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[POLL] What's your translation quality cutoff?


ittaku

What's your translation/localisation quality cutoff?  

59 members have voted

  1. 1. What translation/localisation quality is the minimum you're happy with?

    • 0: Failed partial machine translation. Half the lines are still in Japanese. No one's edited it. The game crashes.
      0
    • 1: Unedited machine translation. It's a complete mystery what most lines are saying, looking more like a dictionary list of words that were used in the original. There is no semblance of the original story.
      0
    • 2: Edited machine translation. Someone with no knowledge of the original language has tried to edit MTL output into comprehensible English. Very little effort is put into correcting grammar. The story still remains incomprehensible.
      1
    • 3: Heavily edited machine translation/beginner Japanese translator with heavy MTL assistance. Someone with beginner knowledge of Japanese has heavily edited the text to try and make it represent the apparent flow of the story with some effort to make the grammar tolerable. The story can be vaguely followed, though with wild errors.
      2
    • 4: Intermediate level Japanese translator. Someone has made a decent effort to edit the text to represent the flow of the story and fix grammar. The bulk of the story flow remains intact, but with occasional critical plot points being missed or wrong. Grammar sounds unnatural.
      9
    • 5: Advanced level Japanese translator. A reasonable effort has been made to edit the grammar and text. The entirety of the major plot points remain intact, but with many subtle nuances missed. The grammar often sounds awkward and non-natural. Minor typos are scattered throughout the text with the occasional laughably bad typos.
      16
    • 6: Experienced advanced level Japanese translator. A concerted effort has been made to edit grammar and text. The major plot points are intact, and a significant number of the subtle nuances are captured. The grammar sounds mostly natural with the occasional awkward sounding line. Minor typos are scattered but there are no massive blunders.
      20
    • 7: Experienced advanced level Japanese + solid cultural knowledge translator. Generous effort has been made to polish the grammar and text. All the plot is intact, and the bulk of the subtle nuances are captured. Grammar sounds natural and awkward sounding lines are rare. Typos are infrequent.
      6
    • 8: Extensive cultural knowledge. Multiple pass editing. All the plot is intact, all the subtle nuances are captured. Grammar sounds natural and there are no awkward sounding lines. Typos are rare.
      0
    • 9: Brilliant writing. Perfect editing. The writing flows off the screen perfectly naturally in the translated language as though it was never written in Japanese. Cultural references are conveyed effortlessly. No grammar errors or typos to speak of.
      1
    • 10: Did someone stick a babelfish in my ear? I have entered the matrix. Neo: "I know Japanese". You are spiritually transported in time and space as though you've been part of Japanese culture all your life. You are absolutely convinced you are reading Japanese.
      1
    • I only read Japanese
      3


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Yeah, 5 is minimum for me too. Unfortunately, most of the 5's I played were official translations :P

 

BTW recently I expeirenced something between 7 and 8, but it wasn't VN, but anime subtitles. I'm speaking about fan-TLed polish subtitles for "Toradora!". I started watching with english subs, and they felt rather stiff and bland. Then I wanted to show it to my mom, so I found PL-subbed version, and it was really good. There were some mistakes, but it felt very natural. BTW they ditched honorifics but still retained some level of information provided by them, by substituting diminutive versions of names in place of -chan - I think they are easier to create in polish than in english, at least for character names in this show. It turned out pretty good.

Edited by adamstan
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6 minutes ago, Narcosis said:

Typos are something most editors fix on the run. Definitely not something to berate translators for, as their main job is an entirely different field.

I did not blame the translator. The rating is for overall translation/editing/localisation.

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>brilliant writing

Is it? Translators and editors aren't supposed to re-write. They are supposed to deliver a quality translation, while "quality" mileage may vary from person to person. If the original is well written, you need a translation on par to deliver it's quality to an english audience. On the other hand, even an excellent translator won't be able to save a game with shitty, amateurish writing.

*looks at majority of vns*

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1 hour ago, alpacaman said:

Does anyone have a link?

Sigh... I guess I remembered it wrong. I couldn't find any thread, but maybe it was a post? I dug this out and I think that may be what I remembered.

If that's not it, then I wrongly remembered by whom the thread/post was. I know it was very informative about TL quality and had ratings listed.

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1 hour ago, Infernoplex said:

Sigh... I guess I remembered it wrong. I couldn't find any thread, but maybe it was a post? I dug this out and I think that may be what I remembered.

If that's not it, then I wrongly remembered by whom the thread/post was. I know it was very informative about TL quality and had ratings listed.

Thanks for searching anyway!

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  • 1 month later...

I have some issues with the entries' descriptions that are making it really hard for me to place a vote.  I can understand why subtle nuances would be missed. In fact, besides the nuances loss that could be chalked up to the translator inexperience or lack of effort, there are some cases where it might be necessary or else it would unavoidably sound awkward (you have to keep in mind that things that are commonly said in a language are not in another one). However, if an English native speaker is translating the thing, I expect the English translation to sound natural. There is absolutely no excuse if it doesn't. It's just laziness (I mean, a fairly good reason, but a very poor excuse nonetheless :makina:).

On the other hand, since I am not a native English speaker myself, I probably wouldn't pick up on every little detail anyway, so that should make my personal cut-off point somewhat more lenient. 

I won't even take typos into the equation because that's not really a translation issue. The translation should be gone over by the editors to at the very least fix those minor issues. If it's not, well, it will certainly give the final product a very unprofessional vibe, but it's not like it affects the translation per se.

So... I guess my bare minimum to be happy should be around a 5 in that list? But as I said I don't agree with every point. It's a 5, but the grammar should still sound natural, ffs. 

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33 minutes ago, Thyndd said:

I have some issues with the entries' descriptions that are making it really hard for me to place a vote.  I can understand why subtle nuances would be missed. In fact, besides the nuances loss that could be chalked up to the translator inexperience or lack of effort, there are some cases where it might be necessary or else it would unavoidably sound awkward (you have to keep in mind that things that are commonly said in a language are not in another one). However, if an English native speaker is translating the thing, I expect the English translation to sound natural. There is absolutely no excuse if it doesn't. It's just laziness (I mean, a fairly good reason, but a very poor excuse nonetheless :makina:).

On the other hand, since I am not a native English speaker myself, I probably wouldn't pick up on every little detail anyway, so that should make my personal cut-off point somewhat more lenient. 

I won't even take typos into the equation because that's not really a translation issue. The translation should be gone over by the editors to at the very least fix those minor issues. If it's not, well, it will certainly give the final product a very unprofessional vibe, but it's not like it affects the translation per se.

So... I guess my bare minimum to be happy should be around a 5 in that list? But as I said I don't agree with every point. It's a 5, but the grammar should still sound natural, ffs. 

There's no doubt that a better grading scale could be created, but the only way to do it justice properly is to split it up into multiple components, separating out translation, editing, production values etc. My list was simply created to try and combine all of those values into one grading scale, assuming that in general quality of other components tends to parallel that of the translation. I also stated in the opening post that there are always exceptions to this, but the main thing that I'm interested in is the actual translation component itself, but one cannot ignore that editing is part of that process!

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6 minutes ago, ittaku said:

assuming that in general quality of other components tends to parallel that of the translation.

Fair enough. I guess a brilliant translator wouldn't normally be working with a mediocre team, and vice versa.  

Though I'll stand by the claim that no matter how mediocre a translator is, unnatural grammar in the target language is unacceptable. Every native speaker would be able to figure out whether something sounds awkward or not, and so should be the translator and make the corresponding tweaks.

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3 minutes ago, Thyndd said:

Though I'll stand by the claim that no matter how mediocre a translator is, unnatural grammar in the target language is unacceptable. Every native speaker would be able to figure out whether something sounds awkward or not, and so should be the translator and make the corresponding tweaks.

I don't disagree, but the grammar being natural sounding is the editor's job. As a translator myself, I can tell you when you're deep in the translation process you can write some funky shit whilst trying to convey the nuance that was in the original Japanese, even if English is your native language.  It then takes a fresh set of eyes to look at it and go WTF and fix it.

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6.

5s remind me of a lot of nukiges I read, particularly those 'translated' by Mangagamer. Those are rather awkward to read, and because the translation is so bare and minimum, lacking most of the interesting nuances that would have made reading the texts alone entertaining, there's very little enjoyment that comes from reading these VNs or the dialogue spoken. Thankfully, nukiges' real enjoyment value lies somewhere else... :makina:

6s is the least I could tolerate if the VN I'm reading is a serious non-nukige story, because this time, I'm actually reading the VN for its story (and by extension, dialogue and narration), not for its... you know, ecchi stuff. :yumiko:

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On 12/1/2018 at 12:56 PM, ittaku said:

Nice bell-shaped curve we ended up getting there, though total numbers is pretty small. Of course it's a self-fulfilling prophecy given the way I worded the entries.

Well, you put everything on a continuum even though it's not really a continuum.  (I.e. there's two different variables here - skill with English, and skill with Japanese).  So I'd be careful with these results.

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