GG manga translation problems

[rallamajoop]

So, we've hit this spot of trouble with those Guilty Gear manga translations we were working on.

As any of you who've been following the project might remember, jaseroque and I were working with sethyhide and raging_tofu to get the scans and translations done (specifically, they contacted us after we posted the script for the second chapter asking if we'd like to collaborate, and naturally we leapt on the offer - the more help the better, right?) At last check sethyhide was going to start on chapter 8 when she got the chance, jaseroque and I were working on translating chapter 9, and raging_tofu was getting ready to post her scans. Everyone seemed pretty positive about things in the messages I'd gotten and things generally seemed to be going well.

Then out of the blue, this message shows up at the Dustloop Forums thread where I'd been posting links to the scripts. After staring at it and wondering what was going on for a bit, I replied to it here and sent emails to both of the email addresses I'm aware sethyhide uses. It's been nearly two weeks now and neither have replied to me - I guess just as promised, I'm being ignored. Honestly, this is one of those posts I'd rather have avoided making if I thought there was any hope we could sort the problem out without dragging others into it, but apparently that's not an option. On the other hand, I know there are people watching this journal who've known them both longer than I have (and possibly others who'd just like to know why there hasn't been a new manga chapter translated in ages, which would also be perfectly fair), so this would be my attempt to lay out the situation and see if anyone else can help me figure out what's going on and what to do about it. 'Cause frankly, I'm at a bit of a loss right now.

I'm really not sure what jaseroque and I have done to deserve having our efforts publicly disparaged like that.

Going by the message, apparently I've been pressuring sethyhide to translate faster - and seriously, sethyhide, if you're reading this and you do feel that way, then I do apologise, it was never my intent to make you feel like you weren't keeping up. But as I said in my reply to that forum, I haven't even heard from her about the translations in something like a month, and I can't think of more than one brief question I've sent her to check how things were going on her end since then. Maybe I have somehow missed an email or skimmed over an LJ post on the subject since I last heard from her, or simply said something which got taken the wrong way, but unless someone points out to me what I've missed then I don't know where to start looking for the problem.

The other main accusation seems to be that I and jaseroque have been rushing through (yeah, at the breakneck pace of maybe one chapter a month if we're lucky) and producing dodgy translations. Since those translations have been online since August last year, and in that time neither they nor anyone else has corrected us on more than a couple of spelling errors, you can probably see why I'm so stumped to suddenly have them declared not good enough to be any use to anyone. But lets be fair - apparently they're only just now getting to the stage of putting the scanslations they were working on together, so maybe they hadn't bothered checking through them in any detail until now. So if there are errors (and I still haven't the faintest idea what kind errors there are even supposed to be) what I really don't get is why they'd tell us like this.

The idea that because there are two of us we don't have the right to make a single mistake is baffling enough - particularly given the way we've been approaching the project. The reality of the situation is that while I've got the free time and the enthusiasm to go hunting down most of the tricky kanji, my Japanese is nowhere near up to the task alone and I've never pretended it was. jaseroque is the one who's done the serious Japanese study. Once every week or two, I get her around to help me fill in the rest of the blanks, though even then there's a few parts here and there which use obscure terms or colloquialisms that she's not familiar with. So, could there be mistakes in the translations? Well, I sure hope there aren't many, but I can't rule it out. But the thing is, that's something we admitted that from the start of the project. For reference, here's what I said in the post that went with the very first translated script before raging_tofu first contacted me about collaborating, and what's also been in the About the translation page on the website ever since:

The scans we’re working for the rest of the chapters aren’t the best quality – a few panels here and there are cut off the edge of the page or too blurry to make out, and even with our collective Japanese skills there are a few bits here and there we’re not 100% certain about. Having said that though, we’re sure the result is still good enough to let people follow the story.

I guess that part could have been skim-read over or forgotten or something, but given that I know raging_tofu saw that first post before she contacted me, why all this sudden shock and horror at the idea our translations might not be absolutely perfect? As I said in my reply at the forum, I guess it is possible we didn't make it clear enough that we would have been very appreciative if they'd taken the time to check over our translations even after we posted them, but I thought expecting them to make the effort to do that when they both seemed so busy and (as far as I knew) happy with the work we'd done would be a bit unfair of me. Maybe I assumed wrong there - I don't have any way to know.

What I don't understand is why the very first thing I'd hear from either of them to tell us they were in any way unhappy with anything we've done on the project would be posted to a public message board. If sethyhide had sent me a reply saying 'look, I'm been putting off translating that next chapter because I've been focusing on your older chapters and frankly, I've been finding a lot of errors,' then I'd have been embarrassed and apologetic, and probably thanked her profusely for taking the time to correct my mistakes. Even 'wow, you guys have been making a lot of mistakes, are you sure you're up to this?' would have been fair enough if they could back it up with an example or two. But as it is, there's no specifics at all - I don't even have the faintest clue yet what kind of mistakes we're being accused of making. Is it a simple case of different interpretations of the same lines? Have I missed panels or gotten things in the wrong order? Have they simply never encountered the word 'ofukuro' being used as an archaic term for 'mother' before? Or have we really genuinely stuffed large parts of the chapters up? I don't know - neither of them will tell me. And I can't do anything make up for my mistakes or fix them if I don't know what I'm being accused of doing wrong.

The clincher is that I'm really not sure what makes them feel they can do a better job without us on board. And I really don't like going into this side of things, because it's going to sound a lot like I'm just trying to say "Well at least we're better translators than you are," and that's not how I want to come across at all, but to give the whole picture it needs to be covered. Since last August when we started the translation, sethyhide has translated only one chapter, and when she sent it to us there were still a few lines which she hadn't been sure about and which she'd left untranslated for us to fill in. I honestly don't mean to belittle her contribution to the project here - I understand that she doesn't have a lot of free time for this kind of work, and it was a lot less work for jaseroque and I to check over that chapter for her than it would have been for us to translate it from scratch. Translating takes a lot of effort and we really appreciate any help we can get. But if she's not 100% confident in her Japanese skills herself and doesn't have much time to work on the project... then it seems awfully self-defeating to alienate people who could help with the translating work.

Seriously guys, if I'm missing something big here, please let me know. Lord knows I've failed miserably at communication and offended people without meaning to before, but I don't know what they hope to achieve by shutting down on us like this. Telling us our translations aren't up to standard without the slightest hint as to where we've been going wrong isn't just unfair to jaseroque and me, it's unfair to everyone else who's used those scripts since we posted them. I can only presume that what they want us to do is just sit and wait until whenever they get their scanslations finished to find out those answers, but this attitude that they can just kick us off the project with hardly a word of explanation is completely out of place here. We're all amateurs doing this for love of the series - we should be on equal footing, and if they've got a valid reason to disagree with that, they could at least tell us why.

So as I said at the start, I'd rather not drag other people into the middle of this, but if anyone else who knows them better than I do has heard from sethyhide or raging_tofu about this or would be willing to talk to them and find out what's going on, then I would appreciate it. This is just a fan project we picked up because we wanted to see the manga translated and it's really not worth starting any Internet-drama over, but I'd feel bad about abandoning it now when there are only a couple of chapters left to go.