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Hi, folks!
This month our topic is all about translation quality with our guest, John Hooper (also known as GundamAce) of Lemnisca! Regrettably, technical issues irrecoverably destroyed a great talk we had about honorifics, and we were unable to reconstruct it in time, so if you notice that we don’t talk about those, we’re sad about it too!
Topics Covered
0:00 – Host and Topic Introductions
0:37 – Guest Introduction and questions
8:36 – What makes a good English translation?
10:36 – Adapting jokes and puns
18:44 – Preserving intent and style
25:45 – Translators as writers
31:00 – Literal vs. Liberal
36:00 – Advice for the aspiring translator
43:00 – Official Translations vs. fan translations
52:40 – Japanese companies and the West
56:44 – VN News
1:03:18 – Shill segment feat. Zonijo
1:08:01 – Outro
Visual Novels Discussed
- Never7 -The End of Infinity-
- I/O
- Killer Queen
- Root Double -Before Crime * After Days-
- Dies Irae
- Ever17 -The Out of Infinity-
- 12Riven -The Ψcliminal of Integral-
- Maji de Watashi ni Koishinasai!
- Tokyo Babel
- Chrono Clock
- Ourai no Gahkthun ~What a Shining Braves~
- Umineko no Naku Koro ni
- Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo
- Grisaia no Rakuen
- Grisaia: Phantom Trigger
- Little Busters!
- Princess Evangile
i really hope to see an official release of I/O, it deserves much more attention. And not to forget 12Riven 🙂
Why people prefer fan translations than official? That’s really simple. Fan translations tend to be a lot more faithful and respecting than official translations which are usually butchering whole script (culture washout, omitted nuances or popcultural quirks) and completely Americanizing it.
Honestly, if I need to choose between “well flowing” text (whatever it mean, I’m an IT guy with mathematics brain, so I can’t really appreciate the “beauty” of perfect language “flow” – for me the most important thing is getting information as faithful as possible) and a bit clunky but faithful with all quirks (like honorifics, original name order, popcultural references, names, things like moe or character types etc) I’ll always pick the later one, which is not targeted to masses.