Just a rant post

---

 

Well, a couple of people seemed fine with seeing a rant post. This is entirely about a somewhat brief experience I had with a company I was doing part-time work for, so it should be fine to talk about it. Not like they made me sign some non-disclosure agreement.

Two weeks ago, I got a part-time job at a company that hosts a bunch of Korean web novels. They wanted a Korean>English translator, so I figured this could be easy pay. Although I found out after the first interview that I would be translating R-18 novels, I’ve already done it on my site before, so I figured I’d give it a shot. After I sent them the translations for the test chapter, which was meant to gauge my skills, they sent me 4 chapters of the novel I was supposed to work on. I finished those 4 chapters within 2 days and sent them in. This is where the problem occurred.

A day after I sent those 4 chapters, they sent back the first chapter with memos on only the first page. They informed me to look at those memos and redo the translations I did for all 4 chapters. Of course, I thought it wouldn’t be anything significant, but boy was I wrong. There was a memo for every single line on the first page alone. In other words, they wanted me to change everything. Furthermore, I would have been compliant if the changes they wanted actually made sense, but no. The English of the person who left the memos was so broken that I thought it was either a joke or they made some other student look over it since they did mention to me that they had 2 other university students translating as well. This is an R-18 novel, so I’ll only use the SFW lines as examples.

1)
Mine: A man with copper skin and a bulky frame~
Theirs: A well-tanned heavy man~

2)
Mine: The girl must have been asleep as she didn’t appear to be conscious.
Theirs: She seems unconscious from her sleep.

3)
Mine: The face of the woman, who appeared to be in her early 30s, was slender and had the look of an intelligent beauty.
Theirs: She has early 30-year old looks and was thin and intelligent beauty.

The other lines are a bit too detailed, but just know the memos for those were equally terrible.

In any case, I sent them an email telling them that these memos are awkward (I was being nice) and that I can’t revise the other chapters with these memos. I thought the memos were left by the other students, so I wanted them to get their ‘professional translator of 20 years’ to look at them. To my surprise, I got a phone call 10 minutes after I sent that email. The person who called me turned out to be that very ‘professional translator of 20 years’. He revealed that he was the one who had left those memos and that he felt insulted since I called them awkward. He then started to question my choice of words, claiming they weren’t common and that normal English speaking people wouldn’t use them. The main thing he focused on was how I used the word “copper skin”. Keep in mind the fact that the original text specifically said “구리빛 피부” which translates to ‘copper-colored skin’ and I saw no issue in using this exact term. I remember seeing it used multiple times in the many novels I’ve read and you can also search it on google to see if copper skin tones are an actual thing. If anything, their decision to use ‘well-tanned’ makes less sense. That implies that anyone with this skin tone didn’t get it innately and that they must’ve all gotten tans. Of course, maybe the character being described is the way he is because he got a tan. If that’s the case, then you can use well-tanned at that point. However, since his skin color is never mentioned again in the following 3 chapters, there’s no way for me to explicitly know whether his skin color is innate or not when it’s a relatively common skin tone that can be found all around the world. Also ‘heavy man’ isn’t the right phrase to use either. ‘Heavy man’ specifically refers to mafia members who do violent things. ‘Heavyset’ would have worked, but I know for certain they wanted to use ‘heavy man’ because that’s what they insisted during our phone call. The final straw was when he proceeded to accuse me of using MTL. I was at such a loss for words. He said that he threw the Korean text into a translator and that several lines were identical to my translations. I actually got curious and tried it myself and, lo and behold, none of the lines were identical. There were some similarities, but what do you expect? MTL isn’t terrible 100% of the time.

In any case, I didn’t want to talk to this guy anymore, so I just said something like, “I’ll do whatever changes I can and send it to you in 2 days.”. He said that he wanted me to localize the text so that English readers could understand it, but I think what he actually wanted me to do was dumb it down to the level of a prepubescent child, which is strange since this is an R-18 web novel. I couldn’t concentrate on anything after that phone call, so I went to bed early. After I cleared my head a little, I promptly wrote them an email saying that I couldn’t work for them and pointed out all the errors their translator left, but of course, who’re they going to trust? Some kid working part-time or their supposed professional translator of 20 years? I learned firsthand that the translation scene is actually really bad over here. If this guy has managed to work for 20 years, that’s saying something.

Welp, that’s all I wanted to say. Rant over.

Worrying about his final semester of university amidst this epidemic,
Shalvation

---