit it all in! Thank you!!) but by moving my words around, I was able to slot in the right word for the right panel.

It's a very simple sentence here in the Japanese.
俺意外に - Aside from me
手話 - Sign language
習わないでよ - Don’t learn
(Don't learn sign language from people aside from me/other people.)
But I needed to have "other people" "sign language" and "don't learn" in those 3 panels.

I also did a ton of research into all the sign language in the manga. I wanted to make sure that each panel that focuses on the sign language will have the word associated to the sign in the text.

I was told we're going to try tilting some of the letters to replicate the effect in JP.
I watched Gangsta and A Silent Voice for research and very carefully chose which letters to tilt so we can replicate the JP as closely as possible (TY to the wonderful editor for her help!)

At least until I get annoyed and cut them again 😂