Just finished timing Nanoha A's volume 2. Damn, it's a good show. And I can get rolling right into the finale, which is pretty nice, as there's a hell of a cliffhanger. Should have the whole thing wrapped up by the end of the year.

One thing I've tried to keep in mind is patterns of speech. Not just between characters, but between those characters' moods. Nanoha talking about becoming a demon is not the same Nanoha as the Nanoha who's talking about cell phones with Fate. (But the characters are still important. Signum with her hair down is much more straight-laced and formal than Nanoha in the middle of dramatic soliloquy.)

Mind you, playing a little fast and loose with the translation in places can be a great help. Most of the time, your translations are either too stiff everywhere, or too loose everywhere. Too stiff is a lot easier to deal with than too loose, at least for me; if I have a literally-correct translation, and it's not some kind of weird metaphor, I can do something with the English. Not much I can do if I can't figure out the original intent of the line, though...

There are two places where it's important that the English work, even at the cost of a bit of the Japanese flavor. The easy bits are the casual conversation ones, since most of the time you're just changing tenses, eliminating some of the passive voice (man, that's a full-time job when you're going through the script), minor stuff like that. The hard part comes on the big, important lines that people are going to be quoting around. These take a lot of thought, because you need to be careful to stick with the original intent pretty closely... but if it's clumsy, your bad-ass hero sounds like a dork.

That's one of the fun parts about the job. Of course, in a sense, I'm thinking way too hard about something that doesn't matter too much, and would only be appreciated by a tiny fraction of the people who're reading it. At the same time, it's a pretty nice world, where I can sit back and spend time thinking about that kind of thing - where there's no momentous decision to be made and you can put the effort into carving each little wave in the sea, so to speak.

(On the gripping hand, there are still deadlines... heh.)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:20 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 411 words, total size 2 kb.