Discussion Did you find any differences between the English and Original Versions?

Probably somewhere someone asked this question before, but I just don't know about it and kind of curious.

So, what I'm asking is, are there any differences (major or minor) between...
1. The translated works of our dearest fan translators. (Free)
2. The translated works of money grabbing publishers. (Paid, with or without publishers)
3. The original works.

It's mostly between 2 and 3, as I do appreciate the free translations, some are just not as good as published work. Hey, they are paid. They are "professionals". And they also got a much bigger team with anyone and everyone supposedly possible. (Apparently, somebody mistook this the wrong way. I'm just saying sometimes, you can't compare 1 with 2 or 3 since they're just MTL and flushed out with really good speed. For all I care about, it's good enough. But for the purpose of comparing your experience between the three, 1 can sometimes be omitted.)

Speaking of which, anyone bought other translated works that are in another language? For example, a ton of Japanese light novels are translated into Chinese. If so, any differences there?

(Though, I do understand the question is weird and silly. If you bought the originals and understands them, why would you buy the translated? And if you don't understand them and only bought them as a collection, then you won't be able to answer anyways. xD)

 

I like the original language the best no matter how good the translator is it's hard to get 100 percent of the meaning across when translating languages

 

Well, I bought one of the few LN tranlated to my language and indeed the translation sometimes was a little amateur with some mistakes of concordance or even word (yeah, the publishers are a small company, so it's compreensible, it was the 2 LN traduced to my language) , when I read in English it was very better and the tranlation in my language for fantranslators was in the same nivel of the publishers if not worse.

 

Donation or not, the translators are mostly doing a free service so I don't really feel like many people have the grounds to complain. If the translations are especially poor, they will probably be called out eventually anyway. People still read MTLs at the end of the day. They are not 'paid professionals', they are people who are doing this on the side from whatever else they are doing with their lives.

The quality between different translators will obviously change but if you can't read the language yourself I don't think there is really a right to complain.

 

fan translators generally keep the story more true to what the author wrote...

 

That is most definitely true and I think it also supports the author the most? Well, it's the most direct, I think.

Amateur eh? I never thought of it like that. I guess they might be like yen press, trying to milk as much as possible with the growing popularity?

I don't really know what you're trying to convey that's related because by no means am I actually complaining. Maybe you misunderstood something? I'm just asking people's opinion on their experience on the different versions. And saying that, at times, fan translations don't need to be compared. Sometimes they can while others there's no point.

 

Money grubbers tend to not be detailed. Ren proved this, one of his friends paid a company to translate, their translation was shit. Barely any detail, monotone etc. Compared to Ren's, it was garbage. But then again, Ren is our Translator God.

 

You kinda made this a bit restrictive. There are some MTLers who also join the money grubbing business, and there are some serious bilinguel people who do the translations for free...

Ren would actually be part of 2... The three sections are basically 1) free MTL translations, 2) Paid translations 3) Original Raws.

Meh, Dreams of Jianghu doesn't seem to take in Donations, yet I find they're very good TLs.

 

Nop, my language don't have any big publishers of LN or others oriental's readings, the three "big publisher" two are side bussines and the later (wich make the LNs) is a small company who don't even has a proper shop besides online shops, it's so sad, I almost just read online because doesn't have too much translators in my language besides the fantranslators (I even become one for that reason)

 

he may be paid with donations but he put out according to that, those 15 chapters a week man.

 

i don't mind if the translator tweak the words a little if it makes it easier to understand that way

 

I didn't say anything to refute that...

 

Translators SHOULD tweak words and sentences. Chinese grammar is NOT English grammar and I find that people who leave the text in the original with all the commas and lack of periods are just lazy. For example, Void, although he was basically a near-pure MTLer. Even MTLers should fix the grammar...

 

Yes, sometimes I read something that doesn't make sense in the translation language while in the original makes (or some writing jokes), so in order to understand that you need to change the words or put a sidenote or else it ends in a "What hell is that?"

 

I was just stating a fact

 

well in anime I prefer the subbed over dubbed because they change stuff and more often drop honorifics or what the characters call each other [surname vs given name vs nicknames]

 

My bad. I didn't mean to toss it into such strict categories. Just thought of it without a whole lot of thought as I was looking at one of my copies of a Chinese translated light novel and wondering how others felt about their translations in whatever language.

That is why I flipped the table and gave up translating. I tried at one point but I got fed up with: 1. Translating off what I know, 2. Struggling to turn Chinese phrases into English and failing, 3. Double checking it, 4. Turning incomprehensible crap into English, 5. Turning English into proper English.

Then I fall into the debate of should I change and tweak stuff or should I try to keep true to the author? And how much should I tweak? Maybe I should just rewrite this? Orz.

 

It's nice to read the original but if the translator did a great job then it's interesting in its own way.(It takes experience and a lot of practice to do it well.) I don't know what that makes sense? The differences in the languages in itself make me think that I'm actually reading a different novel because of the details.

 

If i can read in the original language I prefer the original one. Usually, i'm shy of translated materials. It's hard to find something good in my language. Besides the differences in terms and notions there are things that dissapear with the translating process: idioms for example. But, the best example, is this, look at how i use the words, i'm not english and I didn't learn the correct way of writing in english.

 

original is gotta be the best, its the same as you can never make a perfect copy. I prefer reading the RAWs more than the translations, the JP language has many ways of expressions and some of this expressions are really hard to turn into english without adding/removing some stuff. As a translator i do my best so that the essence stays and conveys the message that the author wants to let the readers read and honestly its really hard.

honestly i hate MT translators who translate stuff without any knowledge of the target language(except for beginners who tries to learn the language by tanslating them).

why i hate them? they are disrespecting the authors who put effort in writing their stories. I translate because i respect the authors and because i love the stories they made, that's why i wanna share the stories that had earned my respect. i also hate those who translate with trash quality(a lot lower than low quality), basically translating them into the language you wanted to translate to but you have really low knowledge of the language you translate them to (like really wrong grammars, wrong uses of words and etc) but still persists to go on with the trash quailty, just go f!@#ing get some editors!!

fuuu~ accidentally released the rants i had once in the past when i saw disrespecting quality translations