Discussion How much does the translation affect your reading experience?

Discussion in 'Novel General' started by Bad Storm, Apr 27, 2021.

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Would you drop a novel due to translation?

  1. Yup, I have standards

    74.1%
  2. Nope, I've mtl-proofed myself *flex*

    25.9%
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  1. afelice

    afelice Well-Known Member

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    its okay. my worst MTL experience in korean is that google translate burned my brain by translating "divine power" as "sexual power".

    poor saintess became a lewd woman lmaoo
     
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  2. AliceShiki

    AliceShiki 『Ms. Tree』『Magical Girl of Love and Justice』

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    If quality is too low I definitely drop it.

    I don't care if the person translating doesn't know a thing about Japanese, their English definitely needs to have a minimum level to be readable.
     
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  3. ToastedRossi

    ToastedRossi Well-Known Member

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    The ones that work the most poorly for me are the words that are technically correct but feel completely wrong. "Pugilist" comes immediately to mind in this case. Every time I see it my mind recoils and it takes me out of the reading experience. It's as if a lot of translators are preoccupied with translating individual words and not caring about conveying the meaning and feel of the original sentence and I think this does a disservice to the reader.

    "Saintess" is another good example of this. It's an extremely rare word that just doesn't fit with modern vernacular very well. Sure it's technically correct, but we've long since switched to just using the word "saint" regardless of gender. It's a word like "doctoress"; it's technically correct but nobody uses it any more because it's dumb.
     
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  4. Havisu

    Havisu Night Lurker

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    Well, that's no effort at all so i completely agree with this. However, if they do MTL, but at least they put some efforts in making the MTL'd words into proper sentences, I would still respect them.

    If its totally MTL with no edits whatsoever, the I won't even consider it a translation.
     
  5. bkwusa

    bkwusa Well-Known Member

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    I have quite a low standard for badly translated novels... wrong words, wrong grammar, I can deal... I can't deal with translations where I have to read a sentence more than once because it doesn't make sense... With MTL I can reread the same paragraph multiple times and still have trouble knowing what I am reading xD So my line is above MTL...

    I do agree I hate when translators switch and the quality goes down... especially in very poetic novels where they try to translate Chinese poetry to some extend...
     
  6. Stueck_Bacon

    Stueck_Bacon Well-Known Member

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    i dropped several novels due to bad htls before and i only read mtls when the writing is quite simple without any fancy poems or words which the machine cant really convey the meaning of,, and when im desperate.

    with bad grammar i can cope, its when almost every word is spelled wrong that i just,,, cant.
    i dont have high standards when reading. my brain can autocorrect bad grammar, but i want the bad grammar to at least correctly express what the original author wanted to express in the translated language, if they cant do that and just use a dictionary i can just read mtl instead ??
    i mean. if the grammar, and understanding of the language is bad i see no difference in htl and mtl
     
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  7. Negiomi

    Negiomi Idiot | Grandurr's

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    Most of the time, I'm lacking brain power whenever I go read novels. So if the translation is too bad I wouldn't be able to follow at all. A few mistakes is feasable, but anything more it becomes a simple eye excercise
     
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  8. Saorihirai

    Saorihirai Well-Known Member

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    I despise MTL with a passion but after my fav novel got dropped, I've finally convinced myself to just mtl the rest. It makes the experience horrible and if I could avoid I would at all costs. Hopefully this won't last too long since I'm learning Chinese
     
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  9. Wujigege

    Wujigege *Christian*SIMP*Comedian

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    Typos are one thing but character names being swapped is hard to stomach.
    Sometimes, the authors make the mistake.

    Translation is harder than it looks.
    If someone isn't going to do a good job, it is recommended that they don't bother to translate in the first place
     
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  10. God slayer

    God slayer Retired God Slayer

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    I wouldn't drop a novel itself cuz of how it's translated if it's interesting I would even read MTL if necessary.......but novel which doesn't pique my interest I'll just drop em.... Or else who read novel which isn't interesting at the same time has a crappy translation.....
     
  11. Nimroth

    Nimroth Someone

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    If a translation is bad enough it sure can make me drop a story, although it rarely happens because most of the time I end up dropping because I find the story itself bad or uninteresting, before my patience with the translation has had a chance to run out.
    Assuming of course that the translation isn't so bad to the point that it gave me the completely wrong idea about the source material without me realizing it.
     
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  12. ToastedRossi

    ToastedRossi Well-Known Member

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    This sounds all too true. I read tons of poorly translated novels so theoretically I'd be dropping a lot of them for that reason, but it never turns out like that. The reason is that these books tend to have lots of other more serious so those play a much larger role in the decision. I can think of only one book which has both a really bad translation and was simultaneously good enough to keep reading. Admittedly this doesn't include Chinese books as I would switch over to reading Chinese even if the translation is good.
     
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  13. Bachingchung

    Bachingchung Well-Known Member

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    It depends, it's like sex. The hornier you are the more tolerable you could be towards disgusting things. If the novel is at a climactic point, then I wouldn't mind to MTL the shit out of that.


    Some rookie translators tend to be more verbose, and it kinda' ruin the immersion, it's tolerable but when you stack some chapters, it often leads to perma drop. Some tends to leave the honorifics, which is really weird at times because the characters are foreigners. It gives me the hibby jibbies ugh, I'd still read it though. Some Translations release too fast, and some too slow, I usually drop the latter, which is unfortunate coz' they are usually fire. There are also greedy translators who split a chapter by parts and ask for a full chapter price, which is heartbreaking because they also reserved the good titles.
     
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  14. Khaos-Thanathan

    Khaos-Thanathan Well-Known Member

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    A lot.

    Most MTLs feature horrible grammar and decent grammar is very important for a decent reading flow.
     
  15. SylviaViolet

    SylviaViolet Toast to the ones that we lost on the way⚓️

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    It mostly depends on the situation. For translations, unless it's absolutely horrendous I usually read it if I like the premise of the story. But once I reach the end of any translation, unless I loved the book a lot, I rarely ever move on to reading the MTL.
     
  16. Deleted member 304540

    Deleted member 304540 Guest

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    I can look past typos and bad grammar if I like the story but when something is so badly translated that I'm confused what's going on and who said what, I'll have to drop it. The translation has to be readable.
     
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  17. zisefenghuang

    zisefenghuang Member

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    I recently dropped two pretty famous BL novels because I just couldn't take it anymore. Tried my best but the translation was awful. Translating a whole damn novel is not a small task but I just feel bad, the first few chapters were very well translated but when the novel started to get interesting, the sentences made little to no sense. Unreadable.
     
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  18. Nightow1

    Nightow1 Well-Known Member

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    I remember one guy that wanted to take over Knight's and Magic from skythewood but when I went over to take a look at his translation, it was utterly .... bad is putting it mildly. It was to the extent that mecha fighting in a forest became mecha fighting in a sea. It was so bad that even the background can be mistranslated. It became totally incomprehensible.
     
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  19. Dearling

    Dearling Active Member

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    I refuse to read MTL or MTL quality novels. Or translations with so many run-on sentences because the translators just don't know how to cut sentences in half.

    But, there are lots of good translations for good novels out there, so this problem doesn't usually bother me much~ blobmelt_thumbs
     
  20. AmimikaMoon

    AmimikaMoon New Member

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    IDK if this is the right thread for this, but a translation thing I've noticed across a few european fantasy novels is when everybody has actual english names, but the MC has some made-up name... which is probably meant to be a real name that just didn't get translated correctly for some reason.

    The main example I'm thinking of is Shuli from A Stepmother's Marchen- everyone has real names except her for some reason... until you realize that "Shuli" is probably meant to be something like Sally, or Shirley, or the french word "Cherie"...

    Either way it bugs me constantly when I'm reading.
     
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