Happy Valentine’s Day! Two weeks later… 😬. Jokes aside, I hope you’ve had an awesome month while I disappeared from my blog. There isn’t much to say, so let’s get to it.
Translating CTCT
I think the most notorious thing I can talk about is this, translating CTCT from English to Spanish.
I had wanted to translate it for a few months already, the obvious reason being that more people will be able to read it, but just the idea was already somewhat scary. Well, I still got to it and yep, it was an entire new world. And I hadn’t even got into proper writing, it was just translation 😅.
I kept pushing it back and back until I published CTCT’s eBook (which you can buy here). My fellow authors were able to read it because they speak and write in English, but my real-life friends struggled more. As much as I wanted to show it to them or my family, it was impossible. So I knew it was time to get it done.
A day later, the first chapter was translated, and I’m lucky enough to have people willing to proofread it. They didn’t say much other than the story was very interesting, something every author wants to hear, right? Well, I began to translate the second chapter and that’s where I was intrigued by something. You know, as much as English and Spanish have a somewhat similar punctuation, there are a few important differences. I had already researched for the first chapter, but some things still bothered me. So I researched a bit more and… oh my.
You could say that, as a writer, I should read a lot, right? Well, I don’t… 😅. And the few things I read are in English. This made me ignore how different writing in Spanish was.
And so, the exhaustive research began. Articles, examples, dictionary definitions (interesting fact: the organization behind the Spanish dictionary has a Twitter in which they reply to a lot of questions), and many more sources. It took a bit of time, but I got to a point where I’m happy with it.
Now, I just don’t have to translate, but I also need to write in Spanish, which are two very different things. At the beginning, my brain was imploding with the many differences between writing in English and writing in Spanish, not only because of the amount, but because there are subtle changes that are easy to miss.
I translated the second chapter and came back to the first one to reformat it in Spanish. Just then I realized that not everything was disadvantages. Writing the same thing in another language (and probably even in the same) helps a lot to notice mistakes and better ways to convey scenes and dialogues. This can also be bad though, as it can make you fall in the trap of the endless loop of corrections, non-stop rewriting the same thing over and over again. As much as we want to, our writing will never be “perfect” even though it has no mistakes.
And that’s everything. No much has happened, aside from playing games (I love Valheim’s construction system) and watching anime (Yuru Camp and The Quintessential Quintuplets 👌).
I wasn’t listening to music while writing this, but I’ll still share a very nice song I found not long ago: Marshmallow Justice from the MONOGATARI Series. Fun fact: I had already listened to it years ago but didn’t remember it existed. It was a nice rediscovery.
Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to check CTCT!
