You’re all welcome!
Hello everyone. I don’t know if you know this, but, I’m a professional illustrator, novelist and author of tabletop role-playing games; but in French, of course. So I’ve decided to do something crazy: start publishing an English version of my novels, and of my role-playing game inspired by those novels, published in French since 2017. Why is this crazy? Well, I’m translating all by myself.
Yes…
I’m a bit crazy.
The principle is that, professionally speaking, there’s only one way to get a book translated properly from French into English: you need a native English speaker with a perfect command of French. Because, if you had any doubts, translation is about adaptation and interpretation, not just word-for-word translation. If you’ve ever tried to see what Google Translate can do with, say, any slightly literary text, you’ll understand the problem. And you need to be a native English speaker to be able to interpret a text correctly, and have a literary background to adapt it correctly.
Of course, I don’t have such a professional translator on hand. It’s simply too expensive, and I can’t afford it at all. But translating my novels and my tabletop role-playing game into English was my dream. And since I’m notoriously stubborn by nature, I set myself a challenge that, I confess, is totally insane: I’m going to do it myself.
It can’t be good quality, and I know it. My written English isn’t very good, I’m practically incapable of speaking it properly, I don’t understand it well orally and, when it comes to reading, if I get by honorably, I can’t do without a dictionary near me. But… long live technology. No, I didn’t ask ChatGPT to do it for me; I refuse to let a supposedly AI algorithm do my job. But I did ask Deepl to help me.
The principle: the DEEPL software translates my text, then I compare the final text with my French text, and sentence by sentence, I correct anything that doesn’t match the music, the poetry or the meaning of what I wanted to write. I reread everything, checking words and expressions. I correct a lot, I rewrite a lot, checking my correction, and, finally, I reread the text in English, to see if I understand everything. On average, I rewrite about a quarter to a third of my text myself.
And that’s it. Of course, if you don’t read English, or if you’re familiar with my novels and role-playing game in French, you don’t care! But there are English speakers who would love to read what I write. So I’m trying to open myself up to a new audience. You never know, maybe one day I’ll be able to launch a crowdfunding campaign to pay for a real translator? That’s one of my goals anyway.
Well… I don’t know if it failed or succeeded. English speakers will tell me. So far, I’ve received mostly praise, but I’m going to have to have this professionally proofread sooner or later. I hope you enjoy discovering my work.
See you soon!
Psychee
