How Three Kids with No Experience Beat Square and Translated Final Fantasy V
Holy shit, this bring back memories. I did something similar with the Harry Potter series about 15 years ago - beat the publisher to translating the book. Doing that, strangely, is <i>the one event</i> that shaped my life the most.<p>I discovered Harry Potter series up until book 4 (The Globet of Fire) by renting books from a bookstore when I was 15. At that time, many Vietnamese kids were all eager for book 5 to come out. Except for when book 5, The Half-blood Prince came, we had to wait for it. We would have to wait for the &quot;blessed&quot; translator and the publisher to translate and churn out the whole book when a new book comes, and with all the proofreading it would take about 4-6 months. I decided that was too long and started posting on a quite popular forum my indie translation, then moved to my personal website. Being a 16-year-old having a summer break at that time, I had nothing better to do. My timetable was something like stay up all night to translate half a chapter, post the new translation, go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 11 AM, the next day rinse and repeat. People <i>loved</i> it and many started contacting me to help with the translation. We had a YUUUUGE following to the point that I had to do nothing but just organizing and assigning who-does-what and then proofread it with my 16-year-old brain, but mostly we flew under the radar and it was easy. The complete translated book came out about 20 days after the English version. The normies still had to wait for the blessed book to read it, but anyone who had the Internet already read the whole story months earlier. People would bring A4-sized printouts to read at school and my older brother was asked more than once whether he knew the person who translated it from time to time.<p>Book 6 wasn&#x27;t a happy story but a fun one. When book 6 came, I knew so much better that I knew to appoint someone that did the logistics for me. I did the fun part, code a website that allows us to automate the translation submission and make sure it can handle the traffic. At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of &quot;Do you know you&#x27;re doing something illegal?&quot; I was scared shitless and <i>fucking deleted everything</i>, thinking this is it - this is the end, and went to bed, not responding to the journalist. Then at 5 AM, not being able to sleep, I checked email again and the same reporter sent another email...<p>&quot;I see that you deleted everything. This is totally not my intention. I won&#x27;t rat you out. If possible, please let me know if we can do a secret interview. You might think that I am being dishonest but please trust me this time, I want you to continue what you are doing. I hope to see the new chapter coming out tomorrow.&quot;<p>I immediately removed all real names and asked everyone on the team to choose a nickname for themselves. I actually gave out my home address to the reporter and he turned out to be a hipster-looking student studying journalism writing part-time for a newspaper. We became good friends after that. Besides the interview, the translation at that time was so controversial that it sparked the discussion whether it is &quot;right&quot; or &quot;wrong&quot; to do on many online forums. I had google analytics at the time so I knew who was linking to the website. I registered a nickname just to talk my side of the story in one of them. It turned out that the admin of the forum was someone who studied in Princeton and three years later, when I dropped out of college, disheartened by what I saw and discouraged by what happened, he asked me to go study abroad. I would otherwise have never dreamt of doing that. Another online friend who is 40+ at that time asked me to work for him in the gap year, appointed me to his &quot;vice-president&quot; role of his company. The rest is just history. Thanks to the event and all that came after it, I knew probably 50% of all online friends that I admire and probably won&#x27;t ever know otherwise.<p>By the way, when book 7 came out (when I was having my &quot;gap year&quot;), I decided not to do it anymore. It was too much to handle. Someone else I knew did it, though.