給翻譯新手的一些信( eng )( Letters to a Young Trans.pdf

給翻譯新手的一些信 主要說的是翻譯日文 GAL game 電子小說和 ACG 游戲 這篇文章只有 2 個(gè)網(wǎng)站上有 而且都需要代理 所以很有必要盡快分享已授權(quán)轉(zhuǎn)載已授權(quán)轉(zhuǎn)載 防止消失 這是一篇不可多得的文章 很好 作者作者 Seung ParkSeung Park 分享者 分享者 xiayuanzhongxiayuanzhong MewCatcherMewCatcher Letters to a Young Translator Part I The Initial Read Posted by Seung Park on May 23rd 2006 to Production Process Letters to a Young Translator Dear X In your last missive to me you spoke of getting together with a few of your friends and starting a group to translate a visual novel or two I was glad to hear it I have found translation to be an enjoyable challenging and fulfilling hobby and I am always excited to see new blood coming in to fill the ranks I thought then that I should give you some encouragement some tips and tricks of the trade that you might find yourself wanting in the near future These are lessons that I have had to learn mainly the hard way and I hope that you do not end up making some of the mistakes that I have made in the past But we get ahead of ourselves Let us begin at the beginning It is not surprising that given the increasing prevalence of Japanese media forms in the market today groups of fans have taken it into their own hands to translate and then distribute content whether it be anime manga eroge what have you to a larger audience My purpose in writing this series of letters to you is not to debate the ethics or lack thereof of certain distribution methods nor is it to attempt to sway you toward my moral axis those are battles that I already lost a long time ago and they are not ones I wish to fight again No my only wish is to relate to you some of ways in which we work and my only hope is that you might find some of this information useful in your own endeavors First we shall speak of the personnel as without the people the operation is a dead husk a structure given form for a specific purpose that no longer exists In our case insani is a two man team one translation lead and one technical lead Granted both Edward and I could hypothetically serve every role required in a translation project we are both generalists in that way but it is true that my specific skillset lends me more toward translation while Edward s specific skillset makes him the natural choice for programming duties Between us we also take care of any graphical translations that might arise and serve various roles as we draw near to the end of the production process However those other roles are a story for another day and I will not bother to go into them in any great detail here It should suffice if you understand that we do not attempt to cower behind the specialized safety of our titles and hope that the unpleasant and boring work will be done by someone else I am sure that there exist some translation groups that decide on the pieces they will translate without ever having read through said works in their entirety and while I suppose it might be possible to craft a passable translation that way my gut tells me otherwise This is why the first thing that happens in our production process is a long initial read of the work to be translated by the translator During this pass the translator must keep a precise record of the following things Language difficulty Is this piece at a 6th grade level A 12th grade level A rocket scientist level How comfortable are you with the vocabulary the grammatical structures the idioms and the narrative flow of the piece If you find yourself struggling just to read the piece you are trying to translate then you should probably either a seek help from someone with more experience and skill b come back to this piece after you ve grown more skilled or c find yourself a piece that is more at your level Length of the piece How long is this piece How many hours does it take to read through it If it is multi branching path then how many branches are there and how long do those take to play through What is your final deadline Is it feasible for you to translate this amount of text given the deadline that you have There are all too many groups and people out there who undertake a translation project without realizing just how long the project is going to be Most of these groups sputter out fairly quickly for obvious reasons Don t be one of them Target audience Who is in it More importantly who is not in it This will inform the kind of language you will be allowed to use when you start translating the piece yourself It would be inappropriate for instance to include copious amounts of swear words in a piece targetted mainly at 6 year olds It would be equally inappropriate to employ a language level suitable for Dick and Jane when the writer you are translating happens to be the likes of say Yuuichi Suzumoto or Ichiro Sakaki Graphics to be translated That s right the translator needs to keep count of these and take screenshots when they come up This has to do with the fact that when the production process starts in earnest the graphics should be the first things to be translated Why Because otherwise your graphics editors will be left standing still while they could be doing something Anyone who has taken introductory courses in Computer Science knows of the laundry machine analogy of pipelining same thing goes here Difficulty of graphics translation Depending on the skill of your graphics staff this may be more or less of an issue However you should never assume that your graphics staff can do something And when you go to ask your graphic editor whether a certain edit is possible or not do not ask is it possible you will almost invariably get a yes to that The question to ask is given your skill level and the set amount of time we have is such a thing feasible followed rapidly by exactly how much time do you need Readme and manual files Do not forget about these they are as much part of the translation as the script files are Movies and other media As above these will need to be translated as well When I admonish you to keep a precise record of these things I do not mean keep a vague idea in your head Write things down Note where and when graphics occur Detail how long it took you to read through the piece and multiply that time by at least a factor of 10 that should unless you are blindingly fast give you some rough idea of at least how long you will be spending in translation If the translation of a piece is beyond your current skill level do not be afraid to alert your team to that fact This will save you an enormous amount of headache and heartache in the long run Most of all do not let anyone try to rush you in this first reading by now you should be aware of the fact that it is absolutely crucial to the success of your project and that if you do not do it you will have to deal with the problems that arise from this lack of preparation later The other thing that should go without saying is this when you are doing your initial read of the piece you are doing nothing more or less than a preliminary translation of the piece in your head Do not ever make the mistake of going oh I ll figure this out later as I translate along or oh I ll look it up in my dictionary later Do it now Make sure you understand the piece you are translating before you ever set pen to paper Or perhaps you are one of those people who enjoys walking out of the bathroom without pulling up his pants Once your initial read is done you will need to report back to the rest of the team and detail what it is that you have found Be as specific as you can in this briefing and begin to assign specific tasks to specific people as soon as is feasible For instance in the vast majority of cases graphics editors can begin work on getting graphical edits together even without the programmer having had to figure out the data structures and rip the relevant data files out of the archives In the worst case scenario you may have to report back that you do not think this piece is doable If you are going to say that you need to be able to tell your team precisely why otherwise you could find yourself getting pushed to do things that you are in no way ready for But if you do end up having to admit that you are not quite skilled enough to translate the prospective piece yet then you do yourself credit that means that more than likely at some point in the future you will be able to translate said piece with skill and efficiency It is better to admit what you cannot do than to lie and say that it is possible after all when the bar for acceptable metric has to be set to 0 lines per day the ability of anyone regardless of skill in language to do a translation rises to 100 The ball is in your court What will you do I suppose we shall see next time Sincerely yours Seung Park Lead Translator insani org 2 Responses to Letters to a Young Translator Part I The Initial Read 1 Essarem May 24th 2006 7 00 am Surpassingly insightful and well written particularly because I was expecting to read a blog entry This has further inspired me to attempt something for say al together 2007 Sadly my knowledge of non English languages currently consists of nothing but nouns and verbs but hopefully I ll be able to understand a simple story by that time Plus the Game Engine Development classes I m supposed to take should help me understand RealLive and such at least a little ahem Anyway enough self oriented ranting Very very nice letter there Sound advice and proof of why I like your work so much 2 Haeleth May 25th 2006 8 01 pm Golly I never realised I was getting quite so much wrong P Letters to a Young Translator Part II Tacticians and Strategists Posted by Seung Park on May 30th 2006 to Production Process Letters to a Young Translator Dear X It has been some time since our last correspondence and I hope this letter finds you well You say that you have spent a good deal of time reading through the piece that you hope to translate and for this I applaud you All the time you spend in this lonely task straining to see and hear all that which is most unseeable and unhearable about a piece will prove its own reward For there is no art save that which is found in solitude no goodness in translation save that which you find in yourself I know you will smile at this and say to yourself knowingly condescendingly that there is a target audience and that translations are made for the purpose of being read In a sense you are right I trust that it is in this sense that you have sent me some of your preliminary translations I thank you for this faith I enjoyed reading them over and indeed the words of explanation you sent highlight very well for me some of the inadequacies in your current translation style I cannot give you specific criticism not at this time but if you want my opinion if you were not speaking in jest when you asked me to be as harsh as I could I can tell you this at the moment you have no style and no form You argue stubbornly to the death that this is what the author wrote without knowing really knowing whether that is a true statement or not You speak to others about being literal as opposed to being loose when you have not the wisdom or the right to offer up such criticisms And I beg of you for your own good and for the good of everyone else to stop You cannot help anyone And likewise no one can help you No one For in this art we are all equally wrong and we are none of us right Not the bountiful polyglot not the astute English major not the silver tongued native speaker of Japanese not the illustrious professor of linguistics not me and certainly not you All we have are our words and when we use those words to vivisect the works of other people instead of to strengthen them we do them and more importantly ourselves a grave disservice Then why should you listen to me Why indeed do you write me letters and why do you say you await a reply At the simplest level you come to me seeking my advice and that is something I am willing to give you in abundance Am I right Am I wrong I do not know All I know is that these are the lessons I have learned and this is the way my translation circle works Perhaps when you have successfully released as many translations as we have you might have a significantly different opinion of what it is to be a translator I do not doubt that And I do not seek to question the validity of the conclusions that your future self will no doubt come to about the nature of these production processes about the nature of translation and even about what happens to both you and the piece you are translating as you translate All of us change all of us have footfalls that whisper on the concrete bones of the cities to which we are given only to forget that we might ever have existed at all But here and now I am me and you are you and so I beseech you to listen So you have completed your initial read and you are getting down to the often unpleasant business of assigning your team members their tasks This then is as good a time as any to talk about the makeup of your team As I wrote before insani is in essence a two man team one translator and one hacker Edward is in fact writing an excellent series of articles about the mechanics of eroge hacking that your programming staff may wish to read at some point However the roles we play are diverse and I will list them here other than the programming role I shall leave Edward to cover that in somewhat greater detail than I did the last time around The Coordinator On many translation teams I have seen this person is not a translator at all in fact in the romhacking circles this person is almost invariably a hacker In the anime fansub circles this person might not actually do anything at all Regardless there is one property and only one property that a good coordinator must have That is he must understand the role of every single person on the team including himself And in order to be truly respected he must be willing to lead from the front charging into the fray before everyone else blazing a path for others to follow That is why in the amateur visual novel localization community the coordinator should usually be the lead translator The coordinator has the final say on all team decisions makes the timetables for milestones and releases works intensively with all members of the team in order to ensure that they are making their deadlines Furthermore it falls to him to arbitrate and resolve team disputes and to make sure that troublesome members of the team are either dealt with or shown the door if necessary Should anything in the production process or the final release go wrong it ultimately falls on him to shoulder the blame Should anything in the production process or the final release go right he cannot take any of the praise at all This is a serious job it may not be taken lightly and the ideal coordinator must out of all members of the team know the most about the nature of both translation and the production process Which means that if you have no knowledge of Japanese other than what you learned from anime if you have no knowledge of translation other than your derision at the much maligned introduction to Zero Wing if you have no ability other than that of an editor read a glorified cheerleader then you have no business in this position The Translator s It goes without saying that any translation project that exists should have at least one translator However if there is more than one then there are additional issues of differing skill levels and translation consistency to deal with Fortunately or unfortunately just as in any other field it is very difficult to put a number or a logical measure to the skill of any given translator I have worked with translators for instance who might be brilliant when they are made to translate legal contracts from one language to another but fail miserably when asked to translate literature I know of others who can translate medical documents well enough even given the fact that they have no M D at the end of their names and I know of M D s who might know more than one language and yet who make miserable translators altogether But ideally in your team your translators will be of fairly clear cut skill levels In this case the translator of the greatest skill and experience should become the lead and on his shoulders should rest the final creative control over the resultant translation Practice the art and craft of pair translation when there is one proficient translator and one who is still in the stages of learning every single line translated should become a teaching point And practice the art and craft of working under strict deadlines as set by the coordinator for this too is an integral part of any production process The Graphics Staff These people are recruited to do what is essentially grunt work and they most likely know this If they do not your coordinator needs to disabuse these people of their illusions Graphics editing is hard monotonous work and it is most often a thankless job The volume and difficulty of graphics to edit will vary per project but in some projects we ve tackled seeMajipuri the configuration menus alone were enough to give our graphics editor see Edward Keyes grand mal tonic clonic seizures People who make good web graphics by the way do not always make good graphics editors for our purposes ideally you want someone who can make every single deadline you throw at him someone who can faithfully duplicate sometimes garish visual effects that appear in the original Japanese game not someone who can build a pretty webpage The Editors These people are among the most unimportant components of a translation team If they are among the most important or if they play a major role in how your final translation reads then your translators are at best clueless and at worst dangerously flawed The problem I have seen is this most editors are drawn from English majors self described masters of English creative writers who have only ever published in obscure blogs and the list just goes on Their one defining charact