When they got back to the ship, they found it awfully quiet. Maybe everyone had gone out. The sailors were making sure everything was shipshape, while the cleaners, a group of middle-aged women dressed in men’s clothing, removed trash from the rooms, swept the deck, and industriously polished every surface on the ship. The cleaners also made the travelers’ meals, and most of them seemed to be family members of the sailors. The fact that Sasha and I get to talk this over is somewhat unusual for a light-novel translation project. Typically in the light novel industry, a translator prepares a draft, sends it to the client (the publisher), and doesn’t hear anything about it again until it’s published. Translators and editors rarely get to work closely with each other, a fact that has as much to do with editors’ frequently crushing workloads as anything; they’re often too busy to engage with translators even if they would like to. J-Novel Club both allows and expects their translation teams to work together closely, which is one of the perks of working on their projects. I’m a firm believer that the translator’s perspective and expertise are valuable throughout the translation process. For example, an editor or a translator might easily fall into a language trap—a false cognate, for example—and it helps if they can check each other’s understanding. On the other hand, sometimes I’ll come up with a really strange piece of English—maybe I was being too literal, or maybe I was just having one of those days—and it’s both more efficient and better for the text if Sasha can ask me what I meant, instead of sitting there trying to puzzle out what on earth I was thinking. Having both of us there all the way through the production of the final draft is nearly always a positive for the quality of the text. This is also an excellent time to point out that although Sasha and I are the ones who produce the English parts week in, week out, we aren’t the only ones with a role to play in the final draft. Once an entire book is complete, it goes to the Quality Assurance team for a
series of final checks. This involves having at least two different additional readers read the complete text of the book. In general, QA isn’t about making substantial changes, but about making sure that all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed—sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. QA readers check for any mechanical issues that Sasha and I missed during the prepub phase (oops—there are two periods there! Uh-oh! Merriam-Webster says that word should be hyphenated!) and anything else they think might be a potential issue. After each QA read, the book comes back to me and Sasha to review the QA edits and decide what to do about any outstanding issues. Only after all that is the final version released as an e-book. The work of editors like Sasha and our QA team is, ideally, invisible—you’ll rarely if ever be able to look at a finished manuscript and say, “Ah, the translator did that line, but the editor clearly touched up this other part!” In the same way that the translator tries to be a transparent window on the work of the original author, the editor tries to inconspicuously make sure the translator’s work is serving the text in the most effective way. Yet whether or not you realize what they’ve done, editors are indispensable to a polished final product. The next time you have a smooth reading experience with a book, you have an editor to thank somewhere along the line! I hope you enjoyed this look at a sometimes underappreciated aspect of the translation process. Have fun, read widely (and be grateful to those editors), and we’ll see you for the next volume!
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Copyright The Apothecary Diaries: Volume 9 by Natsu Hyuuga Illustrations by Touko Shino Translated by Kevin Steinbach Edited by Sasha McGlynn This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Kusuriya No Hitorigoto Copyright © Natsu Hyuuga 2020 All rights reserved. Originally published in Japan by Shufunotomo Infos Co., Ltd. Through Shufunotomo Co., Ltd. This English edition is published by arrangement with Shufunotomo Co., Ltd., Tokyo English translation © 2023 J-Novel Club LLC All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. J-Novel Club LLC
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