Summary post
I said I was going to post updates in this thread and then totally didn’t, whoops!
Been a bit of a wild month for me, in both good and bad ways. I have managed to keep up with listening every day (in both Spanish and Japanese), though!
One thing I did want to talk about is the most interesting translation experience I’ve had thus far!
Dalys and Stephanie Vaquer, luchadoras from the Mexican company CMLL, recently wrestled in a one-off match at Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling on September 11 (here’s my post about translating this show). Naturally, they did their post-match comments in Spanish! So when translating their comments into English, all that I had to work with was the video footage in Spanish (without a transcript), and then a Japanese translation of what they said.
Listening challenge hard mode!
I really wanted to translate directly from the Spanish, so I started off by transcribing the interview, and then I asked a friend of mine who’s fluent in Spanish to double-check my transcription. After that, I translated it and then got that same friend to look at my translation, haha, to make sure I wasn’t off-base.
I missed a few things when transcribing it, but otherwise did decently well! I was very surprised! Listening comprehension is absolutely my biggest weakness with Spanish as well as Japanese. But thanks to this challenge, I’ve been practicing a lot more this year, and I think that really helped me get to a point where I’m capable of translating something like this.
In the other thread, I’ve been including photos from matches so that my posts are more interesting, so here’s one from this show, haha. This is Yuka Sakazaki and Mizuki vs Pokotan, a mascot from DDT Pro-Wrestling, and Demonio Uno (not pictured), who is a zombie (?). In the photo, Yuka is hitting one of her signature moves, the Magical Merry-Go-Round, on Pokotan.
Some day, I will be trilingual and fluent in all three of the pro wrestling languages, and then I will be unstoppable .