At the Movies

Yesterday was a busy day! I spent a lot of it at the Fangamer office, doing some heavy duty meetings for upcoming projects and upcoming prospects. Legends of Localization is doing super well and I think everyone involved is excited for all the things coming up.

Then Poe and I had to rush home, eat, and then rush back to the movie theater – my latest movie translation premiered yesterday! It’s always a treat to be able to watch my stuff on the big screen and see how audiences react to my writing, the jokes I struggle to translate, lines that are meant to be emotional, etc. Although I’m obviously not the creator of the things I translate, it’s a great feeling when people enjoy something I translated, even if they don’t even think about the translator or the translation process. It’s a weird side effect of trying to translate as transparently as possible 😛

Also, super secret translator tip: I’ve learned from these movie releases that the way you watch/play something can greatly enhance your creativity when translating, so if you feel like something you’re working could be improved a bit, try looking at it differently. If you’re working on a text document, try changing the font and font size to something crazy. If you’re working on a show or movie or whatever, try watching it on screens of different sizes. Of course, time plays a big factor too, so if you can manage it, try setting aside a translation and then come back to it after a good amount of time has passed.

Anyway, some more cool stuff happened yesterday but that’s a story for another time!

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3 thoughts on “At the Movies”

  1. Setting something aside for a bit is pretty helpful advice in general, not even just in translating. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been banging my head against some programming issue, stepped away from it for a bit to work on something else, then came back and gone ‘oh, wait, I can just do this.’

    The problem is once you’re sort of in your one mindset about something, you’re not likely going to sway your thinking because you’re still in the same ‘mode.’ It’s one of the reasons I never really bothered checking my work on math tests most of the time. I’d never find mistakes, because my brain would just see everything the same way it did the first time. As soon as I got the test back, though, I’d look at it and go ‘Oh, that’s totally wrong, I’m an idiot’ before even seeing the marks, because my brain wasn’t locked in to that same mode.

    1. I was getting pretty mad yesterday that some programming stuff I wrote wasn’t working when it made no logical sense to not work.
      Until I realized my code that was reading values from text files was converting the numerical text strings to hexadecimal and I had written decimal values.

      1. Nice, lol. It’s amazing how set your mind can get sometimes, where no matter how long you look at something you’re like ‘nah, this is totally right! it shouldn’t NOT work!’. Like there was one time one of my former co-workers was working on something and wracking his brain on it for a while, and called me over for a sanity check. He’s like ‘I don’t get it, when this variable is true it runs all this code’, and I’m like ‘Well that’s because you have if(var) {}’. He wanted it to be if(!var){}. Having someone else give you a sanity check can be super helpful as well, especially when you don’t necessarily have time to step away from something.

        I can’t tell you how many times coding I’ve spent hours troubleshooting some dumb mistake. Generally referred to as ‘I’m an idiot’ moments, since they’re generally followed by me saying or thinking that.

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