Why does it take so long for updates?
I usually spend about three-four hours on a chapter of 1k words. That's because most of the time the translation is like: ‘jousama, it is very bad news! Teges country has attacked!’ and after I think about the language and the context it arises from it becomes -> “Your highness, Queen Alana. The country of Teges has rescinded upon our alliance and turned their backs against us. Without any forewarning of this matter, they have managed to ambush…” I find light novels a lot more harder to translate than web-novels (both for Korean and Japanese). A hard part of translating Niko's and other authors' writing is the amount of metaphors and figurative language used. She’s got a wide vocabulary, and fantastic diction, that most often only works in Japanese, so finding English equivalents are sometimes difficult. e.g: (tl) ‘let them blow bubbles' -> (eng) 'let them be so frightened by this massacre that they started frothing at their mouths where it looks like they're literally blowing bubbles' -> (edit) 'let them reel in this delight.' or, (tl) 'his head was rolling on the ground' -> (edit) 'he racked his brain', and countless other metaphors that frequently appear. (it's also quite funny at times - in one of the later tvl chapters the word sexy milk appears which is obvs a metonymy for breasts, which in jp it's an understandable metaphor but in english it'd be wack if i translated it like that.) As a translator, I aim to translate the meaning of the words without losing the beauty of the writing. I constantly ask myself what does quality and textual integrity look like? I hope to retain the author's intent whilst allowing the reader to still read smoothly :)
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Excerpts of novels that I have not committed to translating but would like to see translated. If the teaser garners enough attention, I might consider picking it up.
You can check the status of the series on the title page. I promise not to drop a series without any announcement! If a series does not have 'dropped' but has yet to be updated in a while, my tanslation speed is probably just slow for that project.
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