

How I became and un-became a manga translator - bemmu
http://www.bemmu.com/how-i-became-and-unbecame-a-manga-translator

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Mithaldu
Yeah, he discovered the cruel truth that translation work isn't seen as
cerebral at all by most people, and just thought of as factory labor, to be
underpaid and forced to push as hard as possible.

I was once on a similar path, localizing MMOs, and am so glad i got out of
that and into software development.

~~~
bemmu
The best part of it was that I was basically getting paid to learn Japanese.
Had I continued on that path my language skills would be amazing at this
point.

~~~
Mithaldu
That actually makes me a little envious. :)

I only got the job at a point where i was already very fluent in english, and
got into dev because i had enough learning time to learn programming skills to
help the translations.

As for your language skills, does that mean you live in japan, have a business
selling things from japan, but aren't fully fluent?

(Also, as a subscriber, i adore the service and hope you'll be doing it for
some time to come. :D)

~~~
bemmu
Yes, there's a standard Japanese test which has levels 1 to 5, called JLPT. 1
is the highest and 5 lowest, I was able to pass level 2. It's sort of
exponential though, you need to know twice as much for each next level
basically.

~~~
e12e
More information:
[https://www.jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html](https://www.jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html)

I seem to recall that Japanese Universities require level 3 for exchange
students to enroll in Japanese language classes. That's probably not enough to
follow lectures, but probably enough to get to the level of being able to
follow lectures after 3-6 months.

My literacy is pretty poor, so I don't think I'd be able to pass a level 3
test, but I think apart from the literacy part it's probably a decent
description of my current level.

Coming from latin-alphabet languages, it takes some effort to get up to speed
-- the primary school curriculum is 1006[1] kanji characters, along with
2*48[2] (depending of how one counts) kana. And that's just the bare minimum,
general literacy is ~3000 kanji.

It's a fascinating language, and learning it gives some interesting linguistic
perspectives because it's so different, especially from other big languages.
It's also a rather simple language -- the main difficulty lies in how
different Japanese is, due to the long isolation.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyōiku_kanji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyōiku_kanji)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana)

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erikb
As always it's supply and demand. Translating Mangas/Animes is considered so
coool that way too many are willing to do way too much work for way too little
pay. As a result the work sucks, considering it as a normal job.

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matxip
I've done some 'scanlations' work. I couldn't imagine doing it for a job
though.

On one hand, there's some pressures and social issues to grapple with when
doing scanlations. For example, You can essentially start turf wars by taking
on certain projects, even if the 'maintainer' is grossly neglecting the
project or non-communicative. Also, the readers are very passionate people,
and they have a direct line to air their grievances with the
translation/typesetting/rate of release/etc. There's also, of course, the
moral issue of enabling what is essentially just piracy.

On the other hand, you're able to work on a manga you're passionate about, or
at the very least interested in without worrying about licensing/etc. And
being unbeholden to anyone on the level of accuracy-versus-fluidity and
offensiveness is definitely very valuable.

Even just doing it for fun was pretty brutal though. I have a lot of respect
for the ancient groups and members that've been plugging away at it forever.

