Allow me to clarify…
I've never taken real lessons. I've never been to the country. All I've done is try my best with free resources available online. Thus, I am far from being fluent in Japanese.
However, I decided to try my hand at translation while I was still learning because 1) doujinshi, being fan-work, is only ever translated by fans (I doubt professionals would); and 2) posting online is a significant source of motivation for me. If it wasn't for this blog, I might have given up learning JP long ago.
That being said, I just want to make it really clear that these translations are amateur and riddled with mistakes. I may not use machine translation, but there are Lots of mistakes. Here's an example of a work that both I and a different, more experienced translator translated:
(You can find the full version of the other translator's work by going to https://yaoi-sei.com/hetalia.html and ctrl+f searching missing fundamental).
As you can see in red, I totally misinterpreted these lines (can't believe I missed a sex joke ;-;). It's the kind of mistake that I couldn't figure out on my own, but is quite obvious in retrospect. And this is only one of many, many mistakes in this doujin alone. For the moment, I'm keeping all my old translations up, because a poor translation might be better than none, I guess…? But I did consider taking them down at one time.
So, in short, this blog is just translation practice for me. Please remember that my interpretations inevitably influence these works, and that they're not what the author originally intended to say! With that said, if you can still get some enjoyment out of my flawed translations anyway, then I have reason to leave the blog up after all.
Thank you for reading all of this!