Mmm. I kept wracking my brains for good material for one final end of year post on Neechin, and all my good material is bound up in comike 75, so that still will have to wait until next year. So, instead, I’ll put my head on the chopping block, and take a look at some highlights of the VN translation world in 2008.
(more...)Previously on Neechin, I’ve covered a few topics on project management, but mostly from the perspective of managing them from the cold management perspective. But you can’t forget that we’re dealing with people, and most importantly, it’s the people that will make or break a project, no amount of paying attention to processes, schedules, and other management tools will make up for when people fail.
It’s a question with many sides to it: who is capable of being a translator, how do you know if you are capable, if you wanted to get into it, how do you start. Well? Are there any answers?
”文学少女” Project Memoire… will we see an animation? Bah who cares, the flash is pretty!
Rating systems are tricky to design, but in designing them you learn all sorts of things about what you’re rating… So, let’s take a deeper look, at how we can talk about how “good” a translation is, waving our hands, being vague, and generally not getting anywhere.
Literal translations are bad. Liberal translations are bad. Fidelity is good. Fluidity is good. Anything is better than nothing. Nothing is better than crap. Just about everyone has their own conception of what’s “acceptable and proper” for a translated work. But let’s just step back for a moment, and figure out where the major positions are coming from, and then try to figure out where we want to stand, when.
So, once a year, I slip out of translation mode and wander the streets of New York in search of chocolate. $28 at the door and (practically) all the samples of top tier and boutique chocolate that you can stand to eat from about 50ish vendors.
Previously I’ve written about translation quality in the visual novel translation community, and the fact that peer review is an important part of the process of building something like a web of trust dealing with quality and reputation. However, we all sort of talk about ‘quality’ in vague terms on personal scales.
So, taking some ideas out of talks with zalas at encubed in #denpa, I’ve sketched out a possible way of at least talking about this topic on a common scale, a Z-scale so-to-speak, that sets some minimal criteria for talking about translation quality.
Lyrics and translation to Soshite Ashita no Sekai Yori’s ED theme, “return to that place”
Well, I usually avoid posting random news clippings onto Neechin, but some things deserve it.
NekoNekoSoft’s home page has revived today! Whee!
For today, wander along with me on a thought experiment and ask, what kind of world would it be if translators weren’t invisible. A world where we give them more attention than they seem to get now. What kind of world would it be?