The Words, Words, Words Translation From Hell takes time. The Research Quagmire TFH takes effort to go out and find what the whole thing is about, but there is only one thing that can help you with a Mad World TFH, a Japanese friend who has at least a touch of science-fiction otaku in him/her.

Blade Runner is a Mad World. Adam Warren's (and before that, Adam Warren and Toren Smith's) Dirty Pair comics were Mad World stories (good ones too). The Mad World comes from taking our world and expanding on the trends nowadays to make them absurd in order to point out how absurd the trends are today. But the problem becomes: to exaggerate them, the author throws in technology and concepts that, while they may have a basis in the real world, are way over-the-top science fiction ideas.

Masters of Mad World manga and anime that I've worked on are people like Masamune Shirow, Mamoru Oshii, and most recently, Hajime Ueda. (My exposure to Masamune Shirow was in a test translation I had to take for Toren Smith early in my career. The other two, I worked on for pay -- the Patlabor movies for Manga Entertainment and the recently released Q-ko-chan for Del Rey.)

Such a translation usually includes details from the real world that you would never think to look up otherwise. Patlabor had technology for draining Tokyo Bay that had to be deciphered (in Patlabor I's case, I didn't even have a script to work with). In Q-ko-chan, there were odd references to fascist government practices. These normally fall into the Research Quagmire TFH zone, but since they are combined with science fiction words, they also work as part of what takes up all of your time doing a Mad World TFH.

So Q-ko-chan turned out to be two different manga from a translation standpoint. The story that centered around the children which was rather straight forward, and the portion that centered around the military which was as confusing as Ueda-sensei could make it.

The way to get through such a translation is to first do a first pass translation and mark up the places where you don't understand what's going on. (In many of the military scenes, the marks filled up the pages.) Then do a second pass trying to glean from context what the puzzling parts are. The third stage is to contact your Japanese friends and see what their impressions are of the scene. Usually they will be completely baffled by it too, and will not want to help for fear of giving you a wrong interpretation. But they're your only hope, so you can't let them off the hook. All you're looking for from them is their impression as the target audience of what's going on. Get their impression and use it.

But also remember that such books are usually more revealing on second or third readings. Information at the back of the book may help decipher baffling dialog at the beginning. Your Japanese friends won't have the time to read the book two or three times, so that's when you will have to bring your knowledge to the forefront and sometimes override your friend's impressions.

Mad World manga are multi-layered puzzles -- some of which have answers and others which don't. All you can do is write the best translation you can and have your best shot ready at deadline time. My most recent, the first volume of Q-ko-chan should be on the shelves now, so you can see for yourself how well I did. If you understand everything that's going on in it, then maybe I did a too good a job figuring it out...