6-day countdown illustration by Gen Kobayashi, character designer for the Paranormasight series, character art designer for The World Ends with You series, Kingdom Hearts series, Musashi Samurai Legend, Final Fantasy I&II Dawn of Souls:

"But Cadensia, you don't need all of that to RP!" Yes, but I like pretty profile teehee~

I'm sorry I love the FFXIV world. I just want to meet some nice people with good politics and write some nice RPs, but alas, we can't have good things.

Not me spending time formatting my RPHub profile before discovering the horrible mess. And now the pain of contemplating my carrd again......

Thank you for the kind words, Sasha! It's the least I could do to respect the game and the people behind it! 💖

Completely! I remember of a sentence where 〝平穏〟 was explicitly created by〝虚構〟and the latter shines such a strong light on the former. Even in the first pass, I couldn't help but think of "normalcy", not even a choice in JP>EN dictionaries. We are always slaves of context—and our personal readings.

Also, when I do my first pass, my goal is to have something written quickly. From reading the source text, I see the stylistic challenges and the difficult expressions. If I can deal with them instantly, good. Else, I keep that in my mind and I go for literal with a note to think about it later.

For literary translation, I'm more holistic and I translate whole paragraphs, refusing the line by line. And then I refine at a small scale. As lete says, literal translation is just a tool and we know when to use it, because we sense the difficulties of the text from the very first read.

As always, what matters is the broader context and how everything flows together. And here, the actual method of translation depends on the medium and the translator. I tend to go textbox by textbox in games for a first pass, and I do an immediate "stylised" second pass for the whole dialogue.

Specifically because there's no pure 1:1 equivalence between words/expression. Our literal translation (the first pass) is already a degree of interpretation, even it comes automatically to us. Sometimes it just clicks and can be left almost as is. But that's to the translators' discretion.

Let's not allow the term "literal translation" to be commandeered by MTL with poor context comprehension, which is only "literal" in a narrow type of way. Utilized carefully, translating literally is one of many tools that can produce a TL faithful to the source. Sometimes it's the preferable base!

In a way, this is why I found TAS to be more appealing to me than traditional speedrun (as a practitioner!).

Wah! Thank you so much for the support, Erin!!! 🩷

Thank you for the support!!

That means a lot to me and the others! I'll do my best so that the wait is worth it! 🩷

Thank you !

Nic Cage: