As a translator, I like to work at a good pace. Having the pages turn along at a certain clip not only makes you money quicker (since translation is often paid per page of manga or per running minute of anime), but it also gives you a sense of accomplishment.

But not everything in translation is a Japanese sentence going into the mind, and an English sentence almost immediately coming out the other side. Certain things can slow that steady pace down to a crawl, and this is what eats up the time of translators.

The first and most common thing that slows a translation down is a word you don't know. The solution is simple, to look it up in the dictionary, but it's more than just plugging in a new word. Your brain recognizes English words from long experience with usage. When there's a Japanese word you don't know, it isn't simply that you don't know the meaning, but you've also (probably) never heard it used before. Which means it takes more time than just looking the thing up, you have to consider it within the context of the sentence. It's more like puzzle solving. I'm not talking hours here, just a few extra minutes per word, but the less Japanese you know to begin with, the more words you have to look up, and that can make a translation stretch into forever.

The second most common is for anime scripts and seinen, josei, and salaryman manga -- kanji you don't know. This is a little more difficult since the method for looking up kanji is far more complicated and time intensive than looking up words by alphabet or kana. It involves knowing the "radical" of the kanji (a small portion by which all similar kanji are referenced), counting the number of strokes used, then looking it up in Nelson's (or some other kanji dictionary). If you know one of the pronunciations for the kanji, then the work is easier, but even then it takes longer than a normal dictionary lookup. If you don't know the pronunciation, don't know the radical, and (usually because the kanji is hand-written) can't figure out the number of strokes in the character, then you're in for a long, long search. Up to twenty minutes on a single kanji, and sometimes even longer. That's a lot of effort for one single word.

Idioms are a constant source of headaches since I haven't found a good, quick dictionary for them. My Wordtank G50 has a way to list idioms that use particular words, but no dictionary, not even the Green Goddess, notes all the idioms. The number of idioms that use the word ki (for spirit or personal energy) are legion. This is a good time for that Japanese friend I mentioned in the Apprentice part of the dojo.

Katakana words. I'll talk about these in more depth in another post, but the basic problem is that the Japanese often take western words and modify the meanings. So not only do you have a foreign word that is in none but the very latest dictionaries, but it often has a different meaning than the word it comes from.

Cultural references can take up a chunk of time. As an example while doing an early volume of Here is Greenwood, (Nasu is notorious for difficult '80s cultural references) two of the main characters had an exchange where one makes a statement, the other replies with "Funôru no ryû?" (Funôru's dragon/lizard?) and the first responds with, "Are ha kansu!" (That's kansu!) (Please forgive my faulty memory, I had to return the Greenwood books to the publisher so I don't have the Japanese original to check.) So I had to figure out what this "Funôru" and "Kansu" were. Dictionaries turned up nothing. I tried a battery of friends, but none of them had any clue. Then at one point, deep into the teens or twenties of the Google lists, there was a website that wrote Funôru in its official English letters, "F'nor." F'nor?! Where had I heard that before? Then it came crashing into place -- it had been more than a dozen years since I had read Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Rider's of Pern series, but thinking it over, F'nor's dragon was named Canth. It had taken probably four or more hours to figure out that one throwaway pun, but at least I was able to. (There were several Nasu references that I was never able to figure out.)

Then there are phone calls, e-mail, and the normal day-to-day activities of one's life. It's a wonder anything gets translated.