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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Workreation
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
Things have been super super crazy these last two weeks, and we had almost no time to think of what to write for a column, because we've been making sure we have all our work in before Anime Expo. But! in a moment of inspiration, Athena made up a new word, that not only seems fitting with AX around the corner, but gives me something to ramble about. The word? Workreation.
There are actually two things that I could go off on about this, so I'll start with the more negative one, so as to end on a positive note. So what could be negative about workreation? I guess more important would be to explain what workreation is. It's a combination of the words “work” and “recreation.” It's what we've decided to call things that we count as both work and recreation. Actually, if you wanted to get really technical, we do our job as a hobby in our free time, so technically everything we do for work is workreation, but we decided to only count things that don't fall under our normal job description, like going to Anime Expo.
But I said I was going to talk about the negative part first, so I'd better get that out of the way. And what is the negative part? It makes me think of why we don't like scanlations. Don't worry; I'm not going to get into a discussion about the ethics or legality or anything like that. We've seen the positive effects of them as well as the negative, so we maintain a neutral stance except for two things, both of which are completely... I'm not sure what word I'm looking for. Let's see if you can figure it out. Our first reason for not liking scanslations is jealousy. Our personal preference is to read our manga in book form, and since we would read it in Japanese, it used to be that we always got to it first. But with scanslations, now everybody's read the end of Fruits Basket but us. It's selfish, we know, which is why we usually don't complain about it. But we do of course want to encourage people to buy the books when they come out, and support not only the companies that sell them, but the authors who created them, as well.
Our other reason is even more ridiculous. You may have noticed that two out of the three times I mentioned them, I spelled the word with an extra S in the middle. That's because, in our minds, “scanslation” is a much better combination of “scan” and “translation” than “scanlation” is. See, “scan” and “tran” share the “an,” so just overlap them and stick the “slation” at the end. There's no reason to remove that S. It would be like making our new word “workeation,” and that just sounds silly. And keeping the S not only makes the word much easier to pronounce (have you ever noticed how hard it is to go right from N to L?), but sound a lot prettier.
And that's our brief campaign to get people to put that other S back in “scanslation.” Moving on.
Now for the happier part of “workreation”--explaining what it is and how you get to do it. As manga translators, we sometimes get assigned titles that require extra research and the like. Well, technically, the research isn't required, but we find it helps us to better understand the world of the manga, thereby allowing us to help all the readers to better understand it, or in the case of a sequel, at least not read the translation and go, “Do these people have any idea what this series is about?” We have been assigned some sequels in our time, and we do always make sure to be familiar with the original. So, for example, before we translated Shaolin Sisters: Reborn, we read the original Shaolin Sisters. It's reading manga, which is recreation, but for work. Thus, workreation.
Some of our favorite workreation comes when we're assigned a title that was based on a video game. Not only do we like video games a lot, but it really helps us figure out what's going on. For example, when we started translating Atelier Marie and Elie, we didn't have any opportunity to play the game. I think we did pretty well anyway, but we really understood the series a heck of a lot better after playing the game. And hopefully that's enough to help the readers understand without having played the game themselves (it's not available in English).
It's difficult to say if workreation is a good thing or a bad thing, because it is a combination of two things that are usually considered opposites. It's true that recreation can be less fun when you have to do it. But on the other hand, how cool is it to have a job that requires you to do stuff you love? I quote this a million times so I don't know if I've said it here or not yet, but I'm going to say it anyway. When we first started working as translators, someone told us that there was a famous quote that says, “Find something you love doing, find a way to get paid doing it, and you'll never work a day in your life.” I think I found something somewhere that attributes that quote to Confucius, but I really don't know if that's where it originally came from. But we've found it to be true, so we definitely encourage everybody out there to follow their dreams and find stuff they love doing, and then everyone can have workreation all the time! Yay! (...too cheesy? Eheh. Sorry.)
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