/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>21124653
His section on translation seems fairly uninformed. Coming from a professional translator with several years of experience. I don't know about the future but right now media localization companies are expanding and pawing for good translators, as they have been for a decent number of years. You won't be forced to deal with manuals or whatever for years to build up experience. One company I just sent an email asking to join, they gave me a test, I passed, and that was that. I was working on compelling media. The real question is just "are you good enough at Japanese", not "how many years of manuals have you translated." If you want to work on compelling media that suits your interests you can do so the second you're good at Japanese. Right now anyway. The market might be a lot different in 5 years.

Going to ignore his minor uninformed points and tackle the one he described as the major factor: "All translations suck". This is a common sentiment. I can understand it. Translation does fundamentally alter the text and generally you will be failing to express the same idea as the Japanese in the same way. Sure. But that doesn't mean the translation sucks. I think the mistake Matt's making here, and the mistake I think a lot of people unfamiliar with translation make, is that it really does not fucking matter how much shit is lost in translation. Like, it really doesn't matter.

He mentions 逆ギレ as an example of a Japanese word that will be lost in translation since English doesn't have an exact equivalent. Sure. Who gives a fuck? It's not a big deal. So you have to reword the conversation in English a bit to cover for the lost word. Who cares? The resulting conversation won't be meaningfully different. It's not like the fundamental sentence structure and words used in Japanese are an almighty holy grail of brilliance, and changing them at all will result in a sucky translation. I might go so far as to say the most important thing to know as a translator is how little the Japanese text itself actually matters. That's somewhat of an exaggeration, but seriously. Specific word choice tends to be the result of cultural habit, like saying a common idiom since it's common in that culture. It's not like the usage of that idiom is suddenly a supremely important concept that will forever be lost in English due to a similar idiom not being present. It's just expressing an idea and rewording that idea to fit in English is not a big deal and does not impact much. The overall experience between a Japanese work and that work properly translated into English will be nigh identical. An autistic poring through the TL files will notice a fair amount of difference, but with a bit of thought, you can generally see that the changes barely matter in the grand scheme of things.

Anyway I could go on because translation is a complex subject but yeah. Matt's view on translation is very uninformed. I'm no e-celeb bird watcher so I can't say much but it feels like a lot of these "Japanese Learning Personalities" that have cropped up over the past few years have very weird, very uninformed perspectives on translation, as if one among their ranks had a bad experience and then poisoned everyone else's opinion with it. Translation is a pretty solid job that pays well and feels meaningful, not to mention how you can generally work from home. (Several of these companies have offices in Japan and it's very easy to ask for them to sponsor a visa which will enable you to live in Japan for a bit if you want.) I'm really baffled by how many of these people are warning learners off becoming a translator. I think they could be ruining a few people's lives by turning them away from a path that would have brought much fulfillment to their lives.

The one person who had a solid take on translation was Dogen, who said that the translation field is growing more competitive and shrinking over time. There are an increasing number of translators, and machine translation is growing in size. It sounds ridiculous but translation agencies in particular have been kickstarting machine translation initiatives where they shift focus to hiring people to edit machine translation rather than translators. Faster and saves costs. It remains to be seen how much the translation field will shrink due to this but it is a significant concern. The problem with this position, however, is precisely that the true effects remain to be seen. Maybe the field won't shrink that much. Maybe it'll take 30-40+ years to really be impacted negatively. Maybe WW3 will start in 10 years and destroy the world. You have no way of knowing any of this, so avoiding a career path you're interested in solely out of fear for potential problems that might not come to pass seems pretty silly to me. It's good to keep your options open, though.