Shadow Skill - Born Legend

[burningsteel]

I have loved this song for a long time, and I tried translating it. It ended up as pure fail. I would love for an experienced person to translate this.

http://www.animelyrics.com/anime/shadows/shskbl.htm

Derp. Cannot figure out how to change the thread title to have [REQ] at the start.

[animeyay]

So I have learned that translating songs after midnight after 5+ hours of Final Fantasy grinding will have a detrimental effect on the sanity of my brain and the quality of my translation, so today, I translated this song before I started playing Final Fantasy~

Now you'll have to excuse me. Zidane is waiting for me =D

[AzureDark]

Zidane retired years ago. /runs

[burningsteel]

Awesome. Thanks a lot!
<(^_^)> <(^_^<) (>^_^)> ^(^_^)^

[animeyay]

Zidane retired years ago. /runs

but I don't really like the new FF games (namely 12 and 13)~
the battle system is just tooooooooo...unorthodox =x

Awesome. Thanks a lot!
<(^_^)> <(^_^<) (>^_^)> ^(^_^)^

sure thing! this is probably the first time a lyrics submitter made a request XD

[burningsteel]

sure thing! this is probably the first time a lyrics submitter made a request XD

Well, confidence in understanding Japanese visual novels, and confidence in understanding Japanese songs are two very different things I am finding. Usually in visual novels the sentence has a clearly defined scope, but in songs it is difficult to tell where "sentences" start and end. Knowing the speaker and the subject in sentences in VNs is also nowhere near as difficult as in songs. It is like Japanese (English too?) songwriters really enjoy being vague. There seems to be other oddities in songs that in visual novels seem quite uncommon, like dropping particles all other the place.
By looking at your translation I was able to verify that I understood most of it, and I was able to learn a bit as well. In the first paragraph/stanza, as I expected, I only perfectly understood the first line. How to translate one or two other lines was also kind of bothering me.

As far as translation goes I am still a scrub (esp for songs), but as I gain more experience I will become better. Out here in the wilderness there is only me, with my particle and kanji dictionaries tucked underneath my arm, Jwpce, Translation Aggregator with the excellent JParser (uses a greedy algorithm on a dictionary for finding definitions, meaning it finds the largest match in a string and displays it, which is good and bad at times), Smartocr lite (lots of errors), and google. Real japanese is so much harder than the silly nice examples in text books in Japanese II, and I only got a half-way decent handle on light novels a month ago with 這いよれ! ニャル子さん and ソードアート・オンライン.

So please do not be too annoyed with me if I request another song or two at some point that I am not too confident in...

Yea, and sorry for the huge long-winded post.

[animeyay]

It is like Japanese (English too?) songwriters really enjoy being vague.
...

Well son, recognizing and accepting this fact is winning half the battle XD

It's not exactly that lyricists are intentionally being vague. They are limited by the melody, so in order to have the appropriate number of syllables in each line, they can't exactly talk normally. Instead, they have to omit/add words here and there to make it work.

So yea, in my opinion, a good/skilled lyricist would someone who can write straightforward lyrics without confusing the listeners too much.

And don't worry about requesting too much. I wouldn't be here taking requests if I get annoyed so easily by requesters =P