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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Happy New Year!
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
We hope everyone's enjoying the holiday season! We had so much going on that I woke up after the weekend and realized, “Oh yeah, I have a column to write!” Not only that, but I then realized I had no idea what to write it on. It probably doesn't help that we've been taking time off for the holidays, so we haven't had much opportunity to have any manga/translation-related epiphanies. So I was thinking maybe I'd just sit down to write it and see what randomly popped into my head, because that can turn into some pretty interesting stuff sometimes.
The end of the year is upon us, and that's usually a pretty good time to look back at the previous year. I thought maybe I'd write about things we've learned, but when I thought about it more, I couldn't remember anything specific. But there were a few milestones for us this last year as far as manga is concerned. For example, we translated the last volume of Fruits Basket this year. Of course, it won't be hitting bookstores until next year, but it was a milestone for us. Fruits Basket wasn't only the first manga we translated professionally, it was also the longest series we translated from start to finish. This won't be the first time we've spent our translating life without Fruits Basket (because of changing schedules, there was an entire year when we were so far ahead of schedule that there was no Fruits Basket for us at all), but we are a little sad to see it go. We'll just have to read it again, I guess.
There is one thing we definitely learned this year, and that's that translating novels really is much harder than translating manga. We first got into translating by working on novels, but that was when we were young and inexperienced and didn't really know anything (it was mostly a way to learn Japanese, rather than an actual attempt at creating coherent translations), so the translations were probably terrible. I think we still have them in notebooks hidden away in boxes somewhere around here. But anyway, this year we translated novels professionally for the first time. You can see if we did a good job by checking out volume two of Kieli, which has a preview of the novel that's coming out this summer. After years of translating manga instead of novels, we knew it would be difficult going back, but we didn't realize how difficult. Though actually, Athena points out, we were actually going forward--bad novel translations to good manga translations to good novel translations (we hope). Anyway, it's good to do hard things, so we're definitely glad to be translating novels. But it's also very very time consuming, and we like translating manga too much to try to do too many novels (too many being more than one) at once.
Another milestone for us would be this column! Yay! I try to be informative, but I'm not sure how successful I am. A lot of the time, I think we end up refuting bad reviews we've read. For example, the other day we read a review of the Atelier Marie & Elie manga, which said that it doesn't make any sense to anyone who hasn't played the games. I would like to contest that we didn't get to play the games until after we had already turned in the translation to volume one, and while there are things that make a little more sense after playing the games, we were able to follow the story very well regardless. The main thing we needed the games for was to help with the details. Of course, there are a few jokes you don't get unless you've played the games, but I would hardly say not understanding those would render the series incomprehensible. This then leads into a rant about how reviewers don't seem to like anything that's not Bleach and/or CLAMP, but I think I'll leave that out.
I think I mentioned in a column several weeks ago that we turned in our two hundredth translation this year. We did the math, and we've turned in an average of approximately one manga translation a week for the past two years. That's kind of intense.
I also thought we could make manga resolutions to write about in the column. I can't really think of any, though. We never were good at coming up with New Year's resolutions. I was thinking about it, and I was like, “We could resolve to make better translations!” but that can be taken in the wrong way. Like we weren't even bothering before. But then again, no matter how good something is, there's almost always room for improvement. Still, we're always trying to make our translations the best they can be, so I think a resolution like this would be a bit redundant.
I want to finish this column by writing something very profound. Unfortunately, it's very hard to come up with profound things on demand. Maybe if we had actually gotten around to watching our shiny new Batman Begins Blu-ray with its shiny Japanese audio track, we would have been able to come up with something profound and translation related! But alas, we have not done that yet.
Anyway, we hope everyone's had a great manga year, and we wish everyone lots of happy manga to come!
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1 July 2009
Words of Truth and Wisdom: Notes 23 June 2009
What I'm Keepin' Track Of: June 23rd, 2009What Ysabet's Reading: June 23, 2009 17 June 2009
Words of Truth and Wisdom: Spelling 10 June 2009
What I’m Keepin’ Track Of: Yen Press, June 10th, 2009
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