My translation process is maybe a little more complex than professional translators, but it works for me, and I thought I'd share to give an idea of all that goes into these translations.
Step 1: Reading: After getting the dialogue, I read through the entire story. Usually I'll read all of the chapters so I know where the story is going before I begin translating. This is especially important because sometimes there are phrases or words that are left very ambiguous in the Japanese in one chapter, but revealed in later chapters. One example of this is in Vim's story:「……あいつも、ここが好きだったからな」 Here we see the use of あいつ, which is an ambiguous way to refer to someone. In reading ahead, we learn that あいつ is referring to a woman, and that's why in the English あいつ has been translated as 'she', despite it not being clear in the initial read-through of the Japanese.
Step 2: Literal Translation: In this stage I go through the text, use a dictionary if needed, and type up the literal translation of the Japanese. This doesn't read well for an English speaker, it's choppy and strange-sounding, and so this isn't the version that gets made public. One example of choppy is from Avi's story: 「ドライフラワー以外にも、そのまま生けても、きっと素敵」Roughly translated, this reads as 'Dry or living, it's lovely.' But that doesn't quite give the whole meaning behind the sentence and needs some reworking.
Step 3: Translation: This is the proper translation where I take the literal translation from step 2 and change up the grammatical structure and word choice to make the story flow better. This is where the creative license comes in. I add words, change out things, and do whatever I can to still keep the original feeling of the Japanese text, but also make it more readable and interesting for English speakers.
Step 4: Re-read: After typing up the proper translation, I'll start inputting it into the website. However, because of the creative license and trying to get a fluid English read, I'll often end up changing the wording and grammatical order a second time around if I come across something that still doesn't sounds quite right. Once that's done, the story is made public.
So there you have it, my translation process. There's a lot that goes into this, and I'll often use a Japanese dictionary, an English dictionary, a thesaurus, and peer-opinion to get the right phrasing and terminology to properly express what the Japanese is trying to say.
And at the end of the day, you have Japanese translated into English!
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