[random] It's for my own good, I'm learning so much

[unjapanologist]

 Translating a symposium piece for a future issue of Transformative Works and Cultures from Japanese to English: four hours of smooth, enjoyable working with occasional snags but overall good progress.

Translating and transcribing the bibliography to said piece and putting all the points and commas in the right places: a full extra fours hours of screaming frustration. *twitch* 

At least it was a paper on a topic similar to my own research, so now I can chuck the transcribed references into the awesome multilingual Zotero. Then I won't have to transcribe them again when I have to make the bibliography for my own dissertation (and that will be the worst week of my entire life for sure, no matter how much I desperately try to automate everything related to it).

Bibliography hatred aside, I heartily recommend OmegaT if you do translations on a regular basis. Open source, cross-platform, easy to use, bunches of automation goodness, and the dictionary can sync with my personal research terminology database. One of those programs that I'm truly grateful exist.

Comments

[abrae]

Wow, thank you for the information about OmegaT. I haven't done translating for several months, but something like this sounds ideal going forward.

And what excellent news about the piece you're translating - I can't wait to see it out!

[unjapanologist]

It's for an issue that's coming out next year. Will definitely mention it here.

And I haven't forgotten that I still owe you a long message. Sorry!

[foxinthestars]

Mmm, I will have to check out OmegaT...

[unjapanologist]

It's basically the open source version of expensive translation suites like Trados. It's probably overkill for people who have to translate pretty rarely, but if it's a regular thing, the dictionary and the sentence-matching with previous translations really come in extremely handy.

[bookshop]

hey, hey! I was wondering if you knew or had heard anything about the J-Manga translation battle? http://facebook.com/jmanga.official i think is the website. I went to a Dragon Con panel given by a Viz editor and he mentioned it. I'm not sure if this is a cause for wariness or excitement! Thoughts? :D

[unjapanologist]

I didn't know about it, had a quick look just now. I don't think there's cause for wariness in particular - the rules say "JManga will retain all rights in your submissions", but that's pretty standard for a contest, and it seems like contestants will all be translating just a part of the same couple of manga volumes anyway. Doesn't look like there's any risk of fan labor being exploited like in some other "let the fans translate" ventures we've seen.

At the same time, it's not really something I'm personally excited about. Allowing exactly one winner to become a professional manga translator is nice for the winner and all, but a bog-standard contest does nothing to encourage structural changes to the system of manga publishing that leads to scanlations (an issue that judge Deb Aoki, for instance, is pretty keen on 'solving' as far as I can remember. Haven't actually read anything by her in a long time). Maybe this info is hidden somewhere, but it doesn't sound like they're trying to invent a potentially innovative business model to harness the powers of fan translators for the benefit of all.

So as far as I can tell, harmless fun that's probably just a marketing gimmick for J-manga. Have any other people found issues with it?