howto:translate

I've cut down this article to something less silly and aggressive. Essentially none of the misguided, high handed language on display in the previous version was being enforced against the unpaid amateurs translating on this site, nor should it be.

The short version is: that guide is essentially appropriate in the context of paid, professional, native English speakers translating for an audience of regular people. Almost none of which is true for this site.

Here's some of the things I find are off base and removed:

"In particular, if you can, don't make your translation any more specific than the original."

...no. English is a more specific language than Japanese. This is especially silly when taken with the next suggestion:

"But within the above, make sure your English is idiomatic and well-written."

Impossible for ESL contributors and extra-weird in combination with the idea of preserving Japanese style ambiguity. Moreover, it is simply not worth the effort. Most translations on the site are quick and dirty efforts aimed at understanding fan works, not enduring contributions to the literary universe. So spare me the high standards.

"Translations should be fully English if possible."

Does anyone pay attention to this? No. Thankfully. A knowledge of weird Japanesisms (like terminating a sentence with ~) is sort of necessary to understand a lot of the material on this site. This guide feels like it was written for normalfags. Know your audience.

"Make sure you completely understand what they're saying."
"Don't translate things if you can't quite grasp the last panel and/or the punchline."

I've done my best to follow these two, but they are mutually exclusive. Oftentimes you reach a point in the dialog where the difficulty spikes. Should you leave the entire thing untranslated? Yes, according the guide.

Does anyone do this? No. Should they? No.

Leaving things untranslated is a cornerstone of the site. Yes JPN is contextual, but it isn't black magic. It is completely possible to understand things in isolation, especially if they precede what is not understood.

Ultimately my problem with this guide is a misapprehension of the stakes. My opinion is: it's not that big a deal. It's just a bunch of fan art, and the people translating it are a bunch of amateurs doing it for free. If there is a bad translation on some downmarket oekaki, nobody cares. If this guide were followed by anyone (it isn't), translation efforts on the site would halt.

Because the site is a wiki, how a person translates and what standards they use to do so are specific to them. If someone is translating a popular work badly, they get corrected. The purpose of a guide is to provide guidance, not to scare the shit out of people.

Ok, where do I even start...

aceofspudz said:

Essentially none of the misguided, high handed language on display in the previous version was being enforced against the unpaid amateurs translating on this site, nor should it be.

It should be. It should be or you will get "I like your thing" as a translation of "あなたの事が好きです", or even horrible guesswork based on google translation output. Unpaid, amateur or expert, whatever, don't translate unless you know what you are doing. Standards are held high, people strive to reach them, that's how it worked up to now and how it should work. You lower the plank, shit starts flowing in, that's it.

aceofspudz said:

"In particular, if you can, don't make your translation any more specific than the original."

...no. English is a more specific language than Japanese.

So what if it's more specific? While Japanese indeed omits many things, one shouldn't add any more than necessary to construct the proper sentence and convey the meaning. There's an old quote going around in runet about Russian translations of LotR. Original sentence - "Boromir smiled." - somehow turned into "And, defying his approaching death, Boromir smiled." or even "The slight shade of smile touched Boromir's pale face, without a trace of color on his cheeks" - all of that while direct translation of "Boromir smiled" was completely grammatically correct and doesn't sound "wooden" or "foreign". FFS, you are a translator, not an author, stop writing what wasn't there.

aceofspudz said:

"But within the above, make sure your English is idiomatic and well-written."

Impossible for ESL contributors and extra-weird in combination with the idea of preserving Japanese style ambiguity. Moreover, it is simply not worth the effort. Most translations on the site are quick and dirty efforts aimed at understanding fan works, not enduring contributions to the literary universe. So spare me the high standards.

Hard, sure, but not impossible. If you're not sure about your English, then either improve it, don't translate difficult things, or ask for double-check after you're done. And how exactly high standards are a bad thing? Do you want "Remilia sais room 'round her smell like wet dogz" in the notes? I don't.

aceofspudz said:
"Make sure you completely understand what they're saying."
"Don't translate things if you can't quite grasp the last panel and/or the punchline."

I've done my best to follow these two, but they are mutually exclusive. Oftentimes you reach a point in the dialog where the difficulty spikes. Should you leave the entire thing untranslated? Yes, according the guide.

Does anyone do this? No. Should they? No.

Leaving things untranslated is a cornerstone of the site. Yes JPN is contextual, but it isn't black magic. It is completely possible to understand things in isolation, especially if they precede what is not understood.

I can see what you mean here, but that's not always true and you know it. What's the point of translating the lead-up if you can't grasp the punch line? it's like tackling the phrase "A drunk man walks into a bar, backs up, rubs his forehead and walks around the bar", then translating the first part as "A drunkard wanders into a pub" and leaving at that. Comment section is there, if you are struggling, request help.

Overall, I don't like your idea of lowering or removing the threshold and encouraging bad translations for "sketches". Bad translation is still worse than no translation, because it cripples the image, whether it was good itself or not. If you're doing things for free in your spare time, it doesn't mean you should do it half-assed. Maybe it's not worth the effort to go at it like you're translating Shakespeare (except for some works I'd say it IS worth it), but not conveying the wrong meaning, or changing the mood of sentence to the direct opposite, or presenting the amazing grammar that makes the eyes of ESL bleed, all of that is still unacceptable and should remain unacceptable.

I am not proposing lowering the water level, but am in favor of recognizing the existing water level.

I think you are engaging in black and white thinking. I am proposing the unrealistically high existing standard, which is followed by no one, be replaced with something more appropriate to the site.

Type-kun said:

What's the point of translating the lead-up if you can't grasp the punch line?

In the fantasy world of this guide, a person puts in his time and effort translating the front part and then, when he happens upon something he doesn't get, deletes all of his prior work. Suffice it to say I've never seen this happen.

What's the point of having a wiki if someone else can't pick up the spare?

Type-kun said:

[The tenets of the guide] should be [enforced].

Are you going to do a search of the partial_translation tag and slap everyone associated with it with a warning? Then do the same with check_translation? I don't even see why those tags exist, since according to the guide you should be issuing complete translations in which you are 100% confident every time.

Type-kun said:

And how exactly high standards are a bad thing?

When those high standards don't exist in practice. If you lower the standard to something more realistic, you will increase the legitimacy of the standard and thus its enforcability.

You (and the guide) say 100% or nothing, I say that 80% is better than nothing.

There needs to be a happy medium between:

• Nothing but the best professional translations, or else negative records and bans aplenty (100%)
• The Wild Wild West of translating, taking whatever Google Translate spits out and calling it done (0%)

I think that's what aceofspudz was getting at.

It's kind of similar to the quality of art uploaded to this website. We don't shoot down all but the best professional artwork, but we still do hold a higher degree of standards than most other image rehosting websites.

For what it's worth I apologize for the aggressiveness of my original post. These are legitimate feelings I have, but at the time of writing I had a terrible day at work and the better part of a fifth of bourbon.

What set me off was discovering I'd made an erroneous translation that evening--which is embarrassing for me personally, since I'd had too many of those recently. More than embarrassing, though, every time someone has to correct you, you aren't simply wrong--you're actually a rule breaker. Being wrong on a translation is evidence enough that you lacked complete understanding, and there is therefore little room in howto:translate for the good faith efforts of an amateur.

Because I try to follow the 'complete translation' rule, I always wind up in a bind of having to translate the whole thing upon starting. I have no idea whether I'll encounter something along the way that I barely understand, but if I followed the 'complete understanding' rule that means I have to junk it all. I would rather not do that, since I (like any human) don't want my work to be in vain. So if you don't want to get rid of your work, you get a Morton's fork of which rule you are going to break.

My other problem with the former howto:translate is that it was written like a rant and was in some places more reflective of the writer's opinions regarding translation than useful as a set of general principles for the site. Yes, you should not make new material up, but it is perfectly acceptable in my world to make what was implicit in Japanese explicit in English. How Type-kun read (or chose to read) that rule--as 'don't make shit up'--is something we both agree on. But that's not what it said in the guide. Making things explicit means naming people and actions which were not present in the original except by implication. That's something I have to do because the goal of my translations is to produce sort of natural sounding English. Another translator might have a different goal--like staying as true to the original Japanese as possible--which is fine as well. I think a modicum of respect is in order for varying styles so long as they are working in good faith.

And good faith is what it boils down to. No we should not brook 'I like your thing'; I left that part in, anyway. We can agree that google translations should be hurled into the sun. Like BrokenEagle said, surely there is a middle ground.

aceofspudz said:

but at the time of writing I had a terrible day at work and the better part of a fifth of bourbon.

Welp, that makes two of us, sans the bourbon part :3 But I'm finishing my 3rd week without a single day off - or was it 4th already - and last few days were all 10-hour shifts, so it sure takes a toll on my diplomatic skills, if not SAN points already.

I've always thought that "complete translation" rule applied to the single image. Surely you read the entire page before trying to translate it? So you'll see difficulty spikes and unclear punchlines right away.

Regarding implicit/explicit context and making things up in the translation, there's rather clear distinction between the two IMO, and the guide should spell it out.

As for errors, well, I'll hold my ground: if you think you understand what's happening in the text and make an error - it's ok, everybody makes errors, in Japanese you could read the particle the wrong way in place where it tends to turn the meaning around. If you don't really understand some parts but attempt to translate them anyway using context guesswork instead of, say, actually attempting to google similar grammar, it's not so good, at should at least be marked with check_translation, or better yet not done at all.

Type-kun said:

As for errors, well, I'll hold my ground: if you think you understand what's happening in the text and make an error - it's ok, everybody makes errors, in Japanese you could read the particle the wrong way in place where it tends to turn the meaning around.

That's why, ultimately, my changes really amount to changing 'be sure you completely understand' to 'be reasonably sure you completely understand' and softening up some of the other needlessly hard line language of the document while still maintaining the points it was trying to convey.

As far as 'surely you've read', generally I do when it comes to single images. But with series there is a general apprehension to begin it and then halt when it becomes too difficult, and you get into the habit of doing it panel by panel after an image or two. In which case the guide should state: yes, it's better to abandon the effort than to make a bad translation. If you do continue after a partial trans, you should be reasonably sure you still understand what's going on.

All of these are things I witness from other translators on a regular basis, and they don't offend me. They're non-optimal and I wouldn't tolerate them in a professional environment, but this isn't that. The previous guide made it seem somewhat shameful to issue a partial trans or abandon a translation effort, which is sort of counterproductive. We actually want people to give up when things are too difficult.

But the way to get a person to give up is to have a reasonable standard. If someone is always below the standard, they will see it as illegitimate and unfair. If someone feels the standard is fair and appropriate to them, they will not feel this way. Or at least, I won't.