Translation question and search!

[yueliangist]

edit: thank you for all the replies!! in hindsight, i feel a little silly with this entry because it's totally logical to finish reading it first, or reading something shorter instead LOL. in any case, i really appreciate everyone's ideas and advice^^

Short intro: I'm a CN learner with a love for danmei/baihe/media and since the beginning of my learning journey I've always had a wish of one day helping with making the baihe community more accessible to (lower level) learners.

I've been stuck in a cycle with translation practicing recently:

I want to start translating a webnovel I've been reading to practice, but I feel like I need to have read the entire thing before I can even start, I'm just a really slow reader and It's so demotivating to "have" to wait. What do you guys think?

It probably does not help that I'd be by myself so I guess this is also my post regarding my search for an editor, as I am merely a learner and will probably make a lot of mistakes.

The webnovel I want to use for my translation practice is 与影后闪婚后, I'm currently 15 chapters of 118 in and 100% sure this is the one I want to tl.

Thanks in advance or replies!

与影后闪婚后 jjwxc link: https://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=3022425

Comments

[larryhammer]

I'm probably not the best person to answer this, as I hate even reading things that aren't complete, let alone translate them. (This might be why I mostly stick to classics these days.) Can't say I've never translated a work in progress, but Yotsuba&! is a special case as it's not exactly a story where the plot matters, or even exists.

I will say, as a translator, I would be extremely uncomfortable translating a novel I haven't read to the end. So many things can happen, later on, that change your interpretation of earlier scenes, passages, sentences -- in ways that affect how you render them. I'd be even more uncomfortable letting anyone else see it till I finished and had a chance to revise through from the start.

(That said, I've been serializing early drafts of a translation of 道德经 even though I haven't gotten through it, willfully, but being explicit that pretty much everything is provisional till I have full context and can make final decisions. I'm not entirely consistent, no.)