The New 2019 and a Realization

Just noticed 12 months ago the post here was on comic printing. Getting those double sided pages in the right order.  Others involved music production and my first try at translating manga.

So if I look back at the year I didn't talk much about the ongoing illustration work I do.  Mostly Automotive related.  As a lot of that is caricatured, it does relate to much of the comic related posts. A picture tells a story, even if a comic is much more about the story. But as I put the new Art samples up on our website, I rarely mention them here.

The translation thing is the topic that stands out as being  very different, as far as topics go on this Blog, but has been a very significant aspect of my life for 35 years or so.  Even if making those 20 or so pages of the manga in English looked like they came out of the blue.

My wife and kids are native Japanese speakers.  So I have been involved with a lot of English to Japanese and Japanese to English translations, without being a "translator" for many decades.

There are a lot of expressions in English that if directly translated don't mean anything. A lot of Slang is the same. And the reverse is true of Japanese.  So a lot is not what it says, but what it means.

I am now following a few different Japanese to English Translators on Twitter, people that do that for a living, and have found them to say what I was thinking all along.  Fluency in Japanese and being a great Translator into English are "almost" not related to each other.  The Translator is the one doing the writing in the new language, and must be a good writer in that language. They also must be an expert in the field the text is in.

So I Realized I was on the right track all along....