Comment on The True Story of Byerly Vorrutyer

  1. trell (qunlat) on Chapter 2 Wed 01 Feb 2023 09:33PM UTC

    Red from Transistor as she appears on her promo posters.

    Thank you so much, it makes me so happy to hear that it reads smoothly! I tried to be very careful about all the choices I made—I always feel like I have a big responsibility as a translator to represent the original faithfully, and when others have translated my own work I’ve often been vaguely frustrated that the results were “lossy,” so I very much wanted to avoid losing information or nuance. But of course the lovely prose style and wordplay of the original were a big part of what made me want to translate it in the first place, so I was equally concerned with making sure it read well! (And was especially determined to avoid the inevitable pitfall of your average movie/TV dub, where hearing a few seconds of dialogue is enough to tell that it originated in another language because the form of the conversation is so stilted and unnatural.) I ended up spending about 1.5 weeks on the original draft, and another 3.5 going through my gargantuan list of annotations and fighting myself on the details, so I’m delighted to hear it paid off…! <3

    And yes, I love how the original author approached Byerly’s early days with ImpSec (the fact that he’s such a hot mess is probably my favorite aspect of this story, he’s just so absolutely believably a 20-year-old moron, lol) and their take on Simon/By! I struggle to imagine this pairing played straight, but the way it’s done here totally worked for me (and was very funny, of course) :-)

    [edited to fix typo]

    Last Edited Wed 01 Feb 2023 09:40PM UTC

    Comment Actions