Language Barrier | Rant 01

 

I have been addicted to a certain light novel for over two years now. It’s very rare for me to stay addicted to a novel this long. I really loved the character development, the plot, the scenes, everything.

But there is one problem that’s really, really frustrating me.

It's in Japanese.

 Because the novel is painfully underrated, no professional translators are willing to translate it because only a few number of people are aware of its existence. But Heaven decided to shine a blessing upon me and other fans of this particular book.

Small groups of people (bless them) has decided to translate it using free website translations. I’m so moved because these people do not speak Japanese at all but they still go through pains to machine translate this novel. As we all know, when you translate a whole page in a machine translator, it’s not really perfect.

Though you get the gist of the story, it is still a long way from being perfectly coherent.

But recently, some translators are quitting without so much a notice and I have been revisiting their websites over and over again yet I already knew they disappeared. And now, only one group of machine translators are left.

What they do is translate the characters word by word, then when they get a full sentence, they rewrite it so the grammar is correct. (Imagine doing that for how many chapters T^T) The volunteers who machine translate the novel has their own lives so they can’t really dedicate their time to translate a novel for only a few people to read.

But I love this novel. I have been feeling paranoid lately because I have this feeling that the last translators are soon going to drop the translations and I'd be left hanging, wondering what happened next.

Do you know what it feels!? Utter torture!

When I get so impatient because the latest translated chapter ended in a cliff hanger, (curse those cliff hangers!) I would open up the novel online (which is in Japanese) and translate it using Google translate.

But Google Translate gives me this half-ass gibberish language that I barely understand. Though I get what is happening in the story, it loses its charm (it really will when you are reading a book that feels as if it's written by a two year old) and because I’ve been reading a whole chapter using Google translate, I absorb broken English and accidentally speak like it

Perhaps one of the reasons why I love reading it too is because it’s very rare to get translated versions and I could feel the thrill and that surge of dopamine when I finally finding one after hours of searching. Finding one new chapter is like finding a buried treasure in an isolated island. You looked so damn hard for it.

But I can't rely on machine translators forever. One day, these translators are going to say, "You know what, fuq this! Let them translate this themselves!" and I'd be stuck reading a crappy, Google translated, version of the book.

Unless, of course, they are super dedicated hardcore fans who has the heart of an angel and continue to translate this book.

Sometimes, I’d have crazy ideas like trying to learn the whole Japanese language myself so that I could understand these kinds of novels but it is very difficult to teach yourself another language especially Japanese where they have more than a thousand characters. T^T