Call To Arms: Japanese Translators/Editors

[barbsicle]

I don't really feel I should be the one doing this. After all besides not being able to take part in most of the heated discussion over the format I've been busy and not really contributing to the work in recent times. But I feel this is a minor point that should be looked upon anyway.

I've flipped through the various projects of Baka-Tsuki and found this one obvious fact:
We're the only project without a Japanese Translator.
EDIT: Rather, we'll be in need of a Japanese Translator to higher our standards (and reduce the burden on our dear seaghyn).
(Note: The rest of the post doesn't really outline about raising standards but oh well.)

From my few months of experience, I have learned and know this much. The Japanese version is canon, Japanese is preferred over Chinese, and after all, the novel was originally written in Japanese anyway. Besides seaghyn (and this new editor Chansey whom i have yet to know), it's just been judgment, me and seaghyn, going at whatever pace we can. Discussions were mainly on the animesuki forums (which is why, i realise, judgment also doesn't really come here anymore), and everything went on at a sort-of relaxed pace. Translations became an after-school hobby for me. Just do it at my own pace, check a little here and here, and submit. No one was really reading it anyway (except seaghyn who always got into a mad frenzy when either me or judgment had an update). The majority, or should I say all, had watched the anime and wanted to continue on from Volume 3, which judgment has completed and is now on Volume 4. I'm not saying that I detest my clean-up work. The people over at animesuki also cheer me on. No matter which chapter or volume I might be doing, I will do it with the same passion and love for the series. So everything went along smoothly, with the exception of the guidelines (and the fact that both me and judgment were wiki noobs).

But now, lo and behold, Spice and Wolf is starting to pick up a bit of attention even here. While really I missed the deadline to submit my vote (because my computer has been spoilt for the past month and occasionally I can come online), I realise there were people posting in the old threads and others (besides the voting ones). Although seaghyn has dedicated (possibly his life) to this project and swears to contribute (yes i'm putting words in your mouth seaghyn) to the translation effort the minute he can master Japanese, I, for the worse part, am basically dead in these few months. There have been a few people who have done other parts of the work (for example 1 of the Volume 7 short stories), and I must really thank them for aiding judment and I (and seaghyn of course), but in the end it still boils down to this one simple fact (no not that I was beating around the bush): that we might be in need of a Japanese translator/editor.

I don't see it as a necessity. I see it as a bonus. If seaghyn were to eventually become the first Japanese translator since aleph and gang left, I figure he would still need to take a little time off to read our already finished works to the original Japanese version, and this time in detail. Apologies if I'm off but so far I think seaghyn's editing and proofreading is, of the better part, less of if the text corresponds to the original and more of if it reads out properly. Essentially, when seaghyn goes into the translating gang, we'll still need someone to proofread the back releases. We'll get it done eventually, but to lighten the load on the dear hyper buddy (guess who) who has been cheering us on with the "*need more*"s and lines along the like, in my opinion, it would benefit us to have someone else on the team. So it's a call to arms for any person well-versed in Japanese, if anyone out there feels like joining our humble little group to provide to the community who continue to love the goddess we call Horo, don't be shy. We're already expecting you.

TL;DR: It's been fun along this road so far, so if you want to join us, please don't hesistate.

Barbs.

[ShadowZeroHeart]

I've flipped through the various projects of Baka-Tsuki and found this one obvious fact:
We're the only project without a Japanese Translator.

SORRY???
I know for A FACT and FOR SURE!
By SWEARING MY LIFE UPON IT!
That the TWO projects i am translating, SnS and KnS, do not possess a Japanese translator either.
Furthermore, I am the ONLY translator for the projects
(well, Zy helped at SnS once, but no more? >"< hopefully people will help at them soon?)

[barbsicle]

I've flipped through the various projects of Baka-Tsuki and found this one obvious fact:
We're the only project without a Japanese Translator.

SORRY???
I know for A FACT and FOR SURE!
By SWEARING MY LIFE UPON IT!
That the TWO projects i am translating, SnS and KnS, do not possess a Japanese translator either.
Furthermore, I am the ONLY translator for the projects
(well, Zy helped at SnS once, but no more? >"< hopefully people will help at them soon?)

Ah. I am aware of KnS and SnS now (I didnt see Chinese Translator around your name so I assumed Japanese, haha, don't get alot of time these days to do a thorough check anyway). So yes my bad. I will edit the post to correct this blasphemous mistake I have made.

Oh and you seem really agitated there, maybe one day I'll consider coming to help you. Haha.

Barbs.

[ShadowZeroHeart]

LOLz, yes, slightly agitated...
Your post is almost like saying
"Hey, we have enough of Chinese translators, but we still want MORE! and more Japanese translators!"
And I am still a one-man-army
m(T.T)m

Anyways, I am a Chinese translator,
and if anyone wishes to help out, i am always fine...
just that... i suggest taking a look at SnS text before anyone tries it...
its a killer... over my limits >"<

[barbsicle]

LOLz, yes, slightly agitated...
Your post is almost like saying
"Hey, we have enough of Chinese translators, but we still want MORE! and more Japanese translators!"
And I am still a one-man-army
m(T.T)m

Anyways, I am a Chinese translator,
and if anyone wishes to help out, i am always fine...
just that... i suggest taking a look at SnS text before anyone tries it...
its a killer... over my limits >"<

I've seen your workload over at the other thread.
But I'm (yes as I have stated) busy at the moment, can't even do S&W.
So perhaps after everything is cleared up and we all begin to relax once again.
Then I will consider breaking your "one-man army". Hehe.

Barbs.

[Krikit]

Lol, and so Shadow has solicited a future helper ^_^. So, since I, (Krikit) and I (Seaghyn) are one, I have just one comment.

*need more*.

As for my plans Barb, I do plan on going back and reading the novels, though I will do so little at a time as I learn japanese. I don't think there's going to be a "eureka!" moment, when I all of a sudden understand Japanese, but when i can piece my way through the kanji, I will be reading the novels. And I think I may help out at the earlier volumes as well, until we are all caught up, and I can move on to helping everyone with the later volumes.

Lol, Shadow has been a true "One-Man-Army" fighting the words of misunderstanding, the call to quit, and the burning fire of depression gained at the knowledge of a war that was waged that sees no end for a long time. Go SHADOW! ^_^. (the hedgehog ^_^)

Anyway, we'll be waiting patiently for you Barb ^_^. I haven't done too much editing recently, but what I want to do:

1) Grammar check all of Volume 3.
2) Link Volume 3 together, (like in ZnT, where you can click on the Volume name, and read all the chapters together.)
3) Get this image thing sorted out.
4) Continue practicing for my next level test next week on Thursday.

[barbsicle]

Go SHADOW! ^_^. (the hedgehog ^_^)

I think you meant Sonic.



...



LOL.

[salv87]

shadow was more like a porcupine ^_^

Anyway, I think that a Jap. translator would be good, to clear out any misunderstandings or misinterpretaions. But it's not like we don't appreciate other work ^_^
Barb, just study for your exams for now, we'll see where this all gets to.

[duncan]

I'm trying to figure out how the translation process works. I see in the forum rules that you can't ask for raws of most stuff. Does that include raws of the books that are being worked on, and does that mean you have to get a copy and scan and OCR it yourself to have a complete electronic copy of the book to work from? Ordering books from Japan is ridiculously expensive in my experience, and a lot of them aren't stocked by anyone in the US. I don't really like translating from hard-copy anyway. I could get scans of S+W and figure out how to OCR Japanese text, I suppose- I hope I'm not breaking any rules by saying that.

I'm not fluent in Japanese, but I can read to some degree, though I have to look a fair bit of stuff up. My level is somewhere between JLPT 3 and JLPT 2, I think, but I read Japanese quite a bit better than I write or speak it., and I have good dictionaries and a number of reference works on grammar. I've made some translations of some older public domain short stories in the past, just for practice. I haven't worked on my Japanese much at all in the last year, but I've been meaning to get back to work on it, and if I'm going to be making translations it makes sense to kill two birds with one stone and share them.

As a reference point I just got a raw scan of the first ZnT novel and I was able to read the first few pages of that without too much difficulty, though there are generally a few compounds I don't know on every page, and I sometimes have a hard time getting the sense of some of the sentences. If I were translating that the bottleneck would be doing the translation, not understanding the Japanese. I suspect Spice and Wolf is more difficult than ZnT- what I tend to have a really hard time with is made-up vocabulary, and off the wall borrowed words, and I suspect that Wolf and Spice has a lot of that. But I'd certainly be willing to take a stab at helping out with it. I enjoyed the anime, so I imagine I would enjoy the books too. I would have to do some fiddling with my computer- my current machine isn't really properly set up to run some of my Japanese software (it pretty much requires that you set the main OS language to Japanese, which has some unfortunate effects in other places, and I also tend to keep that machine booted into Linux a fair bit of the time.) I have a laptop that is set up with everything, but the keyboard no longer works. I could get a USB keyboard for it, but I'm a bit afraid that laptop is near the end of its life anyway. I could use it to get started though.

[onizuka-gto]

Hello Ducan,

Welcome to Baka-Tsuki!

Just to clarify, yes, it is Baka-Tsuki policy that you cannot Publicly request for any raw or source material on the forum. However we are realistic about the situation and we respect all PRIVATE messages here, so if you have anymore question feel free to contact anyone of our happy community for help in any matters regarding the policy via our PRIVATE MESSAGING forum service.

[duncan]

Hello Ducan,

Welcome to Baka-Tsuki!

Just to clarify, yes, it is Baka-Tsuki policy that you cannot Publicly request for any raw or source material on the forum. However we are realistic about the situation and we respect all PRIVATE messages here, so if you have anymore question feel free to contact anyone of our happy community for help in any matters regarding the policy via our PRIVATE MESSAGING forum service.

OK, thanks for the clarification, that clears it up for me- I guess in this case a is as good as a nod . I've been looking at the wiki trying to figure out the gist of the translation process you use. I'm thinking I might try my hand at the second volume, since it looks like no one is working on it at the moment. I guess you have to sign up for chapters before you submit anything. I'm not quite ready to sign up for anything, but I'll start taking a look at it, to make sure it isn't beyond me before I make any promises I can't keep.

[ShadowZeroHeart]

duncan, sorry to be a wet blanket, but i would recommend that instead maybe you should discuss with the rest about this before you start?

The reason being:
1) S&W is licensed and we have yet to hear of its release dates.
2) B-T has a locking policy to lock volumes on their respective dates of releases.

So if you really take too long on volume 2 or something, it is possible for the volume to be locked before it is completed, which would be a shame >"<

So I would think it is better to discuss among the translators to decide on the course of action to take...?

[duncan]

duncan, sorry to be a wet blanket, but i would recommend that instead maybe you should discuss with the rest about this before you start?

The reason being:
1) S&W is licensed and we have yet to hear of its release dates.
2) B-T has a locking policy to lock volumes on their respective dates of releases.

So if you really take too long on volume 2 or something, it is possible for the volume to be locked before it is completed, which would be a shame >"<

So I would think it is better to discuss among the translators to decide on the course of action to take...?

Well, mentioning it on this thread is at least the first step toward discussing it, or so it seemed to me. I also left a message in the animesuki thread asking people involved with the project to PM me. Beyond that it seems like there is a bit of angst in the thread about licensing over whether or not it's possible to get the volumes done before the books become available. At this point my impression is that baka locks things when they become available largely to avoid the charge of having plagiarized the official translation. I can't say that that makes much sense to me legally (infringement is infringement), but if that's the case it seems to argue for getting volume 2 done as quickly as possible, before it becomes available in an English edition and gets locked. I don't really feel like jumping into a later volume because I want to have read everything up to what I am translating, in the original. Of course the book might come out before volume 2 was done- depends on their publishing schedule, which I bet even they can't accurately predict, and of course on how fast we can translate volume 2. And you never know about marginal stuff like this. They might bring out one volume, promise a second for a year or two, and then call the whole thing off. Publishing is a sketchy business.

But I'm mainly interested in doing this for my own benefit. I liked the Spice and Wolf anime, so I figure I'd enjoy working on it. If the people who have been running the Spice and Wolf project decide they'd really rather not bother with volume 2 I might look at some other projects, assuming they interested me. I just figured that since I liked the anime, and since this project was putting out a call to arms, it might be a good fit. Anyway, if any of the translators on this project would like to weigh in on this in this thread, or just message me, I'm all ears.

EDIT: and I can't help noticing that you made most of these points in the thread about licensing. You seemed very gung-ho about getting volume 2 translated in that thread, so I'm not sure I understand why you've had such a sudden change of heart.

[TheGiftedMonkey]

An easy way to solve this problem is to just split up the chapters like usual. Slower people can take less chapters and it should get done roughly (I hope) around the same time. As long as Duncan makes progress he is allowed to translate whatever he wants. Getting it done before the volume releases here in the US is ideal, but that isn't what we're about. Duncan, if you wish to translate one of the chapters from Spice & Wolf sign up for it on the Wiki. The other people working on the project can supply you with the raws you need as well.

Welcome to Baka-Tsuki.

[ShadowZeroHeart]

Well, mentioning it on this thread is at least the first step toward discussing it, or so it seemed to me. I also left a message in the animesuki thread asking people involved with the project to PM me. Beyond that it seems like there is a bit of angst in the thread about licensing over whether or not it's possible to get the volumes done before the books become available. At this point my impression is that baka locks things when they become available largely to avoid the charge of having plagiarized the official translation. I can't say that that makes much sense to me legally (infringement is infringement), but if that's the case it seems to argue for getting volume 2 done as quickly as possible, before it becomes available in an English edition and gets locked. I don't really feel like jumping into a later volume because I want to have read everything up to what I am translating, in the original. Of course the book might come out before volume 2 was done- depends on their publishing schedule, which I bet even they can't accurately predict, and of course on how fast we can translate volume 2. And you never know about marginal stuff like this. They might bring out one volume, promise a second for a year or two, and then call the whole thing off. Publishing is a sketchy business.

But I'm mainly interested in doing this for my own benefit. I liked the Spice and Wolf anime, so I figure I'd enjoy working on it. If the people who have been running the Spice and Wolf project decide they'd really rather not bother with volume 2 I might look at some other projects, assuming they interested me. I just figured that since I liked the anime, and since this project was putting out a call to arms, it might be a good fit. Anyway, if any of the translators on this project would like to weigh in on this in this thread, or just message me, I'm all ears.

EDIT: and I can't help noticing that you made most of these points in the thread about licensing. You seemed very gung-ho about getting volume 2 translated in that thread, so I'm not sure I understand why you've had such a sudden change of heart.

Law cannot affect past events. For example, if a name is not copyrighted yet, you can use it. Once it is copyrighted, that doesnt mean that they can sue you for having used that name before. Plagiarism is impossible if our text is significantly different and if we locked it once the official release is out. Yes, perhaps it doesnt truly prevent B-T from all charges, but at least it is some sort of safety precaution?

I didnt make that many points about licensing i think? ^^"
I would say that it is best for volume 2 to be translated, but i cannot and will not force anything onto others. The reason I am unsure whether to support your decision is because, as Oni mentioned, it is by chapter basis. So I am worried about when the volume may be released. Since if you stopped half-way or take too long, it must end there and then, unless some other translator take note and continue the work =X

No offense to you at that?