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Advice for a beginning translator


Clephas

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I gave this advice a number of times in private to people who said to me, "I know some Japanese, and I want to try being a translator.  Is there anything I should know?"

 

The truth is that I could go on for hours or days on all the things that would prevent a new translator from stepping on the same landmines I and others like me did back in the day... but a lot of that is basically human-relations advice for dealing with prima-donnas.

 

Instead, I'm just going to give a few pieces of simple advice.

 

1.  Master particle and ending usage, no matter what.  Even if you forget half of the rest of the grammar, understanding how particle and ending usage alters the flow of a sentence can allow you to adapt.  (this is a basic requirement not a luxury, as some of the 'translators' I've worked with have assumed)

2.  With fantling VNs, JParser is your best friend.  I only say this for those who can already play VNs on their own with 80-100% understanding just by glancing at the suggested furigana and automatically rephrasing it into a proper Japanese sentence (JParser makes suggestions, but they are just that... suggestions). 

3.  Actual Japanese-English translation tools are worthless for anything other than single words that use common-use kanji.  If you get a writer/author who prefers more unusual kanji, don't even attempt to use them for that.

4.  Play the VN, watch the anime (even if it is just the episode you are working on), read the manga/light novel before you decide to translate it. You'll be surprised at how much info sticks to the back of your mind just by experiencing the material without the handicap of having to translate it.

5.  Love and passion solve a lot of things, but not everything.  Deliberately slow down your translation and take brief breaks (one or two days with VNs, an hour or so with anime) if it feels like you are about to fry.  Don't let those breaks extend beyond that, though.  If you let yourself burn out, there is a good chance you won't start again.

6a.  If you can, attach yourself at the hip to an active and experienced mentor translator.  Get him to tlc scenes that you have translated (not all of them, just the ones that gave you trouble) and give you detailed translation-check reports so you can see how and why you went wrong.  You can learn more from a good translation-checker's tlc report than a month in class.

6b.  Make sure you completely translate any scenes you send to a mentor.  This is simply to reduce the stress levels of your mentor and keep him/her from abandoning you.  Most people who get enough experience to effectively teach others about translation aren't going to have any patience whatsoever for half-assed work.

7.  Avoid anything that even vaguely resembles a difficult project for your first one.  Oddly, for anime, medieval fantasy is probably the easiest genre to translate from the start.  However, with VNs, choose something with easy language for your first project (a very short moege, maybe).

 

I'll let other people expound on the people-issues of translation projects, since most people aren't as cynical as me about them.  Like I said, I could list pitfall after pitfall of dealing with translation projects, but you'd still step on the same landmines anyway.  Good luck, new translators.

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I was going to type something, but realized I had written something (when I had less experience, but which I still think holds true) before.

 

There are two parts to TL:

The first step is understanding.

You need to understand:

-what is being said

-who/what is being addressed/referenced (because it’s Japanese and often this is tricky)

-the tone of the speaker (whether they are inquisitive, happy, in agreement, or expressing contempt).

As one rule of thumb: Don’t translate something when you can’t, or don’t have the knowledge to, do the above 3 points with relative ease. Also note that all these points are certaintly practiced by reading. The last two in particular are mostly picked up through reading experience (the first one requiring grammar, vocab, and use of dictionary (preferably J-J)).

The second part of TL’ing is constructing sentences in English.

Uh, All I can say here is that...if you don't understand the meaning, systematically and grammatically transforming the japanese into english will never really cut it. It's not a system of equations, you can't convert it into a different form you "understand".

 

Anyways Clephas has much more in the way of practical things you'd want to follow. I just am beating the dead horse about a decent mindset and the proper skill req.

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Mmm... this is questionable.  Of course, if both Japanese and English are the translator's second languages, there are frequently major difficulties to overcome.  However, a Japanese-born translator can often work just as fine as an American, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, or British-born one for raw translation.  It is the translation checker that needs to have near-perfect English skills.

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The jobs and requirements are fundamentally different.  Raw translators do first line translations and a translation-checker's job ranges from simply fixing the less-skilled translator's work to a combination of second-line editing and translation, not to mention first-line quality checking.

 

I've said this in other threads, but not making a distinction between translation checkers and a raw translator is always a mistake.  New translators shouldn't even be considered.

 

Edit:  Regardless of how you see the role, the basic requirement is that the TLC be the better of the two translators.  By definition, that individual is going to have to fix the other's translation, and if he is of equivalent skill or - even worse - lesser skill, that isn't possible to do effectively.

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Thanks for this advice, Clephas. ^^ I have my own plans about translating stuff sometime in the future. If I am to start getting into this risky endeavor, I definitely can't be as "blind" as I am now, you know. I shall be referring to this outline to guide me on the right path from now on.

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*Clephas smiles*  And do you seriously think that ever happens?  In fantranslation and fansubbing, no TLC=poor quality.

 

Edit:  A bit more seriously, that puts too much pressure on the translator... and causes projects to collapse.  Having a TLC around as a safety net also serves as a stress-reducer.

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Sounds to me like the raw translator/TLC method is just a compromise.  One guy does it making a bunch of mistakes, and a better guy comes along and fixes it later.  Leading to duplication of effort and the possibility of missing something.

 

I think that what you are calling a TLC for fantranslation/fansubbing, I would just call "the translator."  And the raw translator simply wouldn't exist.  The more qualified person would handle it all.  But whether you call that guy the translator and let him do it all, or whether you call him the TLC and let him fix other people's stuff, *somebody* had better understand enough Japanese to read the whole thing and enough English to write it in a coherent manner...

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I think dedicated translation checkers are a waste of time. Either the TL is good and the TLC gets bored and quits, or the TL is awful and the TLC quits in frustration, or the TL is okay and the TLC only needs to correct something once every hundred lines and misses some, and then quits anyway because they still have to TLC the entire mostly correct script.

 

Translators burn out and shit happens, but a TLC isn't going to save a project from that.

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Definitely strongly against this statement of necessarily having to have one TLC or your project is guaranteed to be pretty much shit. Seriously, this really is not the case and it really depends a lot on the person that is doing the translation.

Shit happens, and like the comment before mine here, a translator can burn himself out sometimes, that's a given. However that really doesn't mean you can't be good enough to TLC your own work or pull a good raw translation without actually having to depend on a TLC.

In my personal opinion any given TLC really is just a waste of time for any translation out there. If you're not actually capable of taking care of the script on your own, then you're most likely not ready to be a translator just yet. It is probably thanks to sticking to Ixrec as a mentor that I can probably say this though. Then again, borrowing his words here, the very idea of seeking a TLC for everything out there falls into what is just massively overcomplicating things and having an overly high opinion of what it is we are all doing, which is just a simple fan translation.

One other thing I'm also strongly against is having more than one translator work for a given project. As also recommended by Ixrec himself, it is definitely a bad idea to consider having more than one translator for a project, no matter how big it may be. You either do it or you just don't even try to. It is actually because most projects usually tend to have more than one translator that the finished work is generally a really messy mix of different translations styles that most of the time don't constitute what could be called a decent translation.

But in the end there really is no need to overcomplicate stuff. A fan translation is exactly what the name implies, so my advice for any beginning translator out there would be to actually attempt to translate something following the points that were listed in this thread, definitely try to get stuff done and improve from experience alone. Also, for anyone out there actually trying you should definitely find yourself a more experienced translator that is willing to help you. It helps you improve so much faster than what you'd actually expect.

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^The people that usually tend to complain about Ixrec's translations most of the time always go on ranting about irrelevant and very subjective stuff.

 

But you have his own words on that matter, if you missed them from my first post:

 

Then again, borrowing his words here, the very idea of seeking a TLC for everything out there falls into what is just massively overcomplicating things and having an overly high opinion of what it is we are all doing, which is just a simple fan translation.

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I think I get the reasoning for and agree with the TL -> Editor -> TLC structure.

 

Reasonably competent TL'er --> raw TL

raw TL --> Editor -->script which looks like it was written from the perspective of English

natified English script--> TLC who scans through the Japanese and English, easily recognizing segments which go "wait a minute, that doesn't mean that", or "this gives a different impression" and correcting them. Since they are working with a piece of meant-to-be-in-English writing, they can also improve the flow by editing on a larger scale than line by line.

 

All these things that a TLC does absolutely require high skill level (and better editing skills than editor if they are doing flow changes), but are not as nearly as taxing per line as raw tl'ing. This way, the TLC might be able to cover the entire VN by themself and make both the accuracy and editing very good, relatively speaking.

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Although (setting aside the fact that you don't need to be a god-tier translator to have an opinion on the matter) second-hand information from untrusted/uncited sources is not so relevant so it's hard to know.

The problem people have with Ixrec's translation is quite simply that most of what he tackles is works by known authors with peculiar writing styles (Sakurai, Romeo, Meteor, etc) and thus he washes out said style in his translation. Does anyone have a complaint about his Muv-Luv Alternative translation?

And on the other hand he at least attempts to translate interesting, uncommon works instead of the latest popular moege or chuuni blockbuster. Not that I find it any satisfying to read a translation with a washed out style nor intend to read most of his TL, but at least he brings attention to those games and make them available to people less intransigent.

That aside, I think the reason why the TLC position exist is quite simply to allow beginner translators to learn from somewhere and for skilled translators to work on more projects and overall lessen the time/effort burden of translation.

It doesn't exist in professional translations and isn't required either, since several of the best VN translations out there were done without this process.

On multiple translators, it does seem like a bad idea but often VN don't even have one single writer to begin with. Assigning different translators to different routes with different writers doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Everyone can definitely share their opinion on the matter but more trusted translators' opinions are usually a lot more relevant than that of random ones. I definitely don't have to go around proving everything I say in every single post though.

From the very moment you decide to translate something you are already pretty much overwriting the authors' original style, no matter the title and no matter how good you are of a translator/TLC. So complaining about not keeping the original writing intact while translating really is silly if you ask me. Sure, it is exactly because of this that it will always be better to read the title in its original language but that is just reserved for the people that can actually do it.

I seriously can't understand the people complaining about stuff like this in what is fundamentally a fan translation. But thanks for proving that the ones that do it are always just complaining about irrelevant and very subjective stuff. Don't want having the authors' flavor changed? Then you definitely should never read a translation.

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