I've been translating manga pretty much constantly since 1991. Right after a year-or-two stint with the fly-by-night company Sun Comics, I parlayed being a published translator into a similarly short stint doing manga and miscellaneous translations for Tokuma Shoten USA which ended in 1994 or 1995 time frame. The next manga I had my name on was in 1998. What was in the middle? Um... Comics that didn't have my name on them.

Most people think that translating porn comics is easy work. That isn't quite true. Sure, the translator doesn't have to dig very far into the dictionary to come up with the dialog. The mangaka know that they aren't supposed to challenge the mind all that much. They're busy challenging...other parts of the anatomy.

Quite honestly, the difficulty with porn is the sound effects and varying repetitive exclamations. As the one writing the words, you will feel a need to give some variety to the sounds that are being made, but really, how many different sounds are there during certain acts? And coming up with the sounds...there are other things that a translator likes to translate more than that.

The first one I translated was three or four people who all wanted to be there and had a good time during the events of the manga. But soon, I was asked to do some series that amounted to being nothing more than rape-rescue fantasy -- but the rescue comes too late. I've been called a prude, but I really don't mind porn where all participants are there voluntarily. But when rape or cruelty became the main factor of the story, I found myself dreading going to the computer to translate the book.

And eventually, that dread lead to the end of the stint. I'd put my anime work before the manga, and all of my manga scripts were beginning to come in late. I'd only do the manga when I absolutely had to do it. At one point I realized just how my attitude was making me deliver less-than-professional work, and I wrote to the publisher saying that I'd like to be taken off of the books. And the publisher, probably thoroughly annoyed with my constantly late performance, quickly agreed.

If anyone is shocked at my doing porn, (or on the other hand, if anyone is fantasizing about getting free, on-the-job porn) please remember that translating porn is not the same as reading it. The focus of attention is on everything other than the images. (There's no need to translate the images.) The translator's focus is on dialog; it's on sound effects; it's on just about everything other than the reason people buy the books.