Discord

ABOUT US

We’re a small group of hobbyists who like light novels, and are passionate about their localizations. Brought together by our shared love for Japanese culture, we soon found ourselves enraptured with the art of bringing it to new audiences.

We don’t translate words. We translate feeling. We translate tone, humor, and cultural nuance so as to convey the author’s intent, at least in the way we interpret it.

Please note that we are by no means professionals, and that we cannot guarantee professional-level localization. However, there are a few things we can guarantee. Namely, that we are human translators and not MTL slop, and we actually put out readable English, not the stuff you’ve been tricked into thinking is readable.

But please understand that we are not a business, and nobody is getting paid to do this. For that reason, we appreciate you not asking us when something is going to release.

Similarly, we try our best to not give any sort of deadline. At the most, we may give soft estimates, or a duration we don’t think we’d take longer than. But you have to understand that we are people too, and life happens. We get burnt out. We cannot dedicate every moment of our lives to this.

This is a passion project, first and foremost. Every release we put out is something we’ve spent time on, argued over, refined, and reread an infinite amount of times.

P.S. i’m in high school btw

- rsa

HOW WE TRANSLATE

Step One is, obviously, obtaining the raws. We usually buy ours from Bookwalker, unless I can grab them from someone I know. It depends on the series, but a lot of the time I’ll also read the volume beforehand (or at least the chapter) without worrying too much about the translation. The goal here is to just understand the general narrative before I dive into it.

Step Two is to do background research. Anything you didn’t get into fully in Step One, you look into here. This is especially important for series that reference weirdly niche topics or obscure slang / dialogue styles, et cetera.

Step Three is all about preparation and formatting. Generally, I’ll setup a Drive folder for each series and create a doc for each chapter. In each chapter doc, I like to have three tabs: 1) the raws, 2) an MTL line-by-line breakdown, and 3) the actual document I’ll be translating into. (Note that the MTL line-by-line is SOLELY for checking the translation afterwards. Because MTLs tend to be very literal (see bad translation), I find it easier to catch issues with over-interpreting or overlocalizing if you cross-reference an MTL alongside its Japanese counterpart).

Step Four is the actual first rough draft. This is the first-pass translation and in my opinion, one of the harder parts. I leave comments throughout the doc with notes on ambiguous lines, tone decisions, and I’ll add translation notes as needed (though usually I’ll just add something like TODO: tl note this later and then… pray I actually remember to do it).

I find it helpful to keep a glossary for names, terminology, and character notes, so we can reference those and give them to editors so we all know that we’re keeping things consistent. Though I haven’t had personally have had that huge of a use for a glossary, it’s especially useful for translators who work on anything remotely lore-heavy.

During step four, if I hit a sentence I can’t immediately think of a good translation for, I tend to get stuck on it and spend time nitpicking until I land on something I’m satisfied with. Though it’s not exactly the most efficient habit, I find it hard to move on otherwise. When in doubt, I’ll try to stick to leaving a more over-literal translation—it’s much easier to clean up overly-literal translations in a later editing pass than an overly-localized one.

I do lookup words a lot (like a lot), and if I don’t feel confident enough in a word, I’ll look up native dictionaries and even dig through forum posts (especially for slang). If I’m having trouble parsing an especially complicated sentence, I use stuff like ichi.moe to help me break it down (very helpful service btw).

Oh, and the workflow for translating itself is pretty simple.

  • Read the whole page once and contextualize it in my mind
  • Break it into logical chunks based on what is happening in the narrative
  • Carefully read each part, analyze it, and understand the tone and intent the author was going for. How did they want the reader to feel?
  • Lookup words as needed, compare definitions on a theasarus, weigh options along with how they may affect the sentence.
  • Then, I interpret the sense of the translation into English.

This is called sense-by-sense translation: you translate the sense of the section rather than it’s literal meaning. You take the meaning, filter it through your understanding, and then express it naturally in the target language, rather than sticking rigidly to the original phrasing.

Step Five and Six are the two main editing passes. Of course, there are often a bunch of smaller passes in between those ones, but I generally consider those as the overarching passes. The difference, however, is that in Step Five we specifically edit with the source text side-by-side (along with a line-by-line MTL) and in Step Six we edit without. Across several iterations of editing, you’ll notice that the process gradually shifts from ensuring acuracy to ensuring fluency and naturalness. Honestly, I think at minimum you should do an editing pass at least 2-3 times. Any less than that is too little. There’s no such thing as too much.

Then, in step six, we generally just make sure that everything sounds completely natural. We polish prose, make sure dialogue flows, cut out any awkward literal phrasing, etc.

Step Seven is a final proofreading pass, just to make sure everything reads naturally. It’s basically our version of quality control (since we don’t have actual quality control, hehe).

Step Eight we create the EPUBs, generate covers, skim the EPUB like once through, and then push the release out.

OUR TRANSLATION PHILOSOPHY

We at Curry Muncher Translations are firm believers of adaptive localization. We recognize that translations are inherently subjective, and that there is no such thing as a perfect translation. We believe that the quality of a translation is determined by how effectively it is able to recreate:

  1. The emotional impact of the original narrative
  2. Character relationships
  3. The stylistic and authorial intent of the original source

Our ultimate goal is to create an experience where a reader of the translated text processes the narrative identically to the way a source language reader read. In this sense, translators are co-writers, shaping the story so it resonates naturally with the target audience. We argue that adaptive localization is almost always a better approach than literal translation, and we endorse techniques such as restructuring, idiomatic substitution, selective explicitation, and adaptation to a context that is easier for an English reader to understand.

As a fan translation group, we have the unique ability to use translation notes to convey nuances that localization alone cannot. This is what sets us apart from official translations. The best translation is one that reads naturally, conveys the author’s intent, and simultaneously conveying subtle nuance to the reader. Official translators, constrained by their inability to provide explanatory notes, often over-localize to compensate. We, however, reject the wholesale rewriting of cultural nuance and strive to preserve the source’s cultural and stylistic integrity.

Some argue that a “good” translation is one that closely mirrors the original Japanese style and conveys the “sense” of the Japanese, and they state that machine translations or overly literal renderings better capture this essence. Let it be known that we vehemently disagree with this opinion. A proper translation should convey the original style in a way that sounds natural to an English-speaking audience. The sense of the Japanese, as some may so call it, is just bad, awkward sounding translation that obscures the author’s intent rather than preserving it.

Translators must balance two overarching goals when adapting a text: fidelity to the source text and readability for the target audience. Fidelity involves preserving meaning, style, and cultural specificity to the extent that the translator’s interpretation reflects the closest possible approximation of the original. Note that different translators have different interpretations on what makes a book close to the original. Readability focuses on how much a translator can produce a fluent and engaging text that feels natural and enjoyable to their target audience. Different translation methodologies place different weights on these goals.

From our perspective, there are three main approaches to translation:

  1. “Faithful” / Source-oriented translation
    This approach strives to be as literally close as possible to the original. It attempts to emulate the source structure, the exact wording, and tries not to audit any of the author’s voice whatsoever with no addition of the translator’s voice. Their goal is to not add any of their own flair and represent the author objectively. Be warned that this is not the definition of faithful, and barely even translating, in our opinion.
  2. Reader-oriented / sense-for-sense dynamic equivalence
    This approach focuses on making the target language reader feel the same way a Japanese reader would. It aims to convey the intended effect and meaning, rather than their literal equivalence. This approach recognizes that the Japanese express tone less explicitly through literal nuance and more through subtle nuance. English, on the other hand, often requires more internal monologue and emotional markers to feel natural, so “implicit emotion” in Japanese might need to be explicitly defined in English.
  3. Adapted / Localized Translation
    This approach seeks to recreate the reading experience in a completely new linguistic and cultural context. As we stated, this comes with the understanding that the translator is a co-writer, and translators who adhere to this often add a lot of their own flair. This flair, of course, is not needless and is to enhance and translate the effect to a different cultural context. The aim is to elicit the same emotional and aesthetic response.

The biggest differences between these three methodologies is the level of abstraction the translator operates on when deciding what to convey. At the most basic level, the translator’s purview consists of words, and then sentences trying to conveying an idea. Looking further at the bigger picture, and it is no longer about conveying meaning but mood, and atmosphere. Looking even further and the sentence is performing some sort of narrative or rhetorical role in the work.

CMTLS primarily operates within that third methodology of translation. Our approach emphasizes not just the words, not just the sentences, but the bigger picture; the entire mood, atmosphere, and narrative function of the text. We at CMTLS consider translation to be an adaptation of the original source. A translation can never truly represent the source itself; it is merely an adaptation to a different context. And there is no such thing as a perfect translation (besides, perhaps, if the author themselves translated it), because translation is inherently subjective and interpretive. As Washburn eloquently states in his translation of The Tale of Genji, “The art of literature only comes into being at the moment of engagement between reader and text… To put the point in a different way, the only truly original text is one that has never been read.”

Ultimately, our mission is to bridge the gap between cultures and languages while honoring the author’s intent. We aim to provide translations that are faithful to the spirit of the source, while still resonating with the reader’s emotions and being found enjoyable to read.

The art of literature only comes into being at the moment of engagement between reader and text, and since every such engagement is different, there can never be a definitive reading. Since all translators are readers first and foremost, the most considered justification I can offer (especially to myself) is a paradoxical one: I have undertaken this work precisely because there can be no such thing as a definitive translation. The very idea of somehow completely capturing in one language a text in another is a chimera, for the text possesses the reader as much as the reader/translator possesses the text. Thus, I believe it is only through multiple translations of brilliantly complex and historically influential narratives like Genji monogatari that we can “get at” a source work in another language, that the art created in the moment of reading can be made truly manifest.

Translating, then, is a deeply humbling task because it heightens our awareness of the parochial nature of all languages and forces the translator to confront issues of faithfulness, originality, and influence that can never be fully resolved. In a sense a translation is a virtual palimpsest, a writing over of one language by another that unavoidably acts as a mediating barrier to the very text it strives to make intelligible. As a mediation of something considered authentic and original, translation can be justified only if it maintains the pretense that it is accurate and sincere in its attitude toward the source work. Indeed, translation is so fundamental to cultural exchange that its contradictory nature can seem like an analytical illusion, something that is there only when one thinks about it. The common tendency to set aside the more troublesome aspects of translation as an abstract annoyance that interferes with the readerly pretense of “getting at” that authentic something of the source text explains why the ideal of translation is transparency - a style of writing that somehow makes the translator’s presence undetectable so that the reader may experience the original in an unmediated way. But that experience is a trick of the mind. A translation is an extremely intrusive form of reading, but it is a form of reading all the same, one that makes explicit the fact that literary texts only come into being as art in the consciousness of readers. In a very real sense, the authentic text of a work like Genji monogatari - the “original” that any translation gestures toward - is the sum of all its readings. To put the point in a different way, the only truly original text is one that has never been read.

- Dennis Washburn, The Tale of Genji

Preface