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Hello! Mars here,
I wanted to give you some information on how I handle translation in these works. Firstly, I am a native English speaker, and while I took four years of Spanish in high school, I am by no means fluent. I do not speak, read, or write any language besides English.
However, it felt disingenuous to have some of these documents written in English as people wrote them in times or places where English was quite uncommon. This left me at a place where I wanted the story to exist (somewhat) authentically in a language that I could not write in. My solution to this was to use Google Translate.
I recognize that Google Translate is not a 1:1 substitution for a translator. Due to this method, the translations will likely be riddled with grammatical errors and sentences whose meanings have changed. That’s a risk I chose to take because, at the time I created these, I didn’t know anyone who natively spoke the languages I was writing, and hiring a native speaker online to translate the works was far outside what I am currently able to spend on the project. I realize it’s not ideal and that google translate is incredibly imperfect. While I would hope that someone who could read the language could at least understand the main story of these works from their translated version, I have no way of verifying that.
The translations are not there for the sake of the language and for accessibility. They are there primarily to make the documents look and feel more authentic to the reader.
Thanks for your understanding,
Mars
P.S. If any reader is interested in helping me translate these works properly into the language they are presented in or into any other language, please contact me, and we can talk about it. I don’t want to ask people to do work without being compensated, but I also realize using google translate for these pages is less than ideal.
