Talk:AFA11 Interview Chiwa Saito

The grammar of this interview is really bad. The most disturbing part is Saito-san referring to herself as "she" in answer to the question about her favorite character. It's been posted like that on ani-culture, I don't know if it's an unedited transcript of the interview which went just like that, or the ani-culture's editor is not that good at English (it seems so, judging from other posts), or was it unskillfully translated from some East Asian language (Japanese or Chinese, perhaps). Anyway, should we leave it as it is (because it was originally posted this way) or is i OK to edit it ourselves? --kFYatek 22:22, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

I took the liberty of editing it. If someone has a problem with it, I'll take responsibility. I don't change the substance of translations, but I will do minor fixes on spelling and grammar for clarity. --randomanon 22:25, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Follow-up: Well, I don't agree with the approach of making major changes, especially with things like wording where the original wording was perfectly acceptable English. "Illuminations" instead of "lighting," and "closing words" instead of "any last words," is really going too far in my opinion. In making changes like this, you're changing the "voice" of the person speaking rather than making corrections that simply clarify understanding. Do you understand what I mean, KFYatek? If you do, please go back and reconsider what changes really need to be made for a reader to understand. Unfortunately we don't have the original Japanese to go for accuracy check but I can tell some things were more accurate in the original interview wording. She's using a standard "thanks, I'll work hard" phrase at the end which has the properly translated "works" in it, not "performances." --randomanon 23:52, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Conclusions

I had to think about this as a matter beyond this interview, because we have many other examples of imperfect English in other cited sources for magazine interviews and so on. We've left them largely intact except for minor spelling and grammar fixes and I think I prefer it this way, rather than opening the door to having people making all kinds of edits to make things sound better (and in the process, getting further and further away from the original meanings). The exception of course is if someone with good Japanese sees the original text and provides a better translation, which actually gets us closer to understanding the original meanings.

This applies only to sources who aren't directly involved with the wiki. In other words, if we have anons and users who are making translations, others can change it because if something is wrong, the original person can go back and fix it, etc. However, for outside sources and many outside interpreters, that's often not possible or not realistic to expect, so we should let their translation work stand unless/until a good translator comes along and can provide a more accurate translation based on their understanding of the original text (in cases where this applies, obviously it won't for this Chiwa Saito interview). --randomanon 00:56, 14 December 2011 (UTC)