Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24081824-20160718235446/@comment-23.122.217.39-20160820224105

Paying professional translators to translate the entire series would probably cost a small fortune. The books alone are over a hundred dollars and that doesn't take into account the labor or skill of the translator involved. It could very well go into the thousands.

Now, while that would solve the translation issues (although I seriously think there's something a little sketchy there in paying people to translate someone else's copyrighted work with the intention of propagating it, so I'm not sure if we could actually get someone to do it--there's a reason why things of this nature are always done by fans), I don't think it's a necessary step considering the price it would involve. We already have a couple of sources of people who can read Japanese, and while none of them are really fully qualified translators some of them can work to a degree of accuracy that we don't have to fear information being incorrect. Even Servant's work, terrible as it is, was good enough at getting most basic facts and plot details right. As for precise wording, being vaguer and not quoting verbatim when writing the articles does actually solve that problem.

Not to jump all down your throat at that suggestion but it seems a bit extreme to want to hire professionals to translate all the source material of a series so extensive when the purpose of a wiki is as an information guide--and free fan translating pretty much cover most of what we need for that.

The biggest issue isn't that there isn't any way to get the series translated reliably. The issue is that we keep treating bad translations as though they're high quality.