Furu Anime Panikku

For the past few days, I’ve been really bored. I haven’t been watching much anime except for the few weekly series which usually airs over the weekends, so my weekdays are worse than a hikkikomori’s. Heck, at least they do productive stuff like watching anime and self-pleasure. What do I do then? I just sleep and sleep and sleep, and listen to music of course.

Then, I decided that I should make should make full use of my time to try something I have always wanted to do. Song translations from Japanese to English. I understand that I have only been learning Japanese for slightly more than 6 months, so my Japanese is probably still worse than a Japanese 5-year-old, and totally shouldn’t be attempting song translations. However, I wanted to try it, even knowing that I would not be able to fully translate a single song.

Before I began learning Japanese, my MP3 player was already loaded with nothing but Japanese music. Good Japanese music was like a drug, and listening to the artistes that I like made me feel really good. However, due to the language barrier, I couldn’t understand everything that I was listening to. Not understanding something that made me feel good really bothered me, and my desire to understand the Japanese lyrics in the songs I listened to grew with each day.

Sure, there are online translations, many of which are pretty decently done. However, not all the songs that I loved were translated, mainly because some of the artistes I liked are not mainstream or anime-related and have a rather small fan base. Hence, when I took up Japanese, one of my goals was to be able to eventually contribute to the fan community by translating song lyrics for other fans to get to understand the song and to further promote the artistes of my liking on the interwebs. In my opinion, that’s what a true fan should do, if he/she could.

Basically, here are the steps I take.

First, I search for the lyrics from those Japanese music sites. Most of the time, you can copy and paste the Japanese lyrics, but for me, I prefer typing the lyrics out as a form of practice. It’s quite useful in helping you remember some kanji, although time consuming. If you typed out the lyrics, the second part where you add the romanji in should be a piece of cake. And finally for the hardest portion. The actual translation.

Some paragraphs are really easy to translate, while some got me really stumbled. Even with the help of a dictionary, it’s still quite mind-wrecking decipher the actual meaning of the lyrics. Some lyrics are written informally, and some even have words that you can’t find in the dictionary. Those are the parts which I have the most trouble with. After you have translated the lyrics into English, there’s still the part where you have to ensure that the translation sounds prim and proper.

And the last part would be checking. As my Japanese is sub-par, I have to find someone who has many years of experience in the language to help me out in this portion. I know that asking someone to check the translations that you have done can be a real hassle for them, especially if your translations have a whole lot of mistakes like mine. Hence, I’m putting the checking portion on hold until I can find someone who has some spare time to check. A few parts of my translations have been checked and corrected by some guys in #Sganimebloggers though, and I thank them for giving me some of their precious time.

What I’m doing now is probably a waste of time, since most of my translations would be wrong, and the only thing I would learn is some new kanji and vocabulary, but I guess I’ll just keep at it. Hopefully, I’ll get better at it and finally complete my first song translation soon ^^