Translation Notes Formatting

This is actually more of a question for the mods and the general public, with regards to how translation notes are formatted (e.g., sizing/bolding/italicizing for sound effects, spoken vs. thought text, honorifics, etc.).

In other words:

1) Does it matter?
2) Do people care if it changes from comic to comic?
3) Should translation notes follow a general standard?

I've been translating minami's "Trouble Spirit" for the past week or so, but now with China's "National Day" Golden Week holiday in full swing, I'll have little time to adhere to my usual schedule of 1 episode per day for the next week or so. Thankfully, Tetrominon's been picking up on some of the translations, but our methods for formatting are different, leading me to wonder if people care about this at all and if the differences are disruptive to the reading experience.

Or, if I'm being too OCD about this and no one really cares, just say so and I'll just keep chugging along.

I would have to see specific examples but while it's nice when things are consistent it's not completely necessary.
If the changes aren't something like a phrase that appears constantly but is translated differently by different people they're not generally something I would notice.

<edited out to make us both look less dumb>

Sorry, I mean sizing as in with html tagging, not the actual physical size of the notes themselves. I probably should have been more specific on that.

Oh, for those I guess if there's a bunch of notes with dialogue one size and one sicks out maybe I would change it but it's not really a big deal. Font changes are a bigger deal when you are hard translating something than when you're just making notes on top of an image where you can still see the original text.

I don't think it matters much, but then again I'm another translator. :)

The important thing, after all, is getting the text translated – once that is done, people can take the formatting and go crazy with it all they like.

I just translate and use the best wordchoice I can think of, typically I just leave it all the same font/size. I occasionally add translator notes, also I usually don't translate sfx

I actually don't stick too much of a standard -- asides from just getting the text there. Although more recently I'm fancying them up somewhat with format tags, I add (or don't add) them on a whim, basically.

If the original image intentionally plays with the size or color of the font it uses, I usually try to emulate that with style tags.

I usually only translate one-off images rather than 4koma or doujin pages though, so it's not likely to cause consistancy issues.

Also where there's something like that is translated with plain text, I'd say that's fine.

The most important thing is consistency with tags for names. Make sure you maintain original name order in translations just as in tagging.

Beyond that, even if we came up with a standard it would be impossible to get all translators on the same page. Although I much prefer for honorifics to be left in.

I do think we had some (unofficial) guidelines about how to format tl notes, though. Not sure what they were.

Text formatting is nice when someone takes time to play with it and really match the effects in the original, but a plain text translation is *perfectly* fine.

jxh2154 said:
Make sure you maintain original name order in translations just as in tagging.

Meh... Aye aye, I guess.