case: (Default)
Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2014-11-16 03:50 pm

[ SECRET POST #2875 ]


⌈ Secret Post #2875 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 063 secrets from Secret Submission Post #411.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

(Anonymous) 2014-11-16 10:46 pm (UTC)(link)
That's really rare these days, though -- off the top of my head, I can only think of one fandom being actively translated that does that sort of thing as a rule, and that one's primarily a video game anyway. (Ace Attorney.)

The biggest problem with fan translations is that very often it's not that they use poor grammar in English, it's that they don't have a real understanding of *Japanese* grammar and phrasing. So they'll get the nouns right, and probably the adjectives and verbs, and then just kind of guess at what the rest of the sentence means. They might not be able to tell if a character is saying he did something, he wanted to do something, someone else wanted him to do something, he's going to do something, someone else is going to do something... Japanese can pack a lot of meaning into choice of connective particles and verb endings, and that's the place a lot of fan translators are weakest.

And I've seen a lot of fan translations get names entirely wrong, too, whether by misreading kanji or choosing the most awkward possible reading of katakana (I mean, seriously, Rivaille?) -- and then fans will furiously defend their blunder against the official translations getting things 'wrong.'

I've been tempted to dabble in translation myself, but I know my Japanese is a bit rusty, so I'm kind of waffling over it. I know all too well the traps I could fall into -- and how unlikely it is that most people would ever call me out over them, which kind of makes it worse.

(Anonymous) 2014-11-17 02:26 am (UTC)(link)
"So they'll get the nouns right, and probably the adjectives and verbs"

And sometimes it's only because they're using a dictionary so if a word has more than one meaning, they'll probably pick the wrong one.