No, you're not the only one who konws Japanese, I am also a translator. But subbing from a sub reduces accuracy doesn't it?
Depends on the way you work. I remember my first pro translation back in '94 was for the AD Police manga. There was already a really good English translation available for it (from Studio Proteus IIRC), so I took my Japanese volume, my English volume, translated from English and checked, word for word, from the Japanese text. It allowed me to avoid browsing through my dictionary everytime I stumbled upon a problematic word. (And believe me, AD Police is not far from Shirow stuff in terms of complexity sometimes.)
Well, I still believe it to be one of my best works. And I'm not ashamed to say I borrowed help from the English version. In the end, it's not like I made an inaccurate translation: I did translate it from Japanese.
The Creamy Mami French dub is really not bad at all. There are issues here and there, but it's quite a good text to use as a basis for an English translation. Then, you just need to check the Japanese version for potential mistakes, and, obviously, for the actual way of saying the things.
Today I was reading through a manga translated to French from English. I didn't have the Japanese original under the hand, but it was a blatant example of how bad the French community can be at translating from English (which is something like ten times easier than translating from Japanese). This was in the second or third sentence in the manga: "(I'm very busy with my job) And that job would be... voice actress". He translated that to "Et ce job serait... actrice". Or something like that. It's a litteral translation. You all realize "would" is not used in its usual context here. Well, he translated it as if someone had said, "If I could have a job, then that job would be voice actress".
It's not a flaw to translate with help from a language that is not the original text. It's a flaw when you're a bad translator or you simply don't care at all about doing your job seriously.
You seem to really like French subs, dubs...
I don't watch much anime, actually. And I only watch them in Japanese with English or French subs. Except for older anime, which I sometimes watch in French, for nostalgia reasons. (French dubs used to be *really* good in the 70's and 80's.)
maybe subs but dubs o_O is a no no I think. Anyway, I think I'll be doing the OVAs from Mami unless you want to.
There's an Italian dub available for them (no French dub, though). I don't speak Italian, but I could doublecheck your work against the Japanese version if you'd like.
there is an urgency of getting it done as soon as possible, so I hope you can return soon.
Do you plan to do the OVAs before actually finishing the TV show? That sounds strange to me.
PS: I'm very tired tonight, sorry if I made any English mistakes in my post.
