Pegasus Device by AuroraDawn

Welcome to my blog page! From now on every translation I complete will be summarized in a post like this one.

Pegasus Device – official Polish translation by Imperium Ominosum

So, as a beginning to my blog, I'd like to talk about my very first public translation which, as you can tell from the title, is AuroraDawn's fantastic Pegasus Device. It all started in February 2020 when I realized SlyphStorm's Pegasus Device song is indeed based on a fanfic. I read it and then wanted to see how good its Polish translation was, simply from curiosity. But it turned out there was a translation of only the first chapter from 2013, and it wasn't even good. No complete Polish translation of one of the fandom's classics, more than seven years after the original release! This is even more puzzling when you recall that Rainbow Factory was translated into eight languages within the first year, and the author of that partial translation announced that the next chapter was coming really soon, but for some reason it was never released. That's most definitely the reason why Polish bronies don't really know of Rainbow Factory's sequel, and so I decided to at least try to change it.

I started working on the translation on March 25 and finished on May 20, but then there was a problem: I'm not good at writing. In order for a translation to sound good you need a proofreader, who would revise the text and make it look like a native piece of litereature, or you can do it by yourself. But I didn't have the skills, nor did I have a proofreader to help me, so I adjusted the raw transaltion a bit and added comments to make it easier for a future proofreader I hoped to find.

In early August it turned out that one of my aquaintances loves books and reads lots of them. I asked her if she'd be willing to help me out. She said she could try and she ended up liking it, so much so, in fact, that she didn't want any money for proofreading the whole thing. About a month later I realized that MLP:FiM's tenth birthday would be in just a few weeks, so we decided to finish off the translation for that occasion. We managed to release the first chapter on October 10, and would then publish the remaining chapters a week apart from each other.

On October 22, AuroraDawn came back to life and brought a bonus chapter to Pegasus Device with him after such a long time of inactivity. I think it was enough of a surprise for most, but for me, there was something even more surprising about to happen. After just three days he found my translation and actually posted about it on his blog page! He thanked me so much and encouraged me to set up a Ko-fi page, and then actually donated himself! At that point my brain just froze and exploded at the same time.

We quickly started talking over Discord and I have to say he's a really, really nice guy. I invited him to a Polish server where he happily answered a few questions from me and some other fans. It was at that point when he said that he was working on a sequel to Pegasus Device, which would be released in early December. As another token of gratitude, as if there hadn't been enough of them already, Aurora put a little easter egg in it, as some kind of tribute to my translation. He was even kind enough to share the unedited version with me and allowed me to start translating it as soon as the first chapter was entirely ready.

And so, I am currently working on my next big project: translation of Pegasus Device: Reckoning, or, as the official Polish title will probably say, Pegasus Device: Rozliczenie.