#but in reality plenty of companies are cool with mtl then quick proofread or rushing and underpaying translators

[rigelmejo]

Now that I can read a little better I understand a bit more why translations vary so wildly.

Like. On the one hand, if you translate word by word you have so many personal choices to make on which word to use for each thing since there's not many one to one translations. There's deciding to keep idioms or localize them, keep terms and ways of conversing or localize to some degree, etc. And then there's deciding if you cut anything for time it takes to translate and time pressures (I finally get why one guardian translator cut out some of the novel, they were trying to get out the weilan content asap for people). There's also parts where you just won't know how to word it in the language you're translating to, what would be best, and you have to make a decision you don't think is perfect and surely isn't (and maybe there is no perfect decision for translating that line, just many various "Okay but not perfect" choices).

On the other hand. Translation is absolutely a skill. A skill that requires a LOT of practice and is separate from language comprehension skills. Yeah, knowing the languages helps so you don't make foolish grammar or mean meaning errors that machine translations make. But beyond that, so much is you personally breaking down sentences and words and deciding what's a good equivalent in meaning/style/effect in the language you're translating to. And there's no perfect answer, only various "okay" answers that will be biased by translator. Which is why it can be fun to read various translations of one piece, they might all be right but retain certain elements and not others (like when I think of rainbowse7ens edited translations with details added a lot of the emotion/atmosphere of the writing style was retained but specific wording was lost, when I translated some guardian I retained wording amount but wasn't super confident of my word selection and think yuka did better however I felt I retained priests writing style of sentences well and therefore the Effect of it, Yuka did a great job retaining word choice but I think some sentence structure and atmosphere the style created was lost, and meanwhile for modu I think edanglarstranslations did about as perfect a job as one could attempt at retaining mood/style/word choice to the point I could very easily match chinese audiobook to their translation and get a ton of phrase and wording and structure matches). So it's cool to see various translations as every single one will be tinged by translators interpretation of text, strengths and weaknesses, and what they personally valued keeping most and How (cause again there's no perfect one to one way to translate).

I realize the more I learn how much I do value people who do mtls and clean them up, and people who put out "gist" translations that may skimp on details but convey the mood of the text and plot and do it quickly. In both cases, so that either overall words get preserved (as best they can in edited mtl since mtls do tend to shorten and summarize] or so that the overall Feel of the novel gets preserved. So that there's a translation quickly, which is nice when otherwise there'd be none. Or until we hope and wait for a more in depth translator to have the time for those particular projects. Merebear translates is amazing for putting out so many timely dmbj translations which otherwise wouldn't exist at all, Yuka is amazing for putting out a guardian translation that kept the word choice, rainbowse7en was amazing for putting out a guardian translation when there was none and keeping the overall mood intact.

Theres value in a lot of different kinds of translating, along with how each individual one will simply vary by translators own things they tended to interpret/focus on most.