Hi Everybody, Can some of you wonderful humans help me out please?

[SarahDevlin]

Hi all!

My name is Sarah Devlin. I am a freelance translator who is also in the process of procuring her Masters in translation. For my dissertation, I am looking at the applicability of theory for translators of all areas and origins and as such have designed a short survey. I have heard that Fuwanovel has great voluntary/activist translators (i.e. translating pro-bono for a cause they believe in) and as such I would really love to hear some of your opinions.  The survey has 5 questions and takes on average less than 60 seconds to complete. If you could participate, I would be very grateful.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/W5VW33W

Thank you!
All the best,
Sarah

[Zakamutt]

Activist makes it sound like I'm doing it for some political reason, so Other>Fan. Really though it's just kind of fun sometimes, I wouldn't do it otherwise. I'm not exactly diligent though.

The "path to translation" question is kinda weird for self-taught fan translators. The only released vn translation I did, one of the sex scenes for Maki Fes, I did mostly because one of my friends asked and it seemed fun. I got the scripts for other vns the same way, and you can find ways to extract vn scripts on your own if you look for tools around the net.

With regards to theories of translation, I think a lot of academic writing has sort of filtered down into more digestible articles. I recently read the first two links listed on this page, and it's kind of the more highbrow version of the eternal liberal/literal debate in most cases. The concept of functional equivalence, or whatever they call it now, is very much a meme that has spread throughout the community, just not by that name. The current fanbase for Japanese media is to an uncomfortably large extent plagued with demands for stiff, literal translations, which is why you'll see very few professionals arguing for more literal translation styles as they have a better grasp of the concepts. The story goes that early anime / game localizations had a tendency to go perhaps too far with changes and censorship, and so the stilted language produced by most fan subtitles at the time began to be seen as a sign of authenticity. Now we have a generation of people who grew up on weebsprach. It's horrible. There are people legitimately writing things worse to cater to them.

[Clephas]

I've experienced translation from all three perspectives (fan, scholastic, and paid) and my opinion is... that each type has a completely different approach based on its objectives.  The focus of a scholastic translation is precision, the focus of most paid translations is comprehensibility, and the focus of most fantranslations is 'making it feel right' (an extremely subjective idea which results in dozens of different approaches to translating).  Then you have people who, regardless of their type, can't get their noses out of their dictionary long enough to actually read the language, people who insist on interpreting every word as being directly equivalent to a word in our language (denial of cultural context and over-reliance on the Rosetta Stone concept), and/or people who don't have a strong enough grasp of grammar in either language to do an effective translation.

 

[Fred the Barber]

Other: I pretty much just read ALL the Umberto Eco things.

On a more serious note, one source for more organized reflection on translation which you're missing is social media, and—wait, hear me out, don't run away, stop. In all seriousness, probably half of the people I follow on Twitter are either professional translators or localization editors, most of whom follow each other, and there's often a lively discussion brewing or a lovely little nugget of wisdom waiting to be picked up.