magnum

There's a case study in Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates pitting a professional translator against an amateur one. Regarding translation notes, the professional actually them used more, even though fan translation is notorious for its liberal use of notes. Of course, notes should be kept to a minimum, but what that minimum is supposed to be isn't completely straightforward even among professionals and academics; it's not as simple as "localize everything", as others have mentioned. You can find bits of the study report here, it's quite interesting.

I'm reaching the point in my Japanese studies at which I'm not quite a beginner, but still far from proficiency. I didn't have to worry too much about that learning English because of my traditional classroom education that carried me through a structured path to basic proficiency (I was, and I still am, kind of rough around the edges, but it's an appropriate level for 95% of my needs). So it's not so much about learning as it's about self-learning; and on top of that, self-learning a wildly different language such as Japanese. I know what I want to achieve, but how to get there is the tricky part. Do I just continue what I'm doing and hope for the best? Should I study some more grammar? Maybe focus on increasing my vocabulary? Hardcore immersion? It's tough. No matter how many resources you can find on the internet, ultimately it's all up to you.

Well, I'm trying to learn how to do it myself, so forgive my inexperience. That said, I think I've made significant progress thanks to books and articles I've read on style. Style isn't as straightforward as grammar (then again, grammar itself gets quite controversial when it comes to subtle details) and you have to think for yourself about what you hope to achieve and, most important, about what the readers feel as they go through the text. So I wouldn't recommend just stubbornly sticking to some set of "rules" without ever thinking about them, but there are certainly some useful principles. As a general introduction to the craft of writing, Stephen King's "On Writing" is a must, highly engaging and informative at the same time. Then there's the classic "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. Don't read it as the Bible of style, but take it as a starting point from which you can think about what goes into writing good prose, a basic framework. For a truly deep dive into prose and what it means to write well beyond the scope of simple rules, the next step is Joseph William's "Style", an amazing book packed with insights that will change the way you think about writing. Also, I'm finding it quite useful to study copywriting, even though I don't plan on becoming a professional copywriter. That's because effective copywriting shares many qualities with what I consider to be my "ideal writing style": it grabs your attention from the get-go, engages you throughout the text while pushing its arguments, and gets you to take some action right now, having persuaded you enough by the end of the copy. If you're interested, check out "The Copywriter's Handbook", by Robert Bly.

Any visual novel fans around? I've found VNs to be a great source of native material, specially with a text hooker to extract lines from the script and some tool to look things up quickly in a dictionary. There's a guide for this kind of setup here (I don't use ATLAS, though; you're better off looking things up than trying to decipher some horrendous automatic translation). Besides the convenience of the setup, VNs are great for me because most dialogues are voiced, which I find easier to process than dry text. The first VN I've read in Japanese was Hanahira!, and it's ideal for beginners: short, easy to read, and almost fully voiced. I'm currently reading Noble Works.

I've recently bumped into a pretty interesting article about studying Japanese with anime. The method uses Anki (though I'm sure you could adapt it to some other SRS) and subs2srs (a tool that automatically turns subtitles into flashcards which can then be imported to an SRS). You make cards out of the lines in the Japanese subtitles, putting the English translation (from the translated subtitles) on the back of the card and adding a snapshot and audio from the episode. Then you study the deck and try to watch the show without subtitles, or with Japanese subtitles. That's the gist of it, at least. Read the article for more details. Has anyone ever tried this or something similar? I'm quite fond of the idea, being somewhat of an SRS maniac, but my current Anki workload is pretty high. It's gonna take a while until I'm comfortable adding new cards again.

Some exposure to linguistics (in fact, many of the social sciences) is enough to blur the lines between "soft" and "hard" subjects. If you want to understand the structure of languages, mathematics is the perfect tool, since it's all about abstractions and patterns; set theory and logic are particularly useful. If you want to do any sort of linguistic analysis, you'll have to get your hands dirty with tons of data and statistics. Also, as Wanda Kaishin pointed above, mathematics itself is a language, but that's one of its aspects which is often ignored in basic education. Most people would hate studying languages they only did grammar drills and vocabulary memorization, without any context. No culture to engage with, no people to talk to, no relevance outside the classroom. You're not there to learn "how" to speak, you learn "what" to speak. It sounds like a terrible way to teach a language, but that's how mathematics is taught in most schools (in my country, at least).