Agreed with mouffette here. You have all the right to be angry because you honestly don’t deserve the hate that you’ve gotten here, but that part where you blamed their “pea brains” was the only bit that I felt was a step out of line. I understand you’re doing this to improve your linguistic skills in both English and Korean, which is truly admirable. However, it’s the responsibility of a translator to ensure that the meaning of the original work is conveyed as clearly as possible to the audience, and while nobody should be bashing you for the free work you’re doing, I think it’s excessive to blame the readers if they don’t understand your translations. I also understand that you are not an official or paid translator, so that argument might not be valid, but this isn’t just about “responsibility”—it’s also about your understanding of the language. In order to really improve your skills in both languages, it’s important that you understand their tricky nuances and how to convey those clearly to the target audience (in this case, English). Naturally, that means direct translations won’t always suffice, but it’s only by getting out of that comfort zone and exploring all your options that you will attain a firmer grasp on them and gain confidence in writing in both languages.
My apologies if that complaint sounded too aggressive. I can only imagine how upset you must have been after reading those comments, so I wouldn’t blame you if that was all written in a moment of anger. I truly appreciate your hard work and am sorry for the hate you’ve received since uploading your translations. This chapter’s quality was honestly great, especially given the tight timeframe you give yourself, so thank you very much for all the hard work you’ve put in. I’ve tried my hand in doing all this before—solo translating, solo cleaning, solo redrawing, the works—and eventually gave up because of the sheer difficulty of trying to work with awkward phrasing and the amount of time that it ate up. So to a partial extent, at least, I know how hard it is, and I’m sincerely grateful for your efforts. As for all the haters, feel free to ignore them. They’re just a bunch of bad eggs that have no bearing on your work.
My only tip for improvement would be as I stated earlier: to experiment and explore your options in translating. Of course, you don’t have to do this straight away, and you certainly don’t have to post any first attempts in your translations online. It can simply be an exercise to get a feel for the language, and if it bears results, all the better for you!
