This site is an attempt to create a wordpress website that easily hosts my translation work. I originally thought to make a website in the language I know (React.JS) but dammit, this website really is sort of for me to say I posted all of these translations _somewhere_ that I can reference them later.

My original motivation to learn Japanese stems from many of the songs I will post translations to. Google translation certainly has improved drastically (especially with the addition of AI) but what really caught me with many of these songs (and why I bother to post lyrics in a post-AI world) is that many of these songs are not translatable, and even more of them are filled with the brim with cultural references and expressions that just do not carry over to English and even throw off AI easily. Much of my desire to translate came from kind people like Kafka-Fuura who translated many of the songs I was curious about back in the day, and in a way I consider this project to perhaps be an attempt to ‘pay it forward’ the same way those people did for me.

It’s a silly thing to say but I am incredibly grateful for the early translators, especially for Touhou music (which is the majority of the music I have translations for) — indie japanese shoot-em-up arranges are not a hot market for translation and despite the silly concept, there are very few western song writers who can even imagine writing lyrics with the level of philosophical and existential depth that many of these songs carry…and I hope that I am able to convey as much as I can of the wisdom that lies within these songs.

The content of this site is a collection of google/word documents I’ve made since (at least) 2014 of translation works. I started learning Japanese in 2012 at the University of Missouri, where I originally started doing translations of songs I was listening to at the time to get more practice in.

I studied in Japan from 2014 to 2015 where my skills definitely were heightened, and I continued doing translation kinda off and on for songs that I was curious about. If you are interested in learning how to translate music, I highly recommend it as a way to learn another culture and another language, and now is _so_ much easier than it was in the past.

The tools I use to translate are
— Jisho.org (for Kanji I do not recognize)
— Rikaikun /Rikaichan extension for Chrome/Firefox — turn it on and highlight the characters
— Deepl.com for translation ‘first pass’ — AI is a tool, don’t rely on it but it can often give you a good idea of what to look for