My interest in the Japanese language has come full circle. It started with playing a Japanese version of Pokemon before it was ever slated to be brought to the US, and it has finally culminated in taking part in translation work after 5 years of study.

I worked on one of the Mother 3 translation projects in 2006 before the unified team took over, but couldn't quite hack it. My skill was just not high enough, but it was still a good experience. I translated monster names, item names, and item descriptions. None of my work made it to the finished patch, though. It was all thrown out in favor of starting over at the beginning. I can't blame them. The team I was working with was a mess with many translators coming in, going out. Many of them were like me, not good enough to do what they were doing at the time. Their heart was in the right place, though. I wish all of them well despite the fact that my portion of it was a failure. It was a great learning experience. It was a lot of fun to try to render the meaning of everything concisely, and also try to do it with humor. It's probably my favorite thing I've ever worked on.

After doing study abroad in Japan last year, and passing JLPT2 I got the idea again to try my hand at other video game translation projects. I finished my first translation in January of this year, and I started a new one a week ago after I graduated school. Neither are released yet, they are dependent on hackers getting around to doing the text insertion.

I've found that my skills are good enough now to do a really decent job. This new project is my first RPG that I intend to finish. It's a shorter NES RPG, and I'm about 1/3rd of the way through. I find that it's a very interesting hobby, and I would like it to be my career in the future. I'm learning a lot of interesting words, and it's a great way for me to feel like I'm being productive while studying.

To describe my ability level now, I am at the point where I can understand a lot of dramas without subtitles. I can follow a game like Professor Layton without the use of a dictionary. I can understand most things as long as I have a good dictionary, and some time on my hands.

I really like reading Japanese, and I really like writing in English. This is the perfect combination of those two things, and I find the whole thing very fulfilling. I find that I can work almost endlessly on it without getting too burnt out. There's always interesting little problems.

Is anyone else involved in doing fan translation projects as a method of study? What projects have you worked on? Were they successful? Was it a good learning experience?

I don't really want to debate the merits of it. I think it's obvious that it's probably not a great plan for beginners, but that intermediate and advanced people might be able to get a lot out of it.

If you think about it, what "The Sentence Method" plus "Sentence Mining" boils down to is pseudo-translation. Yeah, you're not really translating, but you're going for understanding which is one step away from translation.

So yes, fan translation is a legitimate means of studying and can improve your Japanese. The more you do, the better you get.

That sounds really, really awesome. That's the sort of thing that prompted me to start learning Japanese, really. I think it would be a lot of fun to translate a video game, anime, manga etc that you were interested in.

i'm glad to see another Mother 3 fan on this site i just beat it not too long ago... I think it actually beat Chrono Trigger for my favorite game of all time... we share common interests, but i think my level isn't good enough to do translation work right now... i'm sure practicing translating will improve your Japanese a good bit

Ahh yes, much love for Mother 3 which was one of the first RPGs I played through in Japanese in its entirety.

J to E translation is one of my ultimate goals, myself, so I can completely relate. Personally, I don't feel like I'm at the point yet that I can translate with an acceptable level of accuracy (my grammar needs a lot of work), but it's something I'd like to begin at least casually around September (marking one year of my full time Japanese study) - probably starting with translating blog posts, magazine articles and so forth of interest. It's an incredible motivating factor for me, especially as someone who loves to write and loves to force their own interests upon others!

I work on translating Detective Conan every week and for sure it's a good learning experience. Translating is a LOT harder than reading for enjoyment, since you have to make sure you understand all the little bits of minutia that you might just otherwise skip over if you were reading for fun. There's also that bit of added pressure to get the translation 100% right if you know other people are going to be relying on your translation.