Bad grammar translation of a novel is not the only thing. Sometimes, there are also some Chinese novels which have bad grammar and format too. Sometimes its even bad to the point where 2-3 paragraph of the Chinese novel are very messy. So I want to ask, what do translators actually do? Do they just fix the sentence of the Chinese novel themselves or what?
Shoddy work, trying to reach their quota. A certain Chinese company has a lot of those. A snake who has MOLARS a dagger called a STAGGER A flail called a HAMMER and others
In English it's called waffle they waffle so much the cut corners in grammatization? (Is this a word)
In some works, the character is supposed to be an illiterate Xiaabao from Duke of Mount Deer is a good example. He messes idioms and other phrases. It takes a very good writer to do that though I recall reading a book as a kid, pubic hair was called public hair lol
Translators translate. They take words and sentences from one language, process them and spew them as English (or whatever language they are translating to.)The thing is, not every translator has mother tongue level English knowledge, which leads to some grammar mistakes and/or narrative flow. Still, it's not like all English native speakers have perfect grammar or good knowledge on how the flow of the story should go (I mean the way sentences and paragraphs are structured to make the text easier/more enjoyable to read.) Anyways, it all depends on the translator. Some are good, some are decent, some are just people learning the language and practicing by giving leechers something to read and then you have a few godly translators, which everyone wants to bang and have their babies, because they are that good. I don't even understand why you are asking something like this...
I remember reading a CN novel which describes a mace with sharp edge that can cut man in half and I was what the fuck are they talking about
Honestly I don't give a damn about the grammar as long as the sentence make sense. At least it's better than reading MTL.
Machine translations and then auto-corrector or something gets words wrong when they do minimal editing. It's even seen on WuxiaWorld 'the elder condescended from the heavens' instead of coming down he looks down? lol. It's worse on some other sites that shall be unmentioned *cough* Qidian *cough*
In the end its about communicating. Sometimes authors try to convey jokes through engrish, sometimes they just suck at writing(in this case, why bother translating). Its up to the translators to catch the deeper meaning. If there is no such thing, the translator has to fix mistakes.
it's not the translators, it's the Chinese novels themselves because all the companys care about is speed, the writer of Chinese webnovels have no editors
That's also true, but it's not always the case. Though when you add authors rushing to write enough words to live well, no editors and a not so good translator, you get, well, crappy translations. But you are right, it's not always the translators fault.
As a translator of a relatively grammar safe novel, Perfect Superstar (shameless plug), I found that I have little to no trouble with the process. As a native English speaker and someone fluent in Chinese (and with Chinese parents I can ask), I find the process fairly simple fixing kinks in the novel. That being said, I am more fortunate than most. I have the luxury of digesting what a line says and then spewing it down in English or asking a friend how to word stuff (since I usually do translating in the middle of class). However, since I'm translating mostly to learn Chinese and practice English, I translate relatively slow and I'm not really in it to churn out daily chapters (we usually do 2, maybe 3 a week). That being said, I think translators are usually not really in it for the money unless they're on major sites (major is much more liberally applied in my mind). But I'm relatively new as well and I may one day hit a wall and say "no, I don't care about this anymore, pay me or no chapters". But yeah.
It's interesting to see how many people understand that he's asking if a translator will fix the author's mistakes as opposed to people that take this entire thread as some kind of rant about translators with poor grammar. Don't take my word as gospel here, because I'm not a translator myself, but.. I believe translating from chinese to english usually involves almost completely rewriting sentences. The grammar between the two languages is just too different to translate it over word for word, or anything like that. Since the translator is more or less rewriting the sentence from scratch, then, it'd be weird if the author's own grammar mistakes appeared in the translation at all. Any grammar mistakes you see belong 100% to the translator. That said, other mistakes - such as the author switching names around or getting numbers wrong - will definitely show up in the translation, if the translator doesn't go out of their way to correct them. Some translators do, some don't. I've even seen at least one translation that kept the mistake as-is until they got the author to correct it in the raws.
Can't blame them. I need to read the first post twice to understand it. Kind of ironic considering the topic discussed
Grammar mistakes that are major/makes the novel unreadable rarely happens, especially if the novels are from major platforms like 17k and Qidian. That being said, grammar mistakes do happen but I usually just work through it and readers don't exactly yell at you that you didn't stick to the raws (if they do, recruit them to the team because they would have to be seriously dedicated). Grammar mistakes in the translations happen on the translator/editor/PR's end for sure. I doubt it would be a valid excuse to say "I translated it word for word, the author sucks at grammar so that's why this grammar is so bad. ecksDee"
Chinese is my main language and English is my second language...so my bad if my grammar is bad. Anyway, I recently read a Chinese novel that kept on repeating words and there are a lot of commas within a paragraph. Like for example there are 100 words in the paragraph, the author used commas all the way even though its wrong and should use full stop sometimes so that the paragraph would be clearer to the readers. Also the author doesn't skip one scene from another well and the author doesn't write conversation in proper format like famous author like 耳根 and so on. Although I myself have no problem reading through the Chinese novel, I wondered to myself when reading the novel if translator would find it annoying to translate a novel like this.
I spell check for the author when I translate sometimes. It depends on the novel you read, but the less legitimate the novel is, the more you'll find typos in the raws. Typos in Chinese usually aren't grammatical, and it comes more from words that sound similar (e.g. they're, their, there). I change them because I only assume that it's not intentional by the author, and there's no reason for the author to have intentionally mistyped. On the other hand, if it's intentional, or part of the story, then I try to convey it in the translation. For example, a messed up idiom, lisps, character's dialect, and other things that are I judge are intentional by the author I I keep if possible.