Sexy Akiba Detectives
joined Feb 8, 2014
Well, that's certainly far better than the kind of translators who honestly believe that it's not only their prerogative but obligation to strip everything remotely "foreign" from the material to be translated. My sole major reservation, however, is that this approach is quite vulnerable to the scanlator's subjective intrepretations of both the series and the audience.
I'd argue that any translated work is vulnerable to the former! As for the latter... this is pretty true. I normally use the Japanese audience as a baseline, though.
(Another important thing to bear in mind is that unofficial translations are ultimately that - unofficial. Claiming a fan translation to be the canonical expression of the authorial intent will almost never work out, because due to the grey market way in which a lot of these groups operate, they don't talk to the writers directly, and just have to intuit stuff off their interviews, twitter, comments, etc - if those even exist! As such, arguments about the quality of official translations aside, those have a higher chance of actually repping what the author means - and while it's good for unofficial TLs to strive to achieve that, they can ultimately only stab in the dark)
A more minor reservation is how jarring it can be to read two translated works by the same group whose translation styles look different enough that it's reasonable to assume they're done by entirely different translators.
to be fair, the source work is written by different people. if it feels like it's different rather than feeling like the same person wrote the dialogue, that's probably true to the text.