Broken Barriers

It's hard to say exactly how long I've been studying Japanese now. I'm pretty sure I'm approaching ten years; I'd have to look at my college transcript to tell for sure. I'd be interested in finding out how my vocabulary compares to that of an average 10 year old native speaker.

I've been translating song lyrics for most of those ten years, as my only real translation practice. I did once translate Yu-Gi-Oh! as I watched it with my husband (I'd seen it twice all the way through and there was a great deal of repetition in the dialogue), but my first actual attempt at translating a complete episode of anything was a disappointment. There were words I'd never heard before, spoken so quickly I didn't have a chance at looking them up, even if they'd been in the dictionary. My speed was nothing impressive - more than a week for a single episode - and the group I was translating for quickly decided to go looking someplace else.

It's probably been 4 years since then, and despite the lack of any real practice in between, my Japanese has somehow improved so much from simply watching anime that I can now finish the translation of an entire episode of Pandora Hearts in less than 10 hours. Granted this last one was a little shorter on dialogue than the one before it, and I've read ahead in the manga (and also have the raw to use for reference), but that's still an amazing leap for me.

The real surprise, however, came this morning as I was opening up the shop. I'm one of those people who thinks aloud when I'm alone, and I frequently do this in Japanese as it's my only speaking practice. I've long attempted to perfect my accent when, after saying something aloud, I'll realize that my inflection is completely off. But this time, my tongue took over and filled in the gap that even my conscious mind has never been able to bridge. My inflection was perfect. Because I'd heard the phrase so many times my subconscious took over.

Now, I realize that my vocabulary is far from complete, and even familiar words are nearly incomprehensible to me when Alice speaks them as B. Rabbit. But I've finally broken a barrier I've been banging my head against for ten years. That's a greater accomplishment to me than any number of overnight translations.

Becoming a Fansubber

A while back, I saw an ad tacked onto a fansubbed episode of Pandora Hearts saying that they were looking for a translator for the project. Naturally I jumped at the chance, and sent over an email. To make a long story short, they eventually quit the project and I went looking to see if anyone had translated the manga, or possibly even had the raws of it up to read. I found a scanlation group which was working on it and jumped in with both feet.

But they wouldn't let me translate. Apparently one of their long-term translators had earmarked the project, and was working on it a little behind the cleaners. I volunteered as a cleaner and whipped through a few chapters, but I still really wanted to translate - more than just reading it aloud on the fly for my SO. I tried typing my translations directly onto the cleaned raws for him, but it took forever and just wasn't the same.

Then yesterday I finally got fed up with fansubbing groups dropping the project and making me search for another group's releases. Also most of them take nearly a week to release an episode, which is frustrating because I can watch and understand it, but I can't share it with anybody else. So...I've decided to try my hand at fansubbing.

Last night I spent a couple hours translating episode 8 with my headphones on so I wouldn't bother anyone. I got about halfway done with it when another search finally pulled up a new group's release of the episode, but I decided to take what I had and see if I could turn it into subtitles.

I found a sweet program called Aegisub, which lets me create subtitle files. I wasn't really certain what I was supposed to do with the sub file, at first. Sure I could send it off to some current fansubbing group, but they'd most likely have their own translator and I didn't want to step on toes there like I had at MangaAbyss. On the other hand, the only search results I could find for encoding looked like a nightmare - 7 or 8 programs, just to put the subtitles on? That couldn't be what I was looking for.

Finally I found the right search keywords. A program called Virtual Dub with a couple of plug-ins turned my nice raw anime episode into a shiny brand new (half-)subtitled .avi file! Woohoo! As soon as episode 9 airs on Thursday, it's go time! (P.S.: Don't tell my husband. It's a surprise!)

Edit: Virtual dub hashed my karaoke. AVI ReComp is better, but still isn't displaying properly.