#im going to language school right now i wanna git gud for Real

[rassicas]

can I ask what goes through your head while translating ? like, do you read through the text, understand what it's about, and then start translating it ? or does the understanding happen throughout the process ?

hope you're doing well !!

i like to be open about the fact that im not a fluent JP speaker at all, at this point im like... intermediate at most. this isnt me trying to be humble or whatever i am Serious. the only reason ive translated so much splatoon stuff is because i have enough knowledge to not be stumbling around clueless, and (biggest reason) because almost nobody else was doing it. also its fun to figure out how to convey an idea across different languages.... where differences in culture and the way the language itself works creates these gaps that need to be remedied with a translation note or a looser translation/localization... i got a degree in lingusitics i think this shit is incheresting i still got plenty of gaps in my grammar/vocab/kanji knowledge, but im literate enough to get the main ideas of a passage. occasionally ill be able to fully understand it without checking a dictionary or anything and then i type up a translation. but often times the understanding is something that happens throughout the process. process is as follows: parse text to the best of my own abilities. If i'm confident i can read it ill just type up the translation. if i cant fully comprehend it all... ->if its text in a book or something, use google translate's scan function to get a digital transcription -> fix transcription if there's issues -> run text through both deepL and jisho.org. DeepL is much better than google translate at making intelligible auto translations, but it sometimes gets overconfident. sometimes i can understand what a sentence is getting at but im not sure how to neatly convey it in english, and then it's like. wow the machine did it for me. -> cross check the auto translation with the original JP text. again, i'm not fluent, but i can read enough to know what all the parts of the sentence are, and i can tell where exactly the machine translation messed up -> if i dont like how the machine structured a sentence ill rewrite it -> if there's words, idioms, grammar points etc. that i'm unsure about, i'll look into them further on jisho or find more information elsewhere online

tldr my japanese is pretty Mid but im good at researching