Sounding boards?

I was happy to find this community, and I realised I really could do with having fellow pro translators to chat with. Commiserate and bitch, sure, but also help out, take wild guesses about a weird turn of phrase, find the niche cultural reference from that Turkish TV show nobody knows outside of Turkey, and so on.
Who else? And hi!

13 points · 5 comments · view on lemmy.world

5 Comments

Lumidaub@feddit.org · 6 pts · 220d (3 replies)

I didn't manage to become a "pro" translator exactly because Life Started Happenin' And It Won't Stop Happenin'. But back in the day on reddit, one of my most active subs was translators*. If we can have even a fraction of what that sub was, I'll be happy.

* or was it translator? translation? There were several with similar names and they forwarded to the correct one, I forget which it was, it's been a while lol

MarieMarion@literature.cafe · 4 pts · 220d (2 replies)

Life Tends to Happen indeed. One of its least endearing qualities. What are your languages?

Lumidaub@feddit.org · 4 pts · 220d (1 reply)

I'm native German so it's mainly English (my first translations were Sailor Moon fanfiction into German when I should've been doing maths homework, heh). One reason why I never "went pro" is that everybody thinks they can translate English so the rates are abysmal, especially for beginners (not to mention automated translation is a thing that exists...). I see things that were obviously badly translated from English almost every day and it hurts my head.

Technically I also studied Japanese before having to drop out (cf above Life) but I'm very rusty. Also too lazy to maintain any Anki decks (⁠・⁠_⁠・⁠;⁠)

Anyway, yours?

MarieMarion@literature.cafe · 2 pts · 220d

English to French. I actually spoke German quite well back then (and loved the language), and found English very meh, but I really wanted to study lit translation and at the time the only graduat program was in an English department... I switched tack, and nowI haven't used German in 25 years.

k0e3@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 220d

Yay! I'm glad you found this community. And thanks so much for helping me understand that French "joke" earlier.