Back in early 2017 I translated the short fiction story “Final Days of Summer” (残夏) written by Masaki Hashiba (ハシバ柾), which you can read in full here.
Recently I received a query from a person named Perzipal regarding the retranslation and online publishing of this work into the Indonesian language. To make a long story short, after getting permission from the original author I decided to give permission myself and the first episode has already been posted.
It gives me much joy to be able to help others to experience works of literature that would otherwise be impossible due to differing languages, and it’s likewise pleasing for one of my translations to be a stepping stone to allow even more people to read a work. While I admit not being very familiar with Indonesian, according to this site it seems to be the 10th language in the world in terms of the total number of speakers. Besides the actual act of retranslation, it’s great to know that someone enjoyed this story enough to consider retranslating it.
I’d like to thank Masaki Hashiba for allowing permission of this, especially considering some authors shy away from retranslations due to the (perceived) higher potential for deviations from the author’s original intention. While I acknowledge this as a possibility (albeit one that applies even to regular translations to a certain extent), when there is no opportunity for a direct translation I think retranslations are a reasonable option.
I’m generally open to considering retranslations of all my official translations posted on this website, as well as those published as books, so please feel free to contact me if you have any interest (email: “SelfTaughtJapanese [at] gmail.com”). It is likely that I will accept retranslations to other languages of this particular story, given that the author is OK with it (which seems likely).
“Final Days of Summer” is the first time a retranslation of one of my translations has been published in some form, but I have been in discussions about several other retranslations that I hope to be able to announce eventually.