Difference between translating scenes.

[Cryum]

What's the difference between translating for manga, anime, LNs, and video games?

I know that there are differences in skills needed, like re-drawing for manga and timing for anime, but how does this play into the overall pace of translation and attitude to fans/critics?

I don't want to rely on semi-sarcastic comments and jokes, so assume I know nothing.

[Cindynka]

Well, I wouldn't say you need to redraw manga whole translating etc. Usually, there is more people working on one project, everyone has their 'job' - translating, editing, scanning etc. The same goes with translating anime.

I think that transling LN may be the hardest because there's a lot of text. But on the other hand, for manga, you need to translate it to fit the space you have and still being understandable. And anime... Doing just subs should be okay I guess. Usually, translators use proper grammar even in direct speech, just some characters have bad grammar (criminals and such). But when you want to translate anime (or movie or anything else) for dub, there comes the hardest part. You have to fit in the time the characters have and that may be difficult.

I hope I helped you and also that it made sense ^^'

[rock96]

Let's see. I can speak only for translating itself.

Manga:
It's the easiest.
1) Script is pretty small.
2) In most cases you work with a team, so all translator needs to do is to send a script.
3) The hardest part is to form a team.
4) The second hardest thing is to work with scans. Cleaning a scan takes the most time and requires you to know how to work with photoshop well enough.
5) Typesetting ranges from easy to very hard. Medaka Box, for example, is a very hard thing to typeset, to say the least. But good fonts are a must.
6) Correcting mistakes is the easiest thing. If a translator is competent.

Anime:
It ranges from pretty easy to very hard, y'know.
1) Script is easily three times more than manga's one. I'm talking about monthly manga series.
2) You need to nail characterisation well enough.
3) Editors in some cases don't do a shit.
4) You need to stay awake for prolonged periods of time.
5) Just try and catch all the signs here and there. Typesetting is a harsh thing here.
6) Subs are critiqued heavily so you need to produce them without dropping their quality.
7) You need to encode the raws themselves. About two times, I think?
8.) QC is a must.
9) You've got about twelve hours after release of raws to complete everything. At night. Sometimes, teams take longer, but it depends.

LN:
The same as anime just add one rank to difficulty.
1) Script is more than one of a two-cour anime. Actually, c'mon. A normal anime translator doesn't translate nearly as much as an LN translator who did only about two-three chapters in a novel.
2) In most cases, you're doing the work singlehandedly. Even editing.
3) It's a pain to catch puns and word plays, turning them into coherent English.
4) Translating eats away time heavily. You spend sometimes more time in google and wikipedia instead of translating a novel itself.
5) You need to be crazy enough to translate light novel.

Video Game:
The hardest.
1) You need to crack the code and even write some tools, sometimes. Also, it's a programmer's job to find files that incorporate script in the game.
2) Amount of script is big. Sometimes, it's about the same as an LN. Sometimes, it's like a "World and Piece."
3) It takes months to translate.
4) Also, QC.
5) You need beta-testers, perceptive enough to catch all glitches and bugs.
6) Also, you need to work with graphics heavily. So, a cool photoshopper is a must.
7) Screw that, don't translate video games.

[Cryum]

Thanks for the explanation, but what I wanted to know was more about how they get started and finished in comparison to each other. How do groups just form up? Is difficulty the only difference between manga TLs, anime subs, LN TLs, and video game TLs that stops people from just doing it? What about pacing and talking within the group?

As a translator, how often do you talk to the other guys in the group? You already kinda answered the pace question, but do you know how frantic or dedicated the other guys have to be?

I know that there's sort of a difference between the audience as well: there's more exchange with the readers when its LNs or video games. But exactly how different is it, and how different are LN and video game translations, not just in difficulty.
Disclaimer: if I'm wrong about the exchange thing, feel free to correct me.

I'm just asking to get a better understanding and appreciation for all the sages who translate moonspeak into english, and what its like for them.

[KuroiHikari]

There are proper LN translation groups out there but here BT isn't a group. You just translate and uploaded it onto the BT Wiki.

[Teh_ping]

If we want to be technical, I would say that translating video games is easier than LN, it's the cracking of the code and the other technical stuff that's ridiculously hard (and really requires a team).

My experience translating manga now (Hikaru - Aoi) is that the text is easy to do, but given that there is so little space for the speech bubbles, I don't really get the opportunity to express as much freedom as I would like in translating (and I really had to hold back on the vocabulary used since my editors made the text more sophiscated than the actual text ). Generally, I do feel it's the easiest medium.

For anime, I feel, is that the translation has to come to you immediately. My 'experience' is that you can't 'pause' the line at that moment and think, because lines come and go so quickly in audio form, and the next line comes up in a second or less most of the time. Given my bad sense of hearing, I would probably have to replay the same line 4 times or so before I can get the actual line.

For LN, my view: http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread. ... ost4526897 (Also, as people will tell you, translators into languages here are mostly lone rangers, unlike the Chinese fansubbers who outnumber our ranks 100 to 1 or something. If you can read Chinese, go look for the Chinese FTLs; they have like 50 times the content we have on BT)

Can't really say much about game translation. I only did a part of CLANNAD before on this wiki, and the lines are pretty okay. Again, note above.

If you have any specific questions, you can ask here and I'll try to answer as much as I can before I go crazy, translating blind 2 hr and 50 minutes later

[rock96]

Thanks for the explanation, but what I wanted to know was more about how they get started and finished in comparison to each other. How do groups just form up? Is difficulty the only difference between manga TLs, anime subs, LN TLs, and video game TLs that stops people from just doing it? What about pacing and talking within the group?

As a translator, how often do you talk to the other guys in the group? You already kinda answered the pace question, but do you know how frantic or dedicated the other guys have to be?

I know that there's sort of a difference between the audience as well: there's more exchange with the readers when its LNs or video games. But exactly how different is it, and how different are LN and video game translations, not just in difficulty.
Disclaimer: if I'm wrong about the exchange thing, feel free to correct me.

I'm just asking to get a better understanding and appreciation for all the sages who translate moonspeak into english, and what its like for them.

Let me see... As much as I've seen, there are two types of forming groups. The first is when one enthusiastic guy wants to translate and then some other guys find his project interesting enough. The second is when an existing one goes down, and the guys form an another team after a while.
Difficulty doesn't really stop people except for those who understand the difference in difficulty What stops people is time consumption, in most cases. The second biggest reason is lazyness and the lack of motivation.

Next, teams actively use chats, IRC channels, etc. From my experience, some speed-translation team used to grow pretty frantic once raws and English translation came out. And well, I've seen a lot of complaints about some lazy guys who stalled the work. So, I'd say, team members talk a lot. The most dedication in manga/anime translation is required from speed-translation teams because of obvious reasons.

Ping explained this bit. Really, the difference is in technical matters.

Yeah, they need it. Not me, though, I'm not one of them.

[Cryum]

So it's a matter of initiative then? For a given project to start, you need one or a couple of enthusiastic people who are good at letting this enthusiasim carry in how they talk online. Pace is determined by the speed of the weakest link, so you either keep everyone from being lazy, or have multiple people doing the same job(although having that many people working on the same title seems unlikely).

@Teh_ping: since you seem to have a lot of experience in all the fields, how different were comments from readers like? Does anyone help with editing and comments anywhere near the amount I see on BT?

[larethian]

What's the difference between translating for manga, anime, LNs, and video games?

I know that there are differences in skills needed, like re-drawing for manga and timing for anime, but how does this play into the overall pace of translation and attitude to fans/critics?

I don't want to rely on semi-sarcastic comments and jokes, so assume I know nothing.

Manga and anime has mostly dialogue (except for a few rare cases for manga) which are much easier to render into English but with space constraints.
LNs have narration and more exposition which are harder and more time-consuming to work on.
LNs have a lot of text which makes it even more time-consuming.
Like Teh_Ping said, for LNs, you work alone, so you don't need to answer to tight schedules (except your own) whereas for manga and anime, you usually have some kind of deadlines (unless your group doesn't have such a requirement which is rare).
For visual novels, a good 50+ hour VN has as much text as an 8+ (or so) volume LN series.

Just popping by, signing off.

EDIT:

So it's a matter of initiative then? For a given project to start, you need one or a couple of enthusiastic people who are good at letting this enthusiasim carry in how they talk online. Pace is determined by the speed of the weakest link, so you either keep everyone from being lazy, or have multiple people doing the same job(although having that many people working on the same title seems unlikely).

@Teh_ping: since you seem to have a lot of experience in all the fields, how different were comments from readers like? Does anyone help with editing and comments anywhere near the amount I see on BT?

For manga, clean/re-draw and translate can take place in parallel and the former usually take much more time than the later, if it's done by only 1 person and when there's a lot of complicate redrawing. Large groups and groups that do weekly series from popular magazines usually have more than one cleaner/redrawer on a series to release it fast enough so as not to have the manga stolen from them.
Otherwise, it's
Scan -> Clean/Redraw // Translate -> Proof -> (Proof approval by TL) -> Typeset -> QC -> Release

People don't get lazy (except me) because most staff work in multiple groups on multiple titles. Plus pretty much most of the things mentioned by rock.
The reason why I ever got into manga is to build contacts on that side, and get access to resources and know people who I would never have known. If you get into a decent group, you can get pretty connected because as I mentioned, staff work in multiple groups.

As for BT editing, majority of the editing only helps in minor things like grammar and spelling. There are few truly competent 'editors' on BT and sometimes, I've observed good editing getting shot down by the translators who prefer to stick to near 100% closeness in meaning but awkward sentences, rather than allowing some liberties for better flow, which could be one of the reasons why few dare to touch edit text. However I'm still thankful for their work even if it's simple grammar and spelling. Another thing is, the amount of accurate editing is kind of limited by the quality of translations. As you may be aware of, there are translators who are learning Japanese along the way, and if the translations are inaccurate, editing can't help, in fact, there are times when people don't dare to modify the sentences as they are unsure of what the spirit of the original text was.
I close an eye to this (as long as it's not the stuff I work on) because, there are simply too many light novels that won't get translated otherwise, and if these learning translators are willing to persist, and ask questions, they will get better in time. Though the stuff they first worked on will kind of become sacrificial content .

[seitsuki]

From my experience (purely on the TLside of things):

Manga- easy mode. Many are considerate enough to have furigana everywhere, and even for the ones that don't basic kanji knowledge will get you through most and the rest is nothing a dicitonary can't handle. Very little text as well.
Games (VN)- I didn't do any of the extracting or repacking or image editing or the fancy technical stuff so can't say much about it. The text itself is fairly simple and in short sentences with much of it of dialogue. You could probably breeze through it as fast as a manga, except there's a -lot- of words. Seriously. There isn't that much thinking involved, it's just readtypereadtypereadtype whew 100k script done let's see that was the first of 20 of one route out of five oh wow are you goddamn kidding me.
LN- these are highly hit and miss dependant on the writing style of the author, sometimes the text is nice and straightforward while at other times it makes you want to scream and throw things. I pity the fools who have to do this. Ha.

[denormative]

If we want to be technical, I would say that translating video games is easier than LN, it's the cracking of the code and the other technical stuff that's ridiculously hard (and really requires a team).

Actually, it's technically much easier to crack/reverse-engineer nowadays compared to 20 years or so ago when I first started it. Almost everything is in common file formats (JPEG or PNG, rather then headerless-bitmaps or custom RLE-backards-encoded-bitplanar-bitmap images; text encoding formats are well defined; there's multiple embeddable scripting languages available for free so they don't have to write their own; etc.), and usually packed with some standard compression/packing scheme with the header filed off so people can't just open them in 7zip or something.

The issue will be that it's mainly an obscure skill with little job-market potential so most of the people involved are either well paid security engineers reverse engineering viruses or reporting security holes in software, virus/trojan writers, or crackers who have fun removing copy protection from games/software and so forth. (Or ex-kids who hacked save-game files when they were in their childhood and will be in their 30s nowadays with family and other time-sucking responsibilities; I'm an abnormality. ) In short, not a population that has a high intersection with the "Japanese translation" scene.

(Ug. Lots of words, going nowhere...)

Anyway... I'd say the VN would be hardest. All the other others you can skimp on positions to a certain extend to having one person do everything (assuming at least for manga that you don't care too much how perfectly 'cleaned' it is), so you can get away with just a translator doing everything. But even assuming just a basic VN (rather then VN/RPG or something) I can't imagine getting by without at least three people, a programmer, translator, and photoshopper; probably even multiple translators would be necessary for the sheer volume of text, and even then your programmer/photoshopper will no doubt be finished their work long before the translators would have finished theirs. >.<