@Quof said in Hanashi marches on:
Thanks for the thorough response.
I guess my main take-away from this discussion is that the translation pace of Tsukimichi at one volume per month is well within the bounds of human ability. My fears of LLM augmentation are unfounded, particularly given the consistent quality of the translation and lack of other AI-indicators.
And so my legend dies...
You have nothing to worry about. Among the Bookworm fandom your legend endures.
I obviously can't dispute anything you're saying, but I don't think I'm wrong to observe that the pace of Bookworm translation was very high by industry standards. Excluding Tsukimichi and New Gate (two recent Hanashi titles) it's the fastest I'm aware-of by a significant margin.
Maybe I'm being unfair to Hanashi Media, but I think my concern that they're cutting corners is at least understandable, given how much of an outlier they are. This is somewhat hypocritical, I realize, since I'm also more than happy to complain about a slow release cadence.
... So two books could both be 300 pages, while one is really airy while the other is dense enough to "actually" be 600 pages...
Interesting insight into the differences between Japanese and English. Is it something like writers who use lots of five-dollar words versus something more plainly written?
... if it had a virtue it was maybe just consistency rather than speed. The consistency to translate at a bit of an above-average pace on the same series for six years straight. The same goes for Kier there, too.
Yes, completely agreed. The sustained consistency was definitely noteworthy. It helped to foster an entire community with "Myne-day" being a weekly event we all looked forward to. It remains to be seen how sustainable Hanashi's translation pace of Tsukimichi and New Gate are - I admit that my concerns above are based on a very small sample size.
I also don't mean to undersell @Kier's contributions. For all I know the editor might have more impact than the translator. His contributions are just less visible to me.
