I need your advice!
There are two things about which I'd love to hear your opinions, my dear f-list.
First up, should I lock up my translations? Because, as of late, I have, by chance, come across quite a few incidents when excerpts from or the whole of my translations are posted around, or used in fanvids and such, without credit. Seriously, how hard would it be for those people to include a minuscule line stating the fact that those stuffs are not their works? It's not like I want everyone to be eternally grateful for those translations or anything, but some simple acknowledgment couldn't sound too bad, no?
How about it? Do you girls figure I should just f-lock my translation posts on this LJ or create another LJ, move all of my translations there, and lock it up?
The second question is a more pressing one actually. Should I continue to allow re-translation of my posts?
Up until now I've been really easy-going about this matter, in the sense that I would consent to any re-translation request without discrimination. In all cases, there is ever only one tiny condition that I hope to be upheld, which is for a link back to my original translation to be included in the re-translation post. And no, that condition is not because I am an egoistical wench who loves to attract as many viewers as possible to her personal page (well, I can't deny that I AM egoistical, but such is not the case here). I require a link to be included because I know that re-translations can make the meaning of a sentence deviate a fearful distance away from the original. Therefore, in my opinion, the readers should be notified of the fact that they bear that kind of risk in reading the re-translation, and they should be provided of a mean to track back to the English version if they so wish. Even though there is no guarantee that English version of mine is perfect, at least it is interpreted directly from Japanese, thus carries, to a certain degree, less risk compared to a re-translation.
Guess what? The other day when I browsed through some Vietnamese sites during my free time at work, I was totally freaked out, level 1, when I saw my translations re-translated without the link back, none to my LJ and certainly none to my original posts. I was freaked out, level 2, when I took a closer look at those re-translations and saw, to my utter horror, that some parts of those posts went so very far away from the original Japanese version.
Some of those inaccuracies are due to the translators', erm, forgive me for sounding conceited here, obvious lack of English knowledge. For example, let's see, in my post, I wrote: "everyone joined in for a toast" and it was translated into a Vietnamese sentence which would roughly mean "everyone ate some bread together". Oh my...
A larger part of those inaccuracies is due to the inexplicable (to me at least) tendency of the translators to include emotional annotations of their owns into the posts. For example, you know that in Japanese interviews it's common for the note "(laugh)" to appear at the end of a sentence, right? But after going through the hands of my fellow Vietnamese translators, they very usually come with additional adverbs/adjectives such as "(shyly smile)" or "(evil smirk)". And I swear that I'm at a loss as to from where they took those ideas.
*sigh* In one of the interviews I read/translated, I remember Jun saying that he's wary of how magazine interviews are recorded through others' hands, and so what he meant to say might not come out exactly as he wanted on those. That statement of Jun made me, since then, try to keep my translations as literal as possible and add T/Ns whenever literalness calls for further explanation. But now, with those re-translations sprouting from my posts and my easy-going policy, I'm starting to feel somewhat guilty...
Input for me, anyone?
First up, should I lock up my translations? Because, as of late, I have, by chance, come across quite a few incidents when excerpts from or the whole of my translations are posted around, or used in fanvids and such, without credit. Seriously, how hard would it be for those people to include a minuscule line stating the fact that those stuffs are not their works? It's not like I want everyone to be eternally grateful for those translations or anything, but some simple acknowledgment couldn't sound too bad, no?
How about it? Do you girls figure I should just f-lock my translation posts on this LJ or create another LJ, move all of my translations there, and lock it up?
The second question is a more pressing one actually. Should I continue to allow re-translation of my posts?
Up until now I've been really easy-going about this matter, in the sense that I would consent to any re-translation request without discrimination. In all cases, there is ever only one tiny condition that I hope to be upheld, which is for a link back to my original translation to be included in the re-translation post. And no, that condition is not because I am an egoistical wench who loves to attract as many viewers as possible to her personal page (well, I can't deny that I AM egoistical, but such is not the case here). I require a link to be included because I know that re-translations can make the meaning of a sentence deviate a fearful distance away from the original. Therefore, in my opinion, the readers should be notified of the fact that they bear that kind of risk in reading the re-translation, and they should be provided of a mean to track back to the English version if they so wish. Even though there is no guarantee that English version of mine is perfect, at least it is interpreted directly from Japanese, thus carries, to a certain degree, less risk compared to a re-translation.
Guess what? The other day when I browsed through some Vietnamese sites during my free time at work, I was totally freaked out, level 1, when I saw my translations re-translated without the link back, none to my LJ and certainly none to my original posts. I was freaked out, level 2, when I took a closer look at those re-translations and saw, to my utter horror, that some parts of those posts went so very far away from the original Japanese version.
Some of those inaccuracies are due to the translators', erm, forgive me for sounding conceited here, obvious lack of English knowledge. For example, let's see, in my post, I wrote: "everyone joined in for a toast" and it was translated into a Vietnamese sentence which would roughly mean "everyone ate some bread together". Oh my...
A larger part of those inaccuracies is due to the inexplicable (to me at least) tendency of the translators to include emotional annotations of their owns into the posts. For example, you know that in Japanese interviews it's common for the note "(laugh)" to appear at the end of a sentence, right? But after going through the hands of my fellow Vietnamese translators, they very usually come with additional adverbs/adjectives such as "(shyly smile)" or "(evil smirk)". And I swear that I'm at a loss as to from where they took those ideas.
*sigh* In one of the interviews I read/translated, I remember Jun saying that he's wary of how magazine interviews are recorded through others' hands, and so what he meant to say might not come out exactly as he wanted on those. That statement of Jun made me, since then, try to keep my translations as literal as possible and add T/Ns whenever literalness calls for further explanation. But now, with those re-translations sprouting from my posts and my easy-going policy, I'm starting to feel somewhat guilty...
Input for me, anyone?