No matter how much you will want to pick and choose the kind of material that you translate, you will still get assigned a Translation From Hell!! There are all sorts of ways a translation can be handed to you from the burning underworld, but make no mistake, you will receive a translation from hell and you will have to get it in on deadline and with, at least, a forced smile.

My very first TFH was the Inscrutable Author type of TFH which I will get into in a later entry, but in short, it's the translation where the author is trying to build a world (usually a science-fiction world) where the reader is thrust in the middle of a world-gone-crazy and nobody really knows what's going on. The main problem with translating this kind of world is that you are one of those people who doesn't know what's going on.

Of course my next couple of TFH were Research Quagmire translations from hell. These are where you are (usually) sent back in time to an age where little is known of the rituals and customs and magic that makes the world work. A fantasy world based on sketchy history and obscure references in Chinese epic stories. Do you see the problem already? To translate it correctly you have to find and read these sketchy histories and obscure references in Chinese epic stories.

My earliest professional work was a series named Raika which took place in Japan in the 3rd century. It used text from the Kojiki (a collection of Japanese myths including the creation myth, mostly of the gods and what they did) and a small part of the Chinese epic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms named the Gishi-Wajin-Den (which translates out to The Tale of the Gentlemen of Gi and the People of Wa) which is thought to be the very first written record of events in Japan. I got my Kojiki from Kinokuniya (a Japanese bookstore chain in Japan, but also with branches in the U.S.), and I found a copy of an English translation of the Gishi-Wajin-Den in the depths of the local university library.

But so far, the worst TFH I've ever had to deal with was a story by the name of Ankoku Shinwa (The Dark Myth). Sure, it took elements of the Kojiki and the Gishi-Wajin-Den, but it also added Japanese history from the 400s AD, Chinese and Indian Buddhism, Tantric philosophy, and the hardest part of all, Tantric astrology.

I was working with my Japanese translation partner at the time, and even being equipped with (as we used to joke) a walking dictionary doesn't help with a Research Quagmire TFH.

Here's an example. The show centered around three stars that made up a constellation in Tantric astrology that are in some way pivotal to the final events that will either save the world or plunge it into darkness. While doing my research in the library, I found a chart with the original Sanskrit names for the constellations, so I used the Sanskrit terms since the Japanese were simply attempts to put Sanskrit into Japanese characters. However this pivotal three-star constellation didn't seem to correspond with any on the chart. Worse, in the video, they were saying that the constellation was Orion's belt. Tantric astrology, like other astrologies, only concentrated on the stars near the ecliptic (the path of the Sun), and Orion's belt was way off the ecliptic.

In the end, after spending a week in the library looking at every book on Tantric astrology that the university had (a surprisingly good collection), I found a chart with pictures of the stars. It turns out that there was a three-star constellation made up of some low-light stars near Orion's shoulder, and the author had commandeered the name, switched them to the more recognizable stars of Orion's Belt, and based the entire plot on them. (I don't know for sure that he did that. It could be that the author's reference books were wrong.)

In the words of Charlie Brown, Arrrrrrrrrrgg! I spend a week in the library figuring out the author's mistake!

It's times like those when you ask, "How much am I being paid for this job again?