So, I've never really been in to Light Novels. But recently, I've hit a roadblock when it comes to finding more Manga that I am interested in, so I decided to try and find some interesting LNs, starting out with some of those from which the Manga's I read where adopted. But I found a strange pattern as I was working through them.
First off, is it just me, or do a pretty large chunk of them seem to favor a 1st person narrative (a format that I despise, and one of the biggest reasons from staying away from LNs)?
For those good stories that I both like and are in 3rd person narrative, It seems alot of the translations I find range from "Thrown in Google Translate" to "Ehhhh, good enough". With alot of these, is it not that the translation itself is not BAD (per say), but more that the Translators are trying to go for a more LITERAL translation, rather than a more contextually appropriate translation.
A Good example are two LNs I've been following. Bringing the Farm to Live in Another World (Novel) and Knights & Magic (Novel). These two, while some of the better translations I've found, I would still only rate about a 7.8-8.0 (with a 10 being a "perfect" translation).
One of the biggest issues I've found in these two, is the use of pretenses, with the past and present pretenses being mixed together in weird and awkward ways, or grammar only appropriate for past tense being used in a present tense.
All in all, it makes many otherwise great stories, difficult (and sometimes, painful) to read.

I'm not saying that this is true for everyone, but it is simply a trend I've recognized. Is there a reason?

Last edited by Torigoma at 1:30 pm, May 19 2016

From what I think, the reason is simple: fan-made. While for comics it can go mostly unnoticed, since sentences are more simple and most of the story is told through drawings, the difference between actual translators and amateurs becomes evident for light novels. Japanese is a difficult language, and has very different constructions compared to English, so a faithful but readable translation is even more difficult to make than, let's say, translating from Spanish. Also the text to translate is much much more in light novels than in manga, which means: more possibilities of errors/rigid translations, and less time spent focusing on each sentence. And, as you said, sometimes straight up translations from Google and the likes: this won't happen with comics because..well...how do you copy and paste text from a comic?

By the way, I don't usually do this, but given the matter at hand: *grammar

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My current top 3:
Fullmetal Alchemist
Pandora Hearts
3-gatsu no Lion

Think we had a similar thread already. Basically the thing is that there's a lot more to scanlating manga than translation. However, any amateur can translate webnovels/LNs with a translation program. The results aren't really good, since it's mostly a single person working on these kind of projects without a proofreader and varying degrees of fluency in eng and jap.

Very true. I helped a guy translate part of a light novel. I learned from him, or at least from reading his translation, that the Japanese tell stories in the present tense, whereas English almost invariably tells stories in the past tense. (I can't read Japanese, so I only know about the Japanese practice by hearsay).

I also learned elsewhere that Japanese only hast two verb tenses, present and past (and maybe future. That tense never came up in our work together). This latter fact created many stylistic oddities in his initial translations, since when your storytelling is going on in the simple past tense, if you want to refer to something further in the story's past, you have to use the past perfect tense, with "had". E.g., "He was not hungry because he had already eaten."

...

The "fan translations are likely to be mediocre" thing is likely to be especially true of "My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong as I Expected". There is a lot of introspection in that first-person-told tale, and a lot of it is very subtle, AND we have an unreliable narrator. For that reason I'm waiting for the professional translation.

There's many reasons as to why most of LNs and WNs is riddled with grammar mistakes (and sometimes typos). I don't really feel like writing a lengthy post, so I'll just summarize some of the most important (IMO) points:

1. Translators are often fluent in either Japanese/Korean/Chinese/whatever or English. Rarely in both. Sometimes they're not even fluent in either. They're doing the translations for fun or to help them improve their language skills, so they're not starting from a high point.

2. Proper translations take a lot of time - one such translation most likely takes about the same amount of time as two or three quick translations. And I'm not even talking about machine translations, which are also the way some groups go.

3. Not everyone uses editors. And even if they do, not all editors are skilled enough. Besides, no matter how good an editor might be, if they don't know the language the text was translated from they'll have to run all their doubts through the translator, which means delaying the release...

4. Since translators and editors are not getting paid for their time, they might simply not care enough to spend 2-3 times more time on getting the release out.
Yes, I know some series or chapters are sponsored via donations, but that's not exactly steady income, plus there will always be readers who will value quantity over quality (more chapters translated rather than better translated ones) and I get the feeling they'd rather donate for the former.


P.S. You wrote "the grammer", "pretenses", "presence"... I'll take it as the poor translations badly influencing you, I guess...

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You can PM me if you need a temporary (freelance) cleaner/redrawer for some project. Especially if it's something with nice art.
Being the lazy person that I am, I'm not likely to accept anything long-term though.

From my experience translating LN's and Manga,

In regards to tenses:
Japanese does only have the two tense is it done, or will it be done (past or future) - and an adjectival form that makes it in the process of doing...(the present)

In regards to machine translation:
When I first started translating I did try machine translation, just to see what the fuss was all about.
I'm not standing up for it, But when you put a perfectly normal sentence into Google (or many others) the translated result is horrible:
For example:
月に照らされ、 　白く輝く綿雲 のむれが、　風 に吹かれてゆっ くりと視界を横 断していく。
machine translates to:
Moonlit, flock of gleaming white cottony clouds is, go across the field of vision slowly in the wind.
my translation is:
The moon became shiny, while the white fluffy clouds gathered and the wind blew them across my vision.
Keep in mind, I am a native english speaker, so I take some courtesy and make the translation sound like what I would hear in english.

In regards to grammar:
First off, English is such a hard language to learn, if you are not a native-born person...
From my experience a good amount of translators are not native speakers (born in that country), or they might not even live in the country that they are translating for.
That makes it hard to understand or think of what would be normal sounding.
Alot of times when I come across translations that are hard, in my classes, the teacher will ask us if that is what would normally be said in a conversation

So my advice is maybe ask the translator about their translation notes, or maybe if you can read the original take a look at it...

Bwahahahha, Ya that is why you don't try typing things up at 7AM.

Anyway, from how I understand what everyone is saying, it is less 1-2 major issues, and more lots of little problems that culminate into what we have?