User talk:Bersayaka

Question

Are you fluent in Japanese? Because I reverted back one change where you altered the meaning of the translation. Fixing a little grammar is fine but altering the meaning of translations is a different story. --randomanon 01:07, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

About my recent edits

(Moved to your talk page since this is about your changes.) --randomanon 01:45, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

The ridiculous TL note was that he said something like "laugh at it like baka (silly)". That's like a parody of a terrible sub, like "All according to keikaku (TL note: keikaku = plan)" or "I fed the neko (TL note: neko = cat)". Even if you switched "baka" for "silly", it still didn't make grammatical sense in English. Am I right in thinking you reverted a part to "but the end that she reached is the burst up of the feeling of “an ordinary girl”"? Because that makes no sense in English whatsoever. I'm not trying to be aggressive about this, and I'm grateful to that guy for translating this stuff, but it really does need to be gone over by someone fluent in English. I know it does indeed say "burst" in the the Japanese, but a loan word that's obviously being use in a strange way in Japanese shouldn't be left that way when brought back to English. It's like how German's call mobile phones "Handys", and assume that we in Britain and America (etc) do too, because it's a loan word from English. If we translated German to English, we'd obviously change "Handy" to "mobile" or "cell phone", even though it's an English word. Sorry for coming across a bit antagonistically, I'd actually be willing to go through it with him so he can explain the meaning to me and I can rewrite it in a faithful way rather than possibly bastardising it. Bersayaka 01:24, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Look, we have things translated on this site from symbv since October 2010 and you're this guy who showed up today and decided to immediately insult his work. The guy doesn't even watch anime with subs and probably never even heard of gg and most certainly does not do anything resembling trolling. He's a big fan of Madoka and followed it months before it even aired. The guy has translated over a hundred things easily on this site and I don't feel like bothering him over every little grammatical issue, no matter how much you're "actually willing to go through it with him," especially since he's constantly working on translating new raws for us. I post new translations from him on a weekly basis. Either people live with the translations or someone fluent, and I do mean fluent not I recognize a word here or there from my second year Japanese course, can make changes that alter the meaning of the translations. And frankly if you were that fluent, I'd ask you to translate the dozens of raw scans on the site that we have that haven't been translated yet. Slight amendment of thought: If there is a content issue where the clarity of the translation is an issue for someone's analysis or so-on, that's fine I think to ask him to clarify the matter as an occasional favor. But not just because it offends someone's sense of grammar. --randomanon 01:44, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

It's more that large parts of it made no sense before at all. It's not that I have a peculiarly high standard, it's that it wasn't actually in proper English to the point that it was difficult to discern any meaning at all. The other translations I've seen are fine, either sounding totally natural or maybe with the odd strange choice of word here and their (e.g. Homura "flipping" through her hair). I mean, I assumed the Sayaka description was done by a different guy who wasn't a fluent English speaker. Maybe it was a weird passage to translate, maybe he was having an off day, maybe the other ones have been edited? I really don't know. As for the gg trollsub thing, I wasn't saying he actually is trollsubbing, for crying out loud, I was saying that leaving words in Japanese and then following them with the Eigo (English) right afterwards is ridiculous, and the kind of koto (thing) subbers do for a jodan (joke). But really, let's leave it at that. I think we've got off on the wrong foot here, and for that I apologise. Bersayaka 02:34, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

At the top of that page it says all the translations were done by him. OK, I'm fully aware that the translations on here are often imperfect but it requires a high level of proficiency to translate a magazine scan. Not many people are at that level and fewer still are willing to spend the time to do it. So it's simple, if you're not at that level and understand the source scan well enough (not where you're guessing what he "really meant" from the English or picking out some kanji you know here or there...much of its meaning is heavily influenced by context) to know exactly how the translation should be changed, then don't alter the meaning of it done by the guy who does understand it well and furthermore has his name attributed to that translation. Our priority is to get the raws--which I get new ones every week--translated. We have quite the backlog on that. So fixing the grammar of an article is not going to be a priority request unless, like I said, it has some kind of immediate and consequential effect on someone's analysis or so on. There's plenty of other things needed on the wiki, starting with the Wishlist [1]. I ask that if you don't fully understand the source document, please don't alter the translation. To refer to subs as an example, I rather take a clumsily worded "yesy"-type accurate translation over a glib-sounding gg translation that isn't as accurate. The first is much easier to ID and fix by a fluent translator if/when that time comes. As for "It's more that large parts of it made no sense before at all," I seriously hope you aren't suggesting that the translation parts you altered were unintelligible until you made your changes, because all but the one I reverted (which frankly you were off on) were minor grammar fixes that made no substantial changes in understanding the article. --randomanon 03:26, 25 August 2011 (UTC)