About

This site is, basically, my personal place to share things with the Internet. It serves whatever purpose I see fit to post for; the primary purpose, however, is the translation of Japanese lyrics to English, usually for songs related in some way to anime. Do make yourself at home and enjoy whatever it is that you’re looking for.

In general, all translations are done independently of any awareness/permission from the original creators. The original songs and lyrics belong to their respective owners; I simply play the role of being an additional set of eyes and ears for those who need them.

-bambooXZX

On translation content

The single thing that has the most impact on what I translate is what I happen to be listening to at the time. My primary way of discovering music is through watching anime theme songs and then exploring their artists, so you can expect of lot of that. I also take requests, though I’m not very good at fulfilling them reliably. I don’t restrict myself on song choice at all; if it interests me and it’s something I can do, I’ll do it.

I am a native speaker of (US) English. I studied Japanese in the classroom for two years, and I’ve been learning from hands-on experience in translating songs ever since. (I also have JLPT N1 certification, but honestly, that doesn’t really mean a whole lot.)

Other languages I have experience with:
-Mandarin Chinese (speaker since birth; ability has degraded with time, but I can still read and listen to some extent)
-Taiwanese (very slight understanding due to family and informal classroom lectures)

WARNING! I should note that my grasp on Japanese lyrics was not always as strong as it is now, and I have made some highly embarrassing mistakes in my old works, so be aware that the further back you go, the greater the chance you’ll find a TL with some uncharacteristically egregious error. I have been fixing things up where I find them, but it’s an ongoing process; eventually this will be thoroughly solved. For the present, I’ve been told by at least one qualified outside observer that 2014 seems to be the general point where things get safer and that stuff is usually alright even before, but who knows. …not that I don’t still make mistakes from time to time, but just saying. :V

Using my translations

Feel free to use these lyrics for your own purposes, such as adding them to more specific databases (if they allow it) or putting them onto music videos. In general, I would prefer that you credit me (preferably with a link back here) and give me a heads-up; I like to see where my stuff ends up, and I of course take pride in the effort I put into these translations.

One caveat, though: if you want to change any of the wording of the translation, I’d prefer it if you could link to the specific lyrics page, or alternatively don’t name me at all, because I have no desire to claim liability for inaccuracies produced by bad editing. Heck, depending on what this is for, you can try commenting, and maybe I’ll be able to take a look and make sure nothing gets too far off.

Of course, this being the internet, there’s nothing stopping you from disregarding me here, but I hope you can understand.

Retranslating

If you want to try translating my translations to a language other than English or Japanese (or any other source), there’s nothing really stopping you, but I don’t recommend it. There are many issues with doing that, and they can lead to very big problems for material as freeform as song lyrics. One of the main reasons is that when you translate something, you can’t always get all of the meaning that was in the original, and you can’t always avoid adding new meanings that weren’t in the original. If you translate a translation on top of that, you’re missing everything that the previous translator missed, and you’re picking up and transforming things that the previous translator added or transformed – you start getting further and further away from the original meaning, and there will almost definitely be mistakes.

Again, as this is the internet, go ahead if you really feel like it’s what you want to do, but be aware of the pitfalls.

tl;dr yes, you can translate my translations, but it will make me sad

Contact

The best way to reach me is through a comment on this blog, as I check very frequently for those. This page will do for general topics. If you really need a private channel, send email to bambooxzx at gmail and I’ll do my best to get to it.