Guns and Stamps is an interesting manga to translate. And while I’m familiar with the military, especially with all this paperwork mess, it’s all in Russian, not in English. So I’d like to apologise if some? if not all military vocabulary and phrases sound a bit clunky. Aside from this there are few things I’d like to clarify regarding the translation itself.

First of all, Grand Duchy military ranks. I have a feeling that it might be somewhat jarring to come from Overlord Scans translated first volume and see that Lieutenant Mayakovskaya was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant. Indeed, in Soviet and modern Russian army a shoulder mark with two small stars and one stripe corresponds to the rank of Lieutenant, while three small stars and one stripe — to the rank of Senior Lieutenant. However, I decided to change them to Sublieutenant and Lieutenant. There are two reasons for this. The first one is that historically in Russian Imperial Army these ranks were called Podporuchik and Poruchik, which are literally translated as Sublieutenant and Lieutenant respectively. It helps (or at least I hope so) to create the sense of historical and somewhat foreign setting whithout littering the text with unfamiliar terminology. The second reason is rather practical: Martina has three stars for the most of the manga and she is the main character, her rank is repeated the most throughout the series, and as English sentences tend to be longer than Japanese, it would be nice to have Lieutenant instead of Senior or First Lieutenant.

Next thing is Cyrillic labels all over the place. Hayami Rasenjin is a massive nerd with everything that is about Russia, Soviet Union and Slavs in general, so he tries his best to make all Grand Duchy signs, labels and posters written in Cyrillic script. And I find it really weird, because sometimes these writings bear significance to the plot, but a casual Japanese reader wouldn’t be able to decipher the code. Like in Chapter 3 we have the first hint that Kirill is a science fiction writer and subsequently a science fiction nerd. However, you will never know that the magazine Martina brought to him in his cell was called Planeta Fantastiki, The Planet of Science Fiction, a rather cliché Russian name for such a magazine. Transliterated Japanese writing is even more confusing. Who in the World would figure out that the name of Kirill’s favourite magazine Учю Сейфк is to an extent botchered Uchuu Seifuku, translating into Space Conquest? There is a bunch of signs saying ‘Military Personnel Only’, like on a tram car in Chapter 14, but without this knowledge it’s just weird that the other tram car is packed with passengers, yet Martina and Kirill have an entire car for themselves.

Finally, there are some things that I didn’t bother or couldn’t to comment on. In the Chapter 20 Theodosia has a Snake Eyes tattoo on her chest. In Russian prison tattoo culture, a Snake Eyes image is almost non-existent. But it exists in Japanese, and the meaning of this tattoo is different from American. To put it shortly, this is a label of a prostitute. In Chapter 5 there are two pages missing, 132 and 133. It was due to the fact that the scans circulating around the Internet were lacking them. I put these pages into my Russian scanlation of the chapter, but since I have no intention of retranslating the first volume into English, there was no way of incorporating these pages into the Overlord Scans version. So, you can find these missing here.