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A lot of us rely on the hard work of (fan) translators who kindly put out translations of our favorite media so we can enjoy them without knowing what a nakama or a keitei is. Usually for free even!  This is the thread for discussing making translations - replacing text and SFX in manga and webcomics or translating light-novels or regular novels or subtitles for anime and movies -- or even dubs! Feel free to discuss your favorite (or least favorite) translation groups here as well. We actually have some goons who have been working on translating a webcomic in GBS for other goons: The Daily Life of a Certain NEET ! If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it to anyone who hates stories where stuff happens! I've really wanted to improve my abysmal Japanese reading ability so I've been doing some manga/webcomic translations for a while now myself for practice. I can post about my workflow in another post. I've always worked alone, so I'm curious how other people do it. Tell me about your experiences and workflows with translations or translation groups!
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Dec 4, 2022 18:49
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 08:31 |
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Spoggerific posted:I started studying Japanese in 2010, mostly so I could read/watch manga and anime on my own, but I also had aspirations to eventually become a fansubber. After a couple years of studying, I applied to a group and got in as a QC/editor. I stayed for a while, made some friends, and learned a lot, both about Japanese and fansubbing. I eventually got assigned a show as the main TL, and was excited to finally do some Real Translation. I originally had this in the OP before I shortened it, but it definitely stood out for me too after I started getting into translating. I can perfectly understand a sentence in Japanese, but be at a complete loss for how to put it into English. It doesn't help that I try to be overly precise. I know translating involves a certain degree of capturing the idea of a phrase or sentence, not being exact, but I consider it my style now, haha. I don't use automatic translators a lot, but I do sometimes turn to them for help understanding a sentence I just don't understand or for inspiration on how to phrase something in English. If I do use one, I usually try out a few translators (I like to use DeepL and Google translate) on the same sentence to make sure I understand the sentence well, and then put it into my own words to better fit the context and speaking style of the particular character or whatever. If it's a particularly difficult sentence or seems like something that leans heavily on cultural knowledge, I'll reach out to my friend or to a Discord language-learning group I'm part of. Despite kanji, I think translating written stuff is much easier. There are definitely things that people say that I'm not even sure I'd know how to spell and would be at a complete loss trying to subtitle. Of course, reading is traditionally the easier of the two comprehension skills, but kanji is really obnoxious. It doesn't help that the dictionaries never like my left-handed drawings and strokes. I like to use Aedict, but the kanji drawing feature rarely ever works for me. My first attempt at subtitling anything was translating from English->Japanese so my friend could enjoy Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I made it only halfway through the episode before realizing how incredibly difficult it is to translate into a foreign language and make it correct and maybe somewhat natural. I actually made a thread here a long time ago asking for tips. I only remember from it someone mentioning the subtitles should start like half a second before someone speaks. Larry Parrish posted:maybe I'm some kind of crazy person but i skip mtl. every time lol. only if I absolutely have to and if it's only a chapter or two and nobody else released one for that chapter, which often happens in-between one scanlation group dying or randomly dropping a series and a new one grabbing it. if a series is mostly or only MTL i just don't read it. so 'lapping' the real scanlators does nothing. maybe there's a lot of serious weebs out there who don't care and are used to having to mtl stuff for themselves or something, idk. but i have better poo poo to do with my day than puzzle out some garbled AI bullshit. There are people in this very subforum who can't even wait a couple of hours before the official English release of a manga before they start posting spoilers based on the pretty pictures from the Japanese release they can't read or understand. 
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Dec 5, 2022 12:52
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Larry Parrish posted:
Wait, what? I have never heard of such a thing.  Huh. Is this really something only clueless weebs don't know about? Are jocks hanging out in the toy aisles at stores these days? XD Spoggerific posted:There can be good translator's notes, but the vast majority of them are worthless weeb wank. One example of a very good translator's note I've seen was in Grisaia, where the main character is a secret agent type character working for the Japanese government. He refers to his employer as "Ichigaya". The English translation leaves it untranslated, and the first time it comes up there's a note that says something along the lines of "Ichigaya is a term used to refer to the Japanese Self Defense Forces, similar to how "The Pentagon" can refer to the US military. The term comes from the name of the neighborhood where the Ministry of Defense's headquarters is located." Personally, I'd rather have too many translator notes than too few. Like this one - I like this one, I learned a thing. On the other hand,   Back on the first hand though, it's pretty funny and pretty harmless imo. There's also the other extreme. You can just remove all references to Japan!  I spent so, so much of my childhood trying to understand how these were donuts.
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Dec 7, 2022 23:59
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