#sorry yall I'm kind of mad about this article

[djarinova]

from an article titled "I’m a Swiftie, but the staggering size of the Eras tour has left me feeling alienated"

girl im not sure you are a swiftie if you're saying the anthology is full of forgettable songs...

[shukumeinorivals]

sorry if this has been asked before, I'm new to this account and in tumbler in general, so I don't know how things work lmao. My question is how did yall get into translating?

Welcome, I hope you enjoy your stay!

I'm the only translator, so I can only give you one answer.

The short answer is, I got into it because I wanted to understand songs and video games related to Pokémon, Vocaloid and Hetalia.

The really long answer would be...

Story time!

When I was very young I heard one of the Pokémon openings in Japanese for the first time and fell in love with the way it sounded, so I asked my mom to get me a dictionary because I wanted to look up the words I heard and translate the song (lol I was kinda naive). I had no idea kanji or any other writing systems existed yet.

Anyway, she got me the dictionary and because it was in romaji, I actually learned a bunch of vocabulary and fixed phrases just by reading it obsessively. Some time passed and I learned a bit more about the language and kinda taught myself the katakana syllabary so that I could spell the names of my fav characters at the back of my notebooks. I was so proud about it.

A few years later, I was introduced to the wonders of Niconico, Vocaloid and Hetalia all at the same time by a friend I made online. She showed me a Hetalia hand-drawn MAD that had one of Luka's songs as BGM; after that, there was no going back for me, my child self was so amazed and wanted to understand those songs more than ever.

Naturally, I joined the fandom, where I got to know of the existence of doujinshi and fangames.

(Me after watching that video.) So I begged my mom to take me to Japanese classes. At first it was hard to find a school because I was younger than the minimum age some required but we eventually found one. Unfortunately, the courses at that school went only up to lower intermediate level (N3) so I finished rather quick. That was enough to understand doujinshi and pixiv comics but it took me literally hours to read through even short doujinshi and many songs I liked were still out of my league so I was a bit bummed. Around that time, I got super into hetaoni and I was really frustrated because I was struggling to understand all the dialogue but, when one of the translators in the fandom started translating it, I was so impressed and grateful and just wanted to be cool like them and help others understand too. That was probably the moment I decided I wanted to start translating for others as well and pay the favor forward.

Eventually, I grew confident enough to talk to a translator (it took me ages because I was extremely shy, like the kind that gets anxious and can’t even order at a restaurant shy lol) and ask them if they could check a few attempts I had made at translating stuff and I was glad when it wasn't ridden with corrections as I thought it would be.

I wanted to go back to classes but my schedule back then was packed with activities so I was like whatever, I'll teach myself the grammar for the next certification level and so, with the help of very useful webs like japanesetest4you, I did just that and I passed, against all odds. I did the same for the final one but I failed on my first try because my reading speed was not fast enough to finish all the readings, so I hired a tutor who made me read articles like crazy, against time for 6 months... it was torture, but it worked lol.

I'm still learning to this day, because I want to master it, but I basically use the skills I've obtained so far for exactly the same reason I started learning, which is understanding songs, video games, doujinshi and novels, as well as helping others understand them and hopefully encourage them to start their own learning journey.

Ao.