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I apologize for the less than in depth questions above, but there's a limit to the questions I can make, so further questions will be answered with proper replies. A Translation Team has various parts. It's a team because of it. Translator - Translates the Japanese into English. That's all they need to do, but they can do more, depending on how fluent they are. Translation Checker - Checks to see if the translation the translator made is accurate. Another way is for there to be two translators who compare notes, and see where different interpretations and fluency takes them. Editor - Picks up the translation and makes it fluent in English, makes it consistent with the rest of the visual novel and makes it fit the context. Quality Checker/Proofreader - Among other things, their main function is checking whether the translation has a good level of English, whether it makes sense, and to find and remove typos. Together, these heroes translate Visual Novels. For free. Yet, people still complain about translations. Here are some of the main points. Faithfulness A translation stops being a translation if it doesn't translate anything and just makes things up. But is that so bad? No 2 languages are the same (wait no, you know what I meant). I've tried translating to my native language, and it's not easy. Whether be it words you can find a synonym for, or expressions to which there are no equivalents, this tends to mean you cannot translate things easily. To add insult to injury, Japanese is a language with a completely different structure to English, so even translating literally will always get you ungrammatical or nonsensical sentences. To maintain faithfulness, the main involved parties are the Translators and the Editors. Translators can decide to just alter the meaning of a certain sentence, these are some possible reasons: They cannot translate it fluently (implies being fluent at English, doesn't affect literal translators who leave everything to the editors); Lack of Japanese knowledge; Lack of existing translation; Cultural differences; Humor and references. I'll address some of these. Cultural differences - This is up for much debate. Some people assume that since they are reading a VN, they must obviously already know all about Japanese culture. Translator notes are one way too side-step these, but use them too often and people will start complaining too... Otherwise, you can choose to keep purely Japanese things Japanese, or to change them slightly to a Western correspondent. Humor - Some jokes, be them references or puns, are lost in translation. There is no readily available solution to this problem. You'll need to adapt these jokes to a western audience or keep the original and plague it with translation notes. Neither of these is very effective. Lack of existing translation - Because some things just don't exist on a western world. These are either kept with translation notes (yet again) or... removed? Ignored? Not many alternatives here. Editors can decide to just alter a certain sentence, for similar reasons: Cultural differences; Doesn't make sense; Consistency with rest of translation; Humor and references. Consistency - This is one of the least important issues, me thinks. Because you can't really notice it unless it's bad. Fixing this does not affect a translation negatively, except if a character's tone is altered because the translator failed to convey it properly. TL;DR; This only affects people who know Japanese. I could tell you a certain sentence said "I think bananas are pornographic" when it actually said "Puppies are cute". You wouldn't know. The only thing you can base yourself on is what other people say, and that's hardly trustworthy, is it? Don't make a fuss about faithfulness, if you care about the original work so much, learn Japanese. Translations cannot faithfully adapt all things, know this as a rule of thumb. Proofreading It's actually really simple. Either it's well proof read, or it isn't. Proofreaders take care of the typos, grammar mistakes, and nonsensical lines which slip through. That is all, they don't ruin translations, and they don't make them any worse, although it gives off a feeling of unprofessionalism and lack of care. And it's all the fault of a sloppy proofreader, degrading a TL's rep. Readability This means, "can I read and understand the story like this?" If you do, then the translation did its most elementary job. You now know the story. Unfortunately, this isn't all a translation has to do to be "good". Being readable doesn't mean it's as emotional, funny or witty as the original. Striving to keep these factors is the editors' job. Just because it makes sense, it doesn't mean it's good. The flavour, the wittiness, the tone, the consistency. These all matter for a good translation. A good editor is required for these. "Being a native" doesn't make a good editor. I'm a native in my language, but that doesn't mean I can edit books. I don't know enough vocabulary, or I can't make the connection between such vocabulary and another sentence. The fact that you understand complicated books, expressions and words doesn't mean you can write or make them yourself. ---- But that's what I think. What do you think?