I am learning Japanese (slowly but surely) and I was wondering about translations. Right now, I am not proficient enough to translate, but I was wondering how you guys preferred the translations, as in exactly word for word which can cause it to be a rough reading or for it to be smoothed over so that it can be a smooth read? I know errors in translation can happen a lot when it is being smoothed out, but sometimes I prefer a smooth reading and vise versa.

What do you think?

I think a smooth reading is what it should be. Ppl should be able to grasp the flow of the story. They are not here to learn Japanese or any other language but to read the story. The translation should be such that it depicts the feelings of the author as accurately as possible.

I think there has been a poll on this topic. Check out the News forum. You will more views on this.

@beingJyotirmoy

• a dreamer

In fan translations, accuracy is more important than anything.

First make sure your translations are reasonably accurate, then worry about the trade off between accuracy and flow. That is, it's one thing if you consciously sacrifice accuracy in order to make the translation flow the way you want it. It's another thing if you're incapable of producing an accurate translation (e.g. due to lack of Japanese knowledge) in the first place.

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When you do start translating a great site for Kanji that my husband uses is: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/mr.html
He's in love with the site currently and is able to translate a lot faster because of it.

He also likes:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C

and for SFX help:
http://thejadednetwork.com/sfx/

Enjoy!

Owner of Antisense Scanslation.

If you translate word for word it probably won't make much sense in English. Don't be afraid to reformat the sentence structure and to add in the subject as necessary. A literal translation will give things like "store to went" instead of "I went to the/a store". If you honestly can't tell who went to the store (because the Japanese left out the subject) then keep reading until you have a good guess - because your guess based off the context of the Japanese is going to be a lot better than the guess of a reader who has only your awkward translation to go by. Better for a reader to follow your take on the Japanese than for them to be left with nothing to follow because you refused to take a leap.

When translating specific words remember there are multiple word choices you're free to choose from. English is packed full of synonyms. Don't pick the first word choice in your dictionary (etc) just because it's first, pick the one that fits in with the rest of the English sentence (and with the level of formality that character speaks with). Just because you're given the word "pupil" doesn't mean you can't use the word "student" instead.

As a reader, my preference is to have a faulty but well-written translation over a literal one that can't be read and makes no sense. Many groups employ proofreaders who know no Japanese whatsoever, whose only job is to take the "mangled Engrish" rough translations and try to make sense of them. If your first language is English, then you can save them from touching your translation by having it flow and make sense all by yourself. Then the only inaccuracies added by the "smoothing process" will be ones you made by accident because you simply translated it wrong. That happens, so don't feel too bad about it.

On the other hand, I don't like it when people intentionally and radically change the translation in order to replace Japanese humor/puns with English ones. If you're going to do that, then put a note in the margin so people know what they missed. I prefer to have an awkward English translation that is explained in a note, over a random "joke" the translator stuck in there to replace the original one just because they didn't feel like explaining it. Dubbers and official translations do that sort of thing and I dislike it immensely. Fan-translators don't have to do that because they're free to explain things right there at the bottom of the page.