Hey all I’m back with an answer to a frequent question I’ve had for this week’s Translation Necessary Thursday! It’s An Explanation on Subject Matter
What Question?: Well I’ve been asked quite a bit why I don’t cover books like the Play to Live series or officially translated Light Novels and the like in this column. The answer is pretty simple, because they aren’t really the same to me.
Bulls*&% Michael!: No really, they aren’t the same thing to me. Not to mention the frequency with which they release official translations are slow as hell and isn’t going to meet any serious readers demands either. If I cover something that was translated in my Bookish Wednesday column like I did for yesterday’s Patch 17 it means that it’s been released in an Audiobook format and/or it usually has been available and translated for people who really want to read it on the internet for a while already. This isn’t always the case, but frankly I can’t be bothered to care about such things. I’m not going to pay for a translation that is often riddled with mistakes and I’m certainly not going to suggest others to buy such poorly made products either. I often get my source material for Bookish Wednesday from my local library for free.
But what about Yen Press and others like them?: Like I said above, it takes way too long for them to release things that have been on the net for months, often years, prior and have already been translated in a quality fashion by fans for fans. If they want to earn my respect, and I’m going to bet a vast majority of fans respect, they won’t earn it by releasing things so slowly. That isn’t to say they don’t do quality work, although sometimes it’s questionable, but speed has a big factor of whether people will buy it.
So why all the Chinese Novels recently?: Because I don’t like advocating going out there and finding books with “grey” methods. It’s not wrong in my opinion because I’m all for free stories, but the rest of the world doesn’t see it that way. So with the Chinese novels I try to cover series that have gotten official approval or authors flat out don’t care all that much. It’s also why I’m not active anymore on the Baka-Tsuki forums, even though I’m an official “leader” and have access to what they do in their admin forums. I put my two cents in on the subject and they decided to go a different route from what I suggested. I don’t agree and so I won’t cover stuff hosted by them anymore, unless the translated material is truly extraordinary.
That’s it for this week’s Translation Necessary Thursday!