User:silviaASH/Using translated sources

I am a semi-active editor of Wikipedia articles about Japanese media, including anime, video games, and films. A few articles in these topic areas that I have created or substantially edited include:

• Baby Assassins
• BanG Dream! Ave Mujica/It's MyGO!!!!!
• Bloom Into You
• Bocchi the Rock!
• Lily Hoshikawa
• Nio Nakatani
• Onimai
• Saeko: Giantess Dating Sim
• Wonder Egg Priority

In the course of editing these articles, I have on occasion made use of Japanese-language sources. This has been in spite of my lacking Japanese knowledge, which I would (as of this writing) describe as "below kindergarten levels of fluency". I know a handful of words and phrases, have a beginner learner's grasp on the grammar, and that's about it.

When citing Japanese-language sources, I have sometimes relied on translations of these sources by others to verify my edits. Below is an overview of the practices I have usually engaged in while editing in this manner, in order to ensure that my edits remain correct and verifiable, in the hopes that they may prove helpful to other editors.

This advice is not flawless. It is a list of general pointers for making good judgements, not a step-by-step bulletproof guide to guarantee perfect editing. You are, as always, responsible for your edits, and for any errors in your edits that may arise while following this advice. If you're not confident that you know what a source says and that it is suitable for Wikipedia, don't use it.

Third-party English translations

Many Japanese-language sources concerning popular anime, manga, and video games have been translated by others off-wiki. Sometimes, these translations will be published in reliable sources, perhaps on an English companion site of the source itself, or as a feature on another primarily English-language source deemed reliable, with the permission of the original authors/publishers. More often, though, these translations happen unofficially, and are published within the relevant English-speaking fandom communities on blogs, or on social media sites such as Tumblr.

If the former is true, it is probably acceptable to simply cite the reliably-published official translation, provided that there's no reason to doubt its accuracy. If the latter is true, the source may still be useful. Non-English sources are allowed, of course, and it is not forbidden to cite a source that you read with the help of a third-party. However, additional considerations must be taken:

• Consider the individual reliability of the translator. Are they experienced? Is their translation comprehensible and well-written? Can they be counted on to have represented the source accurately and without error? Since you are relying on them for your understanding of the source, you must be certain that you trust them.
• Have they provided a link to the original, or a citation to it if it's a print source? If they haven't provided such a citation, you probably shouldn't rely on their translation. If so, you can check it against the original. If you don't speak Japanese, you can use a machine translation site like DeepL to see, generally, what it says. If the output of the machine translation checks out, broadly, against the unofficial human translation, you can be reasonably certain that it's accurate.
• Have others translated the same source, or other sources on the same topic? Check those translations, and corroborate them against each other to see if the facts presented in them line up. If they do, the translation is almost certainly correct.
  • You can also corroborate a fan translation of a source against an official translation of a related source: for example, when relying on third-party translations to add information from interviews from Nio Nakatani (and others) to the Bloom Into You page, I corroborated the facts in the fan translations with details in the officially translated material such as the afterwords of the English-language manga volumes and the behind-the-scenes booklet included with the Special Edition of the Blu-ray, both of which I possess physical copies of.

Once you're sure that an unofficial translation you've found represents the source accurately, do the following:

• DO NOT CITE THE FAN TRANSLATOR (unless they are themselves a reliable source). This would be citing user-generated content, which as you (should!) know, is generally not allowed. It also would not be helpful to any other Wikipedians trying to verify your edits, who would likely prefer to go straight to the source. As such, you should instead cite the original Japanese text, which, as we already have been over, they should have provided if they were remotely trustworthy. But before you do:
• Check that what they have translated is itself reliable and relevant. Is it from a news website? Is it a tweet, a blog post, or another piece of user-generated content? Does it come from an unrelated individual, or someone related to the topic of the article? Is it a primary source such as an official website? Is it an interview with a relevant individual such as a creator (mangaka, animator, director, etc)? Understand the relevant policies, just as with any other sources, and edit appropriately.
• Use common sense. If the facts presented in the translation seem far-fetched, or the source doesn't appear, from context, to be or say what the translator says, then don't cite it.
• Ask a friend! If you know other people who themselves understand Japanese, consider asking them to check your work for you. There are many people in online English-speaking otaku communities who have taken up the language. If you've spent any length of time being social with anime and manga fans online, it shouldn't be too hard to find someone who can verify your work. You can also try asking another editor who's listed themselves at Wikipedia:Translators available#Japanese-to-English.
• Accept and be prepared for the possibility that you may have made a mistake. You don't know the language, after all (or don't know it very well), and you're relying on others who do. This is an inherently flawed process, which leaves room for errors on the part of you and/or the person whose translation you depended on. This is fine, as long as you are prepared for the possibility that another, more-knowledgeable Wikipedian may at some point come along and correct your mistakes, and you should assume good faith on their part and be ready to be open about how you made your editing decisions if asked.

Fansubs and plot summaries

Writing a plot summary for a narrative work (anime, manga, novel, game, etc) that you engaged with via a fan translation is also viable. You should not, and do not need to, cite the fan translation, as it is already assumed in the case of a plot summary that the original work is the source. The same general considerations detailed above apply, however. Consider the quality of the translation, and whether or not your understanding of the work's plot is internally consistent and makes sense with what is already known about the work. If you're not confident that you understand the plot or that the fan translation conveyed it to you accurately, then consider leaving the summary to someone else.

Machine translation

Machine translation should not be a sole, or even primary, source of Japanese-language translations. Japanese grammar fundamentally differs from English, and the language is often subtle in ways that English is not, as much of the language's meaning is dependent on context. A machine translation cannot understand context in the way that a human can, and can only assume the context from what it sees. It will make mistakes, and the more complex the source text is, the less accurate it will be.

However, as mentioned above, machine translations can be used to "spot check" fan translations to make sure that they generally line up with the source. (Inconsistencies between the fan translation and the machine translation are to be expected, and are not themselves evidence of any issues with the fan translation, if the differences are not so significant as to appear as if the machine translation is relying on a fundamentally different text.) They may also be used to verify simple statements of basic straightforward facts such as release dates, or uncontroversial details that you already know to be true but need a secondary source for, like plot synopsis or basic history. Beyond that, they should generally not be relied on, and especially should not be used as a source of translated quotations.

Other tools

You can also look at a Japanese source yourself with the help of a mouseover dictionary extension, if you are using a desktop/laptop computer. I recommend Yomitan. If you're trying to scrutinize the meaning of a specific sentence, Yomitan can show you the various possible readings and meanings of the scripts used, and give you a general sense of what the sentence is talking about. Third-party translations can also be "spot checked" on a more granular scale in this way.

Past this: if you've read this far, you've probably wished at some point that you had learned Japanese. Good news: You can! It is very possible to teach it to yourself! I haven't gotten quite that far yet, but I have many friends who have. It's not easy, but it's very doable if you have the free time (and, if you're editing Wikipedia, you probably already have free time). There's a lot of places online to help you learn, but I've found that this website is a good starting point. Tae Kim and Cure Dolly are also two good YouTube channels whose videos you can watch to gain a better grasp of how the language works.

がんばれ！

See also

• Source translation list, a list of sources that I have used in the manner described in this essay, and their translations