{ ganessa.org }

In my attempt to hold on to my rusty Japanese skills (the rustiness of which has been bothering me for quite some time), I finally took the courage to apply as a translator for some of the scanlating groups out there. The Japanese language is one of the things I never want to forget. If it’s even possible to fall in love with a language, then I’m totally, absolutely, unconditionally smitten by it.

So, I figured that if I’m going to hurt myself over remembering all my Japanese lessons, I might as well enjoy it. So why not join a manga scanlating group? If you don’t know what scanlation is, Wikipedia defines it as:

the scanning, translation, editing and distribution of comics from a foreign language into the language of the distributors.

I believe that scanlation is a labor of love ^_^. These scanlating groups do not receive any monetary compensation for the time and effort they devote to scanlating manga for the benefit of non-native Japanese speakers. In truth, I’ve only read scanlated manga up until now!

Anyway, the need for translators out there is big, believe me - it’s like one huge market. Although it’s easy to advertise your translation services to scanlation groups, most of them require you to take their translator’s test to determine whether you’re fit for the job. As for me, I was given four *_*. But I only took two. These took time, you know, since I can only translate when I get home and after work.

Luckily, I passed the translator’s exam, so . . .yay! I got my first assignment already, which is a historical shounen-ai (I mean, duh, really — did you expect something else?) story. Bingo, my cup of tea.

In the end, I still remind myself that I’m doing this because I need to sharpen my Japanese skills. Although I still think that remembering/ understanding most grammatical patterns (particularly the formal ones) would need more than working on the manga (which uses conversational/ informal/colloquial Japanese), I’d like to think that I’m off to a good start. Er, hopefully. XD