Whats your process for translating a novel or manga from Japanese to English?
AC: Since I’m already a fan of these books, I’ve already read them. This lets me launch right in. I’ve read interviews with translators who make these frightening charts planning the speech patterns for each character, but I find the more ideas I have about style the worse the translation is. If I go in with preconceived notions of how this is going to sound, I end up having to rewrite the piece heavily. So I read a few pages, get a feel for the novel’s style, or the character’s voice…and that’s it. I just start writing. Once I can hear the character’s voice in my mind, it’s easy to write like them. Some characters are easier than others — Boogiepop and Takeda were very hard, Kimura and Niitoki were really easy. I tend to work very quickly, trying to get entire sections of the book translated in one sitting. Then I go back and revise that, tinker with the wording and making sure I caught the nuances. If I go line by line the first time I think the translation loses something — work
