As Mitsuki Lover pointed out, there are no dumb questions, just ones that don’t get asked. And I will say that as the person running the Hasegawa Translation Project, it makes me happy to have someone curious enough to inquire about the work involved. That said…
The short of it is: It’s a lot of work.
The long of it is: Sadly, there’s nothing ‘simple’ in the process of translating something from Japanese to English. One of the major issues you face when dealing with these things is OCRing – and one of the main reasons Hexagram of Love took so long. In our case, we were using
Next up, machine translations do not really offer readable script. Often times, they pick the wrong meanings to extrapolate and create a jumbled sentence with no direction. They often pick the most literal translations, but with no sense of character or composition. And thanks to the Japanese language’s extremely complex grammar being nearly the opposite of English grammar, it pretty much needs a human to unscramble. This takes time, and a lot of it. Add in cultural references and jokes, puns, and other issues that simply wouldn’t make any sense to English readers without an encyclopedia of footnotes. It all piles up.
Some examples of funnier machine-translated garbled messes, though it should be said that it almost always turns out like this without the human element to step in:
“Kiyone is a brushwood concrete floor as for eyes”
” “It is nonexistent こたあ that is a girl and fix at 1 person. The substitution, first base?” “
“Because the diploma is unnecessary, It consults about the fee, and the toothpick and it doesn’t exist.”
“Ayeka, The thundercloud and the presentiment of ruin are dragged to backing”
Which is where we come in, to properly read and interpret the text. A majority of our work had been interpreted, but it wasn’t perfect. It took us a long time to cut out unnecessary steps, build up a base script and then clean it up a bit. I’m unhappy with the way the first novel came out, and I take responsibility for letting it come out in such a way. Sure, it lets people read the novel and is mostly understandable. The problem is that the text just isn’t clean or clear in a lot of places, with a lot of mistakes and language loops that confuse English readers. I’m upset about it. I want to work on making it better. I’ve taken some time to read essays from professional translators to understand the role of a translator as not just literally interpreting, but to adapt to the other language without changing the meaning of anything. That’s Localization.
We had several large projects come in the way, including Ai Tenchi Muyo, which has slowed progress on the remaining novels. I apologize about this. If we had more staff working to chip away, including ones that have a native grip on the language, things would move much quicker. To give some numbered perspective: Based on the average number of pages per Hasegawa novel, we’re looking at ~4,000 pages of text to rip, translate, iterate, localize, and then polish for publishing. Taking all of the novels that fall under Kajishima’s umbrella (GXP, Shin Tenchi, Paradise War, Seikishi), all of
12,000 pages is quite the library! One that I myself really wish we already had available for everyone to enjoy in fully translated, localized and polished glory. There’s a lot of great content in each series of novels which I feel fans have been missing out on for the past 20+ years. But the amount of effort to truly convert these works is staggeringly large. For a team as small as ours, it’s going to take quite a while to get through while also bearing in mind that we all have lives of our own to attend to. And, if I may be quite frank, translation work is a fairly thankless endeavor. When I think about the amount of work we put in to doing a single novel, and how little of the fanbase actually got to read it and gave us at least a pat on the back, it’s pretty mentally dissuading.
I’m
The longer-short of it is: 12,000 pages is a lot of reading, interpreting, localizing and re-writing for minimal reward.
Thank you very much for asking, Fixn, and welcome to Tenchiforum! kiyonesmile1
