I wonder if these translation issues might have led to the pulling down of chapter 10 by the original TL. I read it a couple days ago, posted it, but then it was pulled from MD, so I pulled down my post as well. I am fairly forgiving of getting names wrong when translating because kanji readings in names can be weird (even native speakers mess it up). However, the fact that this had furigana and it was just completely ignored is pretty damning.
I didn’t know any of that, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I feel for the original scanlators. Presuming, as seems likely, that they were in fact using MTL, the fact that their version wasn’t obvious Engrish implies that they were still spending time and effort massaging and clarifying whatever they were getting, which in turn implies that they meant well but came up short.
I can’t even begin to read Japanese, but there are a bunch of manga I love that have fallen by the wayside, and I can redraw and set type and I’m confident that I can “translate” Engrish into sensible prose, so I’m often tempted to try MTLing them. But I just can’t bring myself to actually do it specifically because I’m afraid that I’d fuck it up without even knowing.
And I know if it was me and I posted something, only to have someone who can actually read Japanese come along and point out my mistakes, I couldn’t delete it fast enough.
Yeah, I get it. My kanji knowledge is woefully insufficient to be able to read most native Japanese writing, so I would also need to rely on MTL for most of the translation. I respect the previous TL for putting in the effort to proofread the MTL into a readable and comprehensible format. Names are particularly difficult for MTL due to the very uncommon kanji readings people will use for them. At the end of the day, I am glad we are going to be getting more content in this series going forward.
I suspected the translation on this was relatively poor, but wasn’t sure. It wasn’t obvious Engrish, so it wasn’t self-evidently poor, and there’s some vague and complex mysteries going on here, so some lack of clarity is to be expected, but it just seemed that there wasn’t enough sense to what was being said and I was having to invest too much effort into figuring out what was happening.
This version is much better. We still only get hints and implications and things only half-said, but it’s much easier to see how they all fit together, so I have to assume that this is more accurate.
