I've still got it! X3

[slr2moons]

 

I love translating manga. I used to do it all the time, for my own fannish reasons. (No way am I good or fast enough to do it professionally!) I can't describe how much fun it is for me. Starting with a sentence of kanji and kana, defining each word with my own knowledge or my dictionaries, then rending it all into an English sentence. It's like the most intriguing logic puzzle! What word or phrasing most strongly captures the meaning of the original? When to sacrifice literal for figurative? So many delightful problems to solve! And of course, the satisfaction of finishing a page, a chapter, a volume (it happened once!) and knowing --->I<--- did it!! :D

Kiokonai's lovely visit two weeks ago reminded me how much I love translating manga studying Japanese, and how much I want to be fluent one day. Or at the very least how much I want to finish reading my favorite unlicensed manga titles! T.T I let my mind dwell on this during my run today, and when I arrived back at my apartment, I attacked my still-unopened boxes on a determined search for my Japanese translation notebooks. It took some digging, but I found them. *happy sigh* (I also found the small doujinshi collection I obtained while still in Texas, so now I can merge that with my Oregon-bought books. More bishounen for me!!! :3)

I just took a 15 minute break from work, and instead of reading, I dived back into my brainy, geektastic joy of translation. Kouji-sama of Zetsuai 1989 has seniority over Arslan-sama of Arslan Senki and Minako-chan of Code Name Sailor V, so I flipped to the first page of vol 2 and happily resumed where I had left off 4 years ago. Believe it or not, in my heyday 4 years ago, I was so familiar with dialogue and phrasing that I only had to consult my grammar reference and phrase books about every five manga pages! This first page was simple in dialogue terms, but there was this sign in the background...all kanji...all handwritten, not crisp type. *wince*. It took me a while, but I figured it out!! X3

Your Japanese vocabulary word of the day is "chuushajou". It means "parking lot". Heh.