Huh. Now here's a question that's caught my attention.

I think the first thing to point out, in a discussion like this, is that there is a difference between a "good translation" and a text that reads well in the target language it's been translated into.

When many casual readers of manga, and especially scanslations, complain that something is "badly translated", what they probably mean is "this shit reads like a third-grader wrote it!". What's being judged in these sorts of cases is not the accuracy of the translation in question, but the smoothness of the English translation.

I'm an amateur translator (as well as scanslator) myself, so I admit I have a vested interest in this topic. XD

My Japanese isn't fluent enough that I could pick up a text and read it as if it were my native tongue, so in most cases I'm not at liberty to easily gauge the accuracy of anyone else's translation.

And when you start talking about translation accuracy or quality... well, that's something I could probably go on for six more pages about, haha.

I suppose one of the points I wanted to make is... you can have a text that is translated completely "accurately"--as true to the original (Japanese) as it possibly can be, and it can--will, most likely--read horribly in English.

That leads us to the question of "how far can a translator tweak things before it's going too far?" and that is something that each translator must discover on their own. It varies from person to person, and everyone's perception of what's "right" is different.

But, I digress! In general, I do have something to say about this topic.

It really gets me when a scanslation group spends all this time making their scans look neat and nice, centering text, hell, even adding sound-effects in elaborate and good-looking English--when they do all this, and they neglect to pay half as much attention to their English script!

Isn't the English translation the most important thing?!

I'd much rather read a shoddy-looking scanslation with a smooth translation, one that aptly conveys the author's intent in English, one that uses words that has the power to move readers than... than a script that essentially does a disservice to the original.

And now I'll go and read what else you guys have written--and probably discover that I'm only repeating the norm, haha.

For me, if I can read it and understand what's going on in the story, I'm fine. I just get annoyed when something reads awkwardly. Hence, I voted "minor errors"

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<!--from_quote--><div class="quotehead"><b>Quote from Iruka-sensei</b></div><div class="quote">My magical ninja powers of magic!</div><!--from_quote end-->

Even though I claim to be an editor foremost, I can live with fairly shitty editing as long as the translation is decent. So I agree with you in principle. But you realise, I hope, that in most groups those things are handled by different people. (Sometimes very different, with little interaction between them.)

Also, I think you're reading something into the whole "translation quality" phrase that really isn't there. Whether a translation is good or not is a highly subjective thing. It's absolutely not all about accuracy, anyway. And it's not all about adapting it for American kids either, like some people seem to think. A good translation is always a compromise. And you can make that compromise in many different ways, and still have it be good. Or bad, for that matter.

For my self it bothers me when you get the translations that don't correct the word order of things so you end up with stuff like "the house over the dog jumped" instead of it being what is meant by the pic such as "the dog jumped over the house". And I don't blame just the translators as to me when you say its a translated work all who worked on the text in anyway such as even the type setters are at fault for it.

Poll's over

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