Unpopular TM opinions you have

[fallacies]

It's an awkward halfway house between prolix and google translate, with the readability failings of both and the discreet charm of neither. And I have no idea why you choose to write this way.

It's at least in part an effort at a "fairly" literal translation that represents the Japanese terminology to a reasonable accuracy — in my opinion (because it's obviously just my own opinion).
Sometimes the grammar is admittedly strange and nonstandard — but if a particularly difficult-to-comprehend bit isn't accounted for in the original Japanese terminology / sentence construction, then I can only ask that you forgive my preference in word choice and so forth. If you find it abhorrent, you find it abhorrent.

If I do a translation of something, a perfectly readable translation generally already exists, and my run-through is just an effort to elucidate what the original terminology in the Japanese was. Obviously, you can dispute whether I'm at all successful, or if these efforts are even warranted or useful — but given the existence of another translation, I don't really see a need to emphasize ease of readability.

That said, if you run the source text of the above through Google, you get:

But the Holy Grail made that impossible possible.
　We summoned all the spirits that were originally out of human hands and fixed Amatsu even to the familiar servant who served as the master.
　It's a mere proof that the Holy Grail is all-purpose.

Then, regardless of the age, the spirits were summoned near 100 years ago and far away from the age of Jindai.
Each of the seven spirits follows the seven masters, and each protects the master and destroys the enemy master.

……The heroes of all nations of all ages are revived in modern times, competing for victory.

　That is why this ritual is called the Holy Grail War.

Machine translation these days looks like this. You can say that it's significantly more readable than what I came up with, and I'd even agree with you. However, it doesn't in my opinion fulfill the objective of terminological clarity — which is the reason I bothered at all.

[AsGryffynn]

what do you mean not all arthropods are insects

Do you consider Crab and Lobster (like those I ate a few weeks back) insects?

[AsGryffynn]

It's at least in part an effort at a "fairly" literal translation that represents the Japanese terminology to a reasonable accuracy — in my opinion (because it's obviously just my own opinion).
Sometimes the grammar is admittedly strange and nonstandard — but if a particularly difficult-to-comprehend bit isn't accounted for in the original Japanese terminology / sentence construction, then I can only ask that you forgive my preference in word choice and so forth. If you find it abhorrent, you find it abhorrent.

If I do a translation of something, a perfectly readable translation generally already exists, and my run-through is just an effort to elucidate what the original terminology in the Japanese was. Obviously, you can dispute whether I'm at all successful, or if these efforts are even warranted or useful — but given the existence of another translation, I don't really see a need to emphasize ease of readability.

That said, if you run the source text of the above through Google, you get:


Machine translation these days looks like this. You can say that it's significantly more readable than what I came up with, and I'd even agree with you. However, it doesn't in my opinion fulfill the objective of terminological clarity — which is the reason I bothered at all.

I think the main issue here is that translators are not writers and an actual localization must have the trappings of both:

The Holy Grail's power renders the impossible possible.　
With its power, magi can summon Heroic Spirits —beings beyond mankind's reach— and subordinate them to a Master, like a Familiar.
Truly, this is proof that the Grail's power is boundless and nigh omnipotent.
There's no bounds or restrictions whatsoever to their summoning; legends from ages past —like the Age of the Gods— all the way to modern times, could be summoned with the same ease.
Seven Heroic Spirits serve under seven Masters — protecting theirs and waging war against all others.　
The Heroic Spirits, from every corner of the Earth, from any Era of History, return to our world today, to fight and rise above all others.　
Therefore, the ritual is referred to as the "Holy Grail War".

https://www.amazon.com/Garners-Moder.../dp/0190491485

[fallacies]

I think the main issue here is that translators are not writers and an actual localization must have the trappings of both:

The objective isn't localization to begin with.

[ItsaRandomUsername]

If I do a translation of something, a perfectly readable translation generally already exists,

If you mean an actual 100% start-to-finish TL, then that's one thing, but the reason peeps gravitate towards this is precisely because you're doing TLs (and summaries, but let's focus on the TLs) of content that doesn't have a pre-existing and readable translation.

[AsGryffynn]

The objective isn't localization to begin with.

I often see those as kind of a necessity. Literal translations from a language whose word order is different from hours, with near endless homophones and the need to spell the pronunciation above words just so you know what word it is often lead to gibberish that is barely readable, you can translate Japanese to English, but because of how logographic languages words, translating the words and then the content itself are two separate things. You're essentially working with two languages (no matter how much JP Reddit would have you believe otherwise); a textual one and a spoken one, and need to translate one to get to the other.

[AAM1232]

Fallacies isn't even a redditor so again I fail to see why reddit is relevant. It's like saying Lily Emilio is a redditor, so his TLs are also crap btw because he posts actively on there.

Honestly not seeing more than complaints about reading comprehension being tested tbh.

[AsGryffynn]

Fallacies isn't even a redditor so again I fail to see why reddit is relevant. It's like saying Lily Emilio is a redditor, so his TLs are also crap btw because he posts actively on there.

Honestly not seeing more than complaints about reading comprehension being tested tbh.

The Reddit comment was shade thrown at the "Learning Japanese" subreddit's insistence that Kanji and Japanese are one language. They are, formally, but learning the spoken Japanese language and how to use Kanji with it means you essentially have to learn two languages. The whole point of logograms is that they are their own thing.

太陽 literally reads as "Taiyang" (Chinese), "Taiyou" (Japanese) but could easily read as "Sol" (Spanish), "Soleil" (French) or yes, just "Sun" in English. The characters mean something without needing to be spoken.

That was just me nitpicking at those guys to be honest, I got everything as well as anyone possibly could. Point is, there's an special procedure for translating languages using Chinese characters. You need to translate the characters, then sort through all possible meanings/compounds/spellings to get at what the author is trying to say. 9 times out of 10 this isn't really an issue since most common use Chinese characters can be read as intended through context, but you might run into issues with allegories or antique languages, and the word order of Japanese (SOV) means literal translations lead to text that looks incoherent until you rearrange the words.

Sorry, I really get carried away when it comes to writing.

[Leftovers]

It's at least in part an effort at a "fairly" literal translation that represents the Japanese terminology to a reasonable accuracy — in my opinion (because it's obviously just my own opinion).
Sometimes the grammar is admittedly strange and nonstandard — but if a particularly difficult-to-comprehend bit isn't accounted for in the original Japanese terminology / sentence construction, then I can only ask that you forgive my preference in word choice and so forth. If you find it abhorrent, you find it abhorrent.

If I do a translation of something, a perfectly readable translation generally already exists, and my run-through is just an effort to elucidate what the original terminology in the Japanese was. Obviously, you can dispute whether I'm at all successful, or if these efforts are even warranted or useful — but given the existence of another translation, I don't really see a need to emphasize ease of readability.

I don't think you're doing a 'literal' translation so much as shifting the text's style completely. Honestly it's easy to tell that the register and diction - the obscure vocabulary, for one, if not also the frequent inversions and archaisms - is a product of your sense of aesthetics, since your writings were elaborately worded and similarly stylised even way back. If your aim is to clarify terminology, those aesthetics work against you in terms of comprehensibility, considering that any rendering of a term is judged for accuracy by how clearly it conveys its meaning, grammatical units by the semantic sum, and so on. If you're willing to sacrifice readability - intuitive understanding - for accuracy - direct equivalence - you'd want meaning to at least carry over as clearly as possible through standardised and easy to parse terminology. Sacrificing readability to further obfuscate meaning is a failed exercise of a 'literal' translation, insofar as it can be defined as an attempt to preserve as close a correspondence to the original text's syntactic structure and vocabulary as possible. What you have then is not a literal translation so much as a shift to your stylistic sensibilities; whether it is more "accurate" is not predicated on an understanding of accuracy as preservation of tone, register, dialect, nuance, semantic load, style, schemes, literary idiosyncrasies, and all that makes any given text unique, but rather on which translation artifact bears the closest isolated resemblance to its source text equivalent. It's one way to do it, and it might even be preferable when debating semantic minutiae, but inherently more accurate it is not, especially after a layer of stylisation is applied to it, and it is furthermore prone to failures of nuance and context, as one would say occurred in the last argument on this thread.

All this to say that if you're going for comprehensibility - a translation that can be trusted to mean exactly what it says - there are bound to be failures of understanding on the side of the reader long before examining the translation itself. Since you've gained major clout as a translator in this fandom, this is less than optimal in facilitating a better level of TM literacy in your audience, which I assume is your goal.

[AAM1232]

The last argument was about whether FGO and Requiem retconned whether HS of the modern era and future could be summoned, with the already ready made excuse at the start that Archer doesn't count btw. That's not exactly a great understanding of context from people who've supposedly read FSN.

[Leftovers]

The failure of understanding was that you can't pick and mix parts of a sentence without taking into account the context they're in and what they're referring to. That you didn't agree doesn't mean it didn't happen.

[AsGryffynn]

The failure of understanding was that you can't pick and mix parts of a sentence without taking into account the context they're in and what they're referring to. That you didn't agree doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Bingo. Also, I genuinely haven't noticed any form of retconning, since it goes against the very configuration of the Throne of Heroes: outside of space and time.

[AAM1232]

The failure of understanding was that you can't pick and mix parts of a sentence without taking into account the context they're in and what they're referring to. That you didn't agree doesn't mean it didn't happen.

The context was that there was no specific era being off limits. Apparently ignoring the start of the sentence, the following sentences, Rin and Shirou deducing Archer's identity through the given mechanics, Nasu's Q&A about how modern weapons with souls can be HS and so on is fine I guess.

[Leftovers]

We must be reading different translations of the argument then.

[AAM1232]

Clearly you're missing the context I guess.

[Kamera]

Do you consider Crab and Lobster (like those I ate a few weeks back) insects?

Water insect.

yes

[Byegod]

yes

You mean the other water lobster

[Deathhappens]

The objective isn't localization to begin with.

I, having only read anything you've translated approximately two minutes ago with the text Dullahan quoted last page, have no dog in this fight.
But I've got to say if you don't consider the "verily's" and the ye olde subject-object inversions as 'localisation' then you're either being intellectually dishonest or plain lying to yourself.

- - - Updated - - -

And purely from a preference standpoint, mixing "thereon' with "such nonsense" one sentence apart and throwing out TLnotes like they're going out of fashion is a crime against English-speaking humanity.

[asterism42]

yes

Frankly, a crab has a better claim to the term 'water insect' than an octopus does

[Byegod]

A octopus is just a small cthulhu