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Anonymous Rabbit · 3mo

i hope this isn't rude or overstepping much but i saw a tweet you made a while ago that was really judgemental about 18trip translations, is it really fair to be so harsh on them? some people can be starting out, they don't have much control if they have mistakes...

i'll be real with you, anon: i personally believe that if you put a translation out for the public to read, they should at the very least be presentable. like at least make it understandable in the target language. yes, everyone starts out as beginners and i was too! i still consider myself one. however, i always reached out for help in order to improve the quality. particularly those who are more experience than me and that i trust to put out quality work. i'm able to learn this way too!

the problem with low quality translations being out and about is that they'll become the norm when they Shouldn't be. 18trip isn't the only one with this problem—prsk is littered with them. not only that, a lot of the players genuinely think that the wonky tls are better than something that's more natural sounding. this is what low quality tls being abundant means: it'll fuck up readers' minds. it's genuinely frustrating and honestly they're almost as bad as those who whine about localization for adding "western politics"

for another example, just look at scanlation. bruh, low quality shit everywhere. what's worse is that people would put out sloppy shit fast for clout which would cause those who actually put in the effort to not work on the series anymore. i'm most familiar with the bl scene as that's what i'm translating, but there's SOOOOO much trash scans out there and people will literally just settle for that. oh, did i mention sniping? yes, there's some bastards out there that'll "continue" a group's scan if they're taking too long. oh, and the quality would be utter crap too. just look at mgo. google translated shit with horrid typesetting... literally illegible and makes you wonder if they ever laid their eyes on a professionally published comic before. it's SO bad there

let's not to mention that if a low quality translation comes out first, people would only read that version of it. if a better version came out, there'll be less people reading it as they already read another one, even if there's tons of mistranslations on it

i could go on and on about this, really. i have so much to say. tl;dr: ask for help. don't settle for speed over quality. the more lq translations out there, the more it becomes the norm. and people will often only read stories once and won't reread if a higher quality version came out later

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