#amorphine

I just watched the first two seasons on YouTube! (link goes to playlist)

Ahhh thank you so much! I’m glad people think it’s funny, I did it for the crack 😆 And yes let’s totally be friends and also my fave colour is forest green, what’s yours?

2/2 I hope to soon be at a level where I can read it without having to figure out every sentence and where I get all the nuance in the dialogue. I'm thinking I might try my hand at scanlating too if I ever get there. I'd love to scanlate freezing point. anyway this was super random but I thought you might get my pain :D

I originally wanted to learn Japanese as a kid to read my Japanese Pokemon cards, but my mom thought that was a stupid idea, so I didn’t get back around to it until the start of college, and even then, it was so I could read manga before it received an official English translation. I was impatient, lol. I used to be embarrassed to admit that’s why I wanted to learn Japanese, but whatever. 

I started out translating manga because I was getting impatient for Acid Town updates and people used to post raws sometimes on the MangaFox forums. It was just practice at first and I only ended up taking over after the previous scanlator got hit with a DMCA. I think translating manga when you’re not yet fluent can be very stressful but fun. 

The part I enjoy most about translating is that “solving a puzzle” feeling of trying to figure out how all the parts of the sentence work together, and then the best equivalent for that in English. An exciting part of learning Japanese is when you eventually get to the part where some things just make “sense” even if you can’t explain it. Like if a sentence sounds wrong, you know it’s wrong, but might struggle to explain why. Or you understand the feeling or intention behind a sentence but can’t explain it in English. I’ve translated enough manga now that when I see a sound effect I understand the sort of sound that’s meant to evoke in Japanese, but it’s always an enormous struggle to convey in English. 

I think the more challenging part of doing scanlations when you’re not yet fluent is you feel a lot of pressure to do everything right. You feel the weight of knowing that whatever you put out there is what people are going to believe and how they’re going to understand the story, so you really don’t want to mess up. Mistakes can happen even for professionals, of course, so it’s not a huge deal. But I still stress over it a lot and will try to reach out for help from native Japanese speakers if there’s something I’m truly, terribly stuck on.

I managed to pass the JLPT N3 with decent scores, but I don’t want it to seem like I’m in any way fluent. When I do translations it’s with a complicated set-up of the raws, the document I’m writing the English script in, a browser opened to Jisho.org, a browser opened to Google Translate (for when I’m REALLY stuck), and the Google Translate app open on my phone (for looking up kanji without furigana). I think some people call this “machine translation” because I’m leaning on the dictionary for unfamiliar words or phrases, but I’m still mostly using my knowledge of Japanese to translate, and you wouldn’t necessarily get the same results if you were to just run the Japanese through Google Translate. I’m at the point where I can turn around a chapter a lot faster than I used to because I can just read and understand without having to constantly pause to look up everything. In a way it feels like I magically got to this point, but I also know that behind that is countless hours of studying kanji. :\