A project to archive, annotate, and contextualize out-of-print, untranslated, and otherwise obscure materials pertaining to the 1995-'96 television anime 『新世紀エヴァンゲリオン』 (Neon Genesis Evangelion) and the 1997 film 『新世紀エヴァンゲリオン劇場版 Air／まごころを、君に』 (The End of Evangelion) intended to serve as a resource for fans, academics, translators, and anyone else interested in the history and background of one of the most significant pop-cultural artefacts of our time.
The first phase of this Project is the establishment of a preliminary archive of the afureko (dubbing/recording) scripts for the television anime and the subsequent 1997 film The End of Evangelion, which scripts comprise the dialogue of the series as well as the "stage directions", sound effects, and occasional directorial comments, that accompanied each cut of animation storyboarded. These documents, while once archived on Eva fansites, are no longer distributed by their publisher, and have never received an English translation (official or otherwise). The Project intends to transcribe the Japanese text from the images in question, originally distributed in Japanese as standard definition image files on a DVD set that is no longer sold, and present it alongside an (admittedly rudimentary) English rendition, along with footnotes and citations of relevant peripheral materials. The original images - which number over 2,300 - will, due to file size constraints, copyright concerns, and low (by today's standards) image resolution, not be hosted here, at least for the time being.
At this stage, the documents presented on this site are first drafts. The work of revising, correcting, improving upon, and annotating these drafts is in progress, and updated & corrected drafts will be published to this site as soon as I have completed them.
If you have any questions or comments regarding the Project, please visit this page for contact information.
A Note of Acknowledgement
This is not exactly the first project of its kind. While I am working on the Evangelion Annotation Project independently of the FanGeeks Commentary on evageeks.org, that project was of course an inspiration for this one. I'm setting forth on my own here mainly due to gaps in the translation archived on the EvaGeeks Wiki; my intent is that this project will be distinct from that one in that it will be oriented more towards constructing a version of the original text with an English rendition & relevant contextual materials cited inline, as opposed to the (equally valuable and still ongoing) effort at EvaGeeks to create a collaborative document of fan commentary and analysis.
A transcript and preliminary translation of a letter from Assistant Director Masayuki, originally published in Issue #10 of the EVA Fan Club newsletter, can be found here.
A transcript of the menu commentary for Episodes 1-26 (from Renewal of Evangelion) has been uploaded as a resource for future translators. My translation is currently in progress. The document can be found here.
With first drafts of the TV Series complete, I want to outline the goals for the Project's completion and potential expansions to its scope. I'll list a rough "roadmap" here, in approximate order of priority.
…and after that? It's hard to say. There will, of course, be many more documents to compile, so I don't have a fixed "end point" in mind. I hope that, whatever direction this project may take in the future, it will serve as a resource to complement those on many fansites, past and present.
This is a work in progress. Certain documents or annotations may be missing whilst this web site (and the Project itself) remain "under construction".
Scripts are listed under both their English and Japanese titles in order of original broadcast date, and presented in two parts (A and B, comprising the events preceding the mid-episode "eyecatch" and those following it, respectively).
The links below point to .PDF files with embedded text hosted on this Neocities site. Plaintext files may be available at some point in the future.
I have studied Japanese for less than two years, and I have no prior experience in translation. I am the only person working on this Project at present. All translations were done by me; neither machine translation nor any prior translations of the dialogue of Evangelion were used (though of course occasional coincidental similarities to official translations or past fan-translations are inevitable). As such, quotations or excerpts translated here certainly contain at least a few errors. Feel free to reach out if you wish to correct any errors I may have included or otherwise comment on the quality of translations. Additionally, in the interest of preserving the integrity of the original language for readers, I have included the original Japanese text (transcribed by OCR and manually corrected) in-line alongside any translated excerpts.
This Project is not any sort of filesharing endeavour, and I'd like to stress that the Project is not intended to infringe upon the rights of the authors, publishers, or distributors of the original work. This web site does not and will not distribute scans, rips, or complete copies of any copyrighted work. It will merely compile for archival and educational purposes such fragments of the relevant works as are necessary to serve its goals of transformative commentary and historical preservation. It is my hope that the Project's use of such fragments constitutes fair - limited, educational, and noncommercial - use and not infringement. I'm not a lawyer. Please don't sue me.