December 28, 2007
Power failures and timing
When I first started this stuff, I hated power failures. I was timing with VCRs and a genlock, and so on my initial timing passes, I had to go through the entire show in a single pass - no pausing, no stopping. If I screwed up the initial sync (which was performed by me hitting a button), I either had to live with it through the whole proofing of that copy, or redo the whole thing from scratch. Pretty bad for a half hour episode of anime. But for a two-hour movie, a little glitch in the power feed could eat half a productive day. (Yeah, well, back then I was also a secretary-type, and spent plenty of mornings doing things like labeling tapes and filling out actor invoices.)
Even a UPS wasn't much help. Sure, it can keep your PC on long enough to save your work, but it can't keep on my PC, my television, and two running VCRs (plus the genlock!) for half an hour... at least, none of the ones we had could do that, and I wasn't paid so much that it was ever a huge deal to get one, I guess.
Things are a lot nicer these days. We got a bit of rain a couple of hours ago, while I was going through Nanoha A's 10, and the power hiccuped. No UPS here at home, of course. Total lost work time, two lines. Not only do I save pretty often, but Aegisub is downright paranoid in its auto-saving feature. Can't complain, I surely cannot...
Episode suffers bad from the previous problems in translation. Lots of lines where the translation isn't wrong, technically, exactly, but the way that they've put the line makes it so that it communicates the wrong thing to the viewer (or fails to emphasize the thing that the line was trying to emphasize... kind of the difference between "I'll stop you!" and "I'll put an end to you!", or between "Until then, we must do something." and "So until then, it's up to us to do something?")
It almost feels like there's a layer of editing that hasn't happened here, which is bad (because it's being left to me), but also good (because I'm up to it, so far, and it gives me a better idea of how on-the-ball the translator is, i.e. not very.) There's also some pretty basic mistakes, words wrong, a few lines that just aren't there (simple stuff, but still), and all the other hallmarks of a script where I need to disregard the translator's sensibilities and just make it work. I shouldn't really blame the translator, we're talking a low-budget production with a short time frame, and it's entirely possible that it got the shaft in favor of something more lucrative. But what the hell, I'm managing, right? (Managing to delay finishing it until all the more lucrative shows are done, true...)
It's also a little frustrating, though, because I know competent translators who don't have enough work; rather than pay this person good (well... not good) money to do marginal translations, there are other translators who could give me much better value for dollar. But it's a very, very small industry, and honestly, people don't like changing who they deal with. I wouldn't have the contracts that I have now if other people hadn't taken other jobs, flaked out and disappeared, or come in months after deadline. I can say "employ this person, she is good at this stuff", but it doesn't get them hired...
The show makes up for all of it, though. The very end of A's was a bit anticlimactic, but getting there is several episodes of full-power fighting, Nanoha burning ammo like there's no tomorrow (accurate under the circumstances, heh), Fate moe, and things going boom. There's worse ways to make a buck.
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Even a UPS wasn't much help. Sure, it can keep your PC on long enough to save your work, but it can't keep on my PC, my television, and two running VCRs (plus the genlock!) for half an hour... at least, none of the ones we had could do that, and I wasn't paid so much that it was ever a huge deal to get one, I guess.
Things are a lot nicer these days. We got a bit of rain a couple of hours ago, while I was going through Nanoha A's 10, and the power hiccuped. No UPS here at home, of course. Total lost work time, two lines. Not only do I save pretty often, but Aegisub is downright paranoid in its auto-saving feature. Can't complain, I surely cannot...
Episode suffers bad from the previous problems in translation. Lots of lines where the translation isn't wrong, technically, exactly, but the way that they've put the line makes it so that it communicates the wrong thing to the viewer (or fails to emphasize the thing that the line was trying to emphasize... kind of the difference between "I'll stop you!" and "I'll put an end to you!", or between "Until then, we must do something." and "So until then, it's up to us to do something?")
It almost feels like there's a layer of editing that hasn't happened here, which is bad (because it's being left to me), but also good (because I'm up to it, so far, and it gives me a better idea of how on-the-ball the translator is, i.e. not very.) There's also some pretty basic mistakes, words wrong, a few lines that just aren't there (simple stuff, but still), and all the other hallmarks of a script where I need to disregard the translator's sensibilities and just make it work. I shouldn't really blame the translator, we're talking a low-budget production with a short time frame, and it's entirely possible that it got the shaft in favor of something more lucrative. But what the hell, I'm managing, right? (Managing to delay finishing it until all the more lucrative shows are done, true...)
It's also a little frustrating, though, because I know competent translators who don't have enough work; rather than pay this person good (well... not good) money to do marginal translations, there are other translators who could give me much better value for dollar. But it's a very, very small industry, and honestly, people don't like changing who they deal with. I wouldn't have the contracts that I have now if other people hadn't taken other jobs, flaked out and disappeared, or come in months after deadline. I can say "employ this person, she is good at this stuff", but it doesn't get them hired...
The show makes up for all of it, though. The very end of A's was a bit anticlimactic, but getting there is several episodes of full-power fighting, Nanoha burning ammo like there's no tomorrow (accurate under the circumstances, heh), Fate moe, and things going boom. There's worse ways to make a buck.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at
02:54 AM
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If you start making a rep for yourself as producing reasonable output and making deadline eventually they'll start listening to you, I bet.
But not yet.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 28, 2007 09:16 AM (+rSRq)
2
I do have such a rep, fortunately. ;p
The biggest problem is that it's very hard for someone to judge the quality of a translation if they're not a translator themselves. I'm only at this point because of many years of working on the nuts and bolts of scripts, with some very good, some very bad, and a lot of help distinguishing between the two. At first, I didn't have a clue; I could tell a script was bad if it were missing whole lines or if the English made so little sense that I couldn't even re-word it, but that was all. Now I'm to the point where I'm comfortable listening to individual lines and saying "no, you got that wrong..." and translating skipped lines myself if they're not too complicated. And even then, I still miss plenty of stuff; I'm NOT a translator.
But this is what I do for a living; the people who hire translators are usually people who hire other people to worry about this stuff, meaning their ability to judge isn't that great. The same person will hire both good and bad translators, and honestly won't be able to see all that much of a difference in the results. (More cynically, it may be that from the perspective of the customer, there isn't that much of a difference; a glib but inaccurate translation may be just as functional as an accurate but stiff one, as far as viewer enjoyment is concerned. I'm not certain it's true, but I can't say that it's false...)
From the point of view of a contracting company, there are other factors that are just as important as translation quality, and one of those is reliability. If you can be counted on to deliver like clockwork, no matter what, no matter when, that's a huge reason to keep you. I can definitely understand why somebody would be hesitant to throw work to a new translator, even with the highest references, if it means not using your usual, reliable source.
This probably goes double for translations. With subtitles, so long as I'm done by the time it goes to DVD, it's fine; nobody else is depending on the output of my work. With translators, though, you really can't even get started with the dubbing process until the translations come in. That's a lot of people depending on timely completion.
(There's also a certain amount of work that you need to feed to people so that they don't have to go get another job; if you want to keep someone available on short notice at any time, you have to make sure they're getting enough work. Splitting it between two people might get you better work, but if both of them have a day job and are busy right when you need them...)
The biggest problem is that it's very hard for someone to judge the quality of a translation if they're not a translator themselves. I'm only at this point because of many years of working on the nuts and bolts of scripts, with some very good, some very bad, and a lot of help distinguishing between the two. At first, I didn't have a clue; I could tell a script was bad if it were missing whole lines or if the English made so little sense that I couldn't even re-word it, but that was all. Now I'm to the point where I'm comfortable listening to individual lines and saying "no, you got that wrong..." and translating skipped lines myself if they're not too complicated. And even then, I still miss plenty of stuff; I'm NOT a translator.
But this is what I do for a living; the people who hire translators are usually people who hire other people to worry about this stuff, meaning their ability to judge isn't that great. The same person will hire both good and bad translators, and honestly won't be able to see all that much of a difference in the results. (More cynically, it may be that from the perspective of the customer, there isn't that much of a difference; a glib but inaccurate translation may be just as functional as an accurate but stiff one, as far as viewer enjoyment is concerned. I'm not certain it's true, but I can't say that it's false...)
From the point of view of a contracting company, there are other factors that are just as important as translation quality, and one of those is reliability. If you can be counted on to deliver like clockwork, no matter what, no matter when, that's a huge reason to keep you. I can definitely understand why somebody would be hesitant to throw work to a new translator, even with the highest references, if it means not using your usual, reliable source.
This probably goes double for translations. With subtitles, so long as I'm done by the time it goes to DVD, it's fine; nobody else is depending on the output of my work. With translators, though, you really can't even get started with the dubbing process until the translations come in. That's a lot of people depending on timely completion.
(There's also a certain amount of work that you need to feed to people so that they don't have to go get another job; if you want to keep someone available on short notice at any time, you have to make sure they're getting enough work. Splitting it between two people might get you better work, but if both of them have a day job and are busy right when you need them...)
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at December 28, 2007 05:48 PM (LMDdY)
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