Well, Steven watched Nanoha, and liked it a lot, which is good. In passing, though, he points out a line that I wasn't particularly wild with myself.

This can be a serious problem when you're working with a translator who's not 100% coherent at all times. Every so often you get a translation of a technical term that's not quiiite "mass naked child events" bad, but still pretty obviously weird. How do you treat those? My conversational Japanese isn't terrible, but I'm not literate and can't even look up technical stuff, much less understand it myself.

I could just assume that I know what it's saying and rewrite the line, but that's always dangerous - it's always possible that I'm not understanding, or that the line's just weird to begin with (this does happen). In an ideal world I can get a more-competent translator to examine the line and take a guess at what it is, but that's difficult with no script and complicated or technical Japanese (especially in cases where it's technobabble!)

So do you second-guess the professional of moderate competence? Sometimes you've gotta; sometimes you had better not. Wish there was a hard and fast rule, or failing that, that I could divert work from crummy translators to good ones...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:39 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 215 words, total size 1 kb.