It’s something I’ve always been interested in, ever since learning that it isn’t as cut and dry as translating exactly what’s written. It seems to me that it is as much an art as it is a mechanical skill. I’m still a beginner so of course I’m not trying to run before I can crawl, but I really think I’d love to try it one day. If any of you do or have done it, what’s it like?
Conversely, if anyone has any recommendations for reading/watching insofar as what that profession is actually like, how one breaks into it, or etc, I’d love if you shared them! Because I really don’t know much about it if I’m being honest, haha.
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I’ve seen one youtube channel slightly related to translation:
[https://www.youtube.com/c/SarahKTranslate](https://www.youtube.com/c/SarahKTranslate)
Generally I can say only from viewpoint of a reader. From my experience, if we talk about high quality translation, then person needs very deep understanding of Japanese. I’ve started to use content quite early, somewhere around N4 and speaking honestly I could understand meaning in any content I was using. Some works I reread, like maybe once in half a year and every time I was doing that, I could find something new. Not so much in plot meaning, but rather language nuances, how something was used. And it’s repeating like that for a while.
For example, I’ve seen もの and の being used in similar situations for reasoning. The difference is that もの is used when person tries to hide behind some social norm for excuse, on the other hand の is used when person tries to proactively force personal viewpoint. This nuance is quite small, but it slightly describes characters and their traits/nature. So what I mean by deep understanding of Japanese, is that we not only need to understand the meaning, but also such nuanced variations. Otherwise it’s impossible to keep it in translation.