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>Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care

As a professional translator, I cherish those readers. They have the good sense to trust me to do the technical part (understanding the original) and only criticize the artistic part (producing a beautiful derivative work).

The worst readers are the ones who have some knowledge of the source language, and rush to nitpick the technical decisions without considering the artistic ones. They are the literary equivalent of those "fans" who will watch a stunning film adaptation and then go home to complain about the colour of Gandalf's shoes or the width of a sand worm's molars. Ultimately, readers of this type are all ego, more concerned about being right than about whether the work is good.

The very best readers, of course, are knowledgeable in both languages and understand that "equivalence" goes far beyond what is written in the dictionary. But as you say, they don't need the translation!

> The readers? The only thing that makes a translation great for them is whether the translated text reads well. Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care, that's why they are reading a translation!

On the contrary, readers generally read a translation because they want to read a specific work, and/or experience the culture it's part of, but can't or won't spend what it would take to become fluent in the language themselves. If they just wanted to read something that reads well they wouldn't be reading a translation. So accuracy is something they care deeply about, even - especially - if they're poorly qualified to assess it.

> being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality

Well, yes. It's like sound design, or colour grading, or stage magic; when you do it right, the audience doesn't notice that you've done anything at all. It certainly takes a certain mentality to thrive in.

> Personally, speaking as a Japanese-American who has done amateur translations (anime fansubs) at one point, being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality

I'm surprised that you feel that way, because I've always associated the anime community with caring very strongly (not always correctly, but always strongly) about the translations. Hence the fansubs in the first place. It's only really a thing for anime in the first place; there aren't many people fan-translating Spanish telenovellas or Kdramas into English, for example.

> Accuracy and reading well are secondary to speed. Time is money.

Looks like AI will accelerate this tendency. We'll get more, cheaper, but worse, translations. Which I see as a qualified good, since it means more amateur and "long tail" from other languages can make it to the English Internet.

>I've always associated the anime community with caring very strongly (not always correctly, but always strongly) about the translations.

As I came to find, most watchers simply couldn't care. How could they? They don't know Japanese! They certainly appreciated anime, but they couldn't appreciate translating and I won't blame them for not appreciating what they don't know.

Of those who did care, though, most of them judged translations for all the wrong reasons and usually without realizing. Kind of a similar vein to how most ham radio guys know enough electricity to be dangerous but not enough to be useful.

All in all I found the work was ultimately a thankless one and I burned out real bad after serving as a translator for a couple animes.

But the fansub group I was with were a great bunch, and the flame wars I had with other translators in other fansub groups were awesome. Flame wars between passionate people who know what they're talking about are a sight to behold.

from my experience doing animanga-adjacent translations - readers also prioritize speed first, quality second. there are a lot of people who will happily read machine-translated work (and often awkward, typo-ridden MTL at that) rather than wait a day or two for better translations. same goes for general scanlation quality, like typesetting and redraws.

this is also why the fansubbing scene is effectively dead - companies like crunchyroll get episode scripts early and can thus release subs simultaneously with the official release. most fansub groups now just fix/edit the crunchyroll script, if they even pick up series at all. there's no point in putting in the effort if no one's going to look at it, after all.

that's the main issue i have with 'more but worse' translations, honestly. you'll get more material, but the good translators won't just move to content that wasn't translated before - they'll just disappear entirely.

The translations in anime at least are unlikely to actually be worse, since a lot of the English anime translation industry are obsessed with inserting woke politics and cringey zoomer jokes into their translations and more or less hate the people who buy their products. There's a reason a lot of people are laughing at the activist translators losing their jobs to AI.

In areas where the translators are actual, responsible professionals, the quality will suffer.

Although your comment is unnecessary strongly worded, you raise some very serious points.

Especially Japanese - English entertainment media translations, it is very often pretty apparent that there is some kind of agenda behind translation of such works (even with translators admitting it them self doing so in comments / messages on different social media platforms).

Something I just wonder is, why does especially this niche part of this profession (translating Japanese entertainment media) attract people doing so and even let them admit to make it more culturally appropriate for western markets?

It's really an interesting phenomena.

Japanese entertainment is among the more popular entertainment venues in recent years, and that means it's also a useful tool for political espionage. People interested in pushing political agendas would be fools to not exploit this as they would any other.

Hell, the distribution of Japanese entertainment across the world is in large part a Japanese government agenda[1] for diplomatic ends.

It's all politics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan

Hah! That "Cool Japan" thing! I remember some (lesser known) people to advertise for it. Dunno, it (cool japan) came to a halt in 2020 and never took off again afterwards.

I don't think Japanese translation is all that well paid, and if people don't get money from their work, they'll go for the job for other forms of payment (eg. status), or extract payment in other ways (half-assing things, being a petty tyrant like reddit mods, etc.)

As someone who can understand both languages, it's less that the translators are obsessed and more that the gamergate-adjacent crowd has decided to drag their culture war into anime translations. There are a handful of examples where the translation could be debated and a lot more where it's actually pretty accurate and tonally consistent with the Japanese (which is often not exactly high literature itself), but some guy armed with a Japanese 101 textbook and Deep-L wants to get an internet mob going about it because he's convinced that someone with a trans flag in their Twitter profile can't possibly be doing it right, or that Japanese creatives themselves couldn't have left-wing/pro-LGBT views.

See: people getting mad about the word "LGBT" appearing in the English version when the Japanese version also literally said "LGBT".