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Teamliquid's a pretty multicultural place and is definitely blessed with people from all over and with different perspectives. Since my last blog on "culture" seemed to spur up a fair amount of discussion, I've decided to continue the series, talking about translation today.
(Don't worry, I'll go back to doing silly Brood War battle reports when I have enough time and find the right replays)
In my line of work, I do a fair amount of translation. I didn't major in it or anything back in school, I just find it an interesting process, and do it primarily when I enjoy the source material (not necessarily the case for work, but that's understandable).
Translation really isn't as simple as "knowing two languages". There's a big difference between translating fiction and non-fiction. I've done a fair amount of Chinese-English translation for Brood War, and it's a *lot* easier than translating fiction, for reasons I will outline below. I recall reading in one of my classes Walter Benjamin’s famous work (in this field, at least) "The Task of the Translator". In it, he makes the point that as far as fiction is concerned, the idea of an “invisible translator” is flawed, and the worst thing to do.
He argues that even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process – this is regarding the original language itself, not simply when it comes to translation. What sounded fresh once may sound hackneyed later what was once current may someday sound quaint. Translation is not something between two dead languages, but generally two constantly evolving and growing languages, if only because people’s perceptions and ways of thinking about language change.
Now obviously, this is important as far as tone, interpretation, and voice are concerned. I’d say it’s safe to say that fiction translators are constantly trying to balance between 1) Translating literally, and 2) Translating something such that it feels natural in the new language. Under Benjamin’s framework, the translator is no longer burdened by what she’s doing when she changes words, because the original language itself is in constant flux. For example, Japanese used now is different from the Japanese used in the early 1900s. This holds true for almost every language, except for truly dead ones like Latin. The context through which you see something changes – because the original language changes, there’s really no such thing as a perfect and timeless translation.
Now regarding the balance that the translator has to strike between being extremely faithful to the original language and re-interpreting it in the new language, one can observe an interesting phenomenon when it comes to Japanese manga translated into English and published in the States. Here, you have a situation where the translator/translation is intentionally visible – for a lot of manga, people want to see the original meaning to a certain extent, and thus you have names that aren’t westernized. In the past, sometimes characters originally called “Makoto” might get names like “Ashley” when the manga was brought to the States, but it’s significantly less common now. "Uzumaki Naruto" is still called "Uzumaki Naruto" instead of "Josh NineTails" or something stupid like that. Rather, for many things in translated manga, they keep the original word and instead provide footnotes in the end to provide context, rather than try and find an English equivalent.
Of course, there are some exceptions, depending on the market and the manga itself. Notably, in Pokemon, rather than keep the word “onigiri” (rice balls), they switched it to “donuts”, though quite obviously... they weren't actually donuts.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2Sy2q.png)
Also famously, the series Detective Conan is called Case Closed in the States, and the character's names have been changed. Shinichi is now Jimmy, Ran is now Rachel. It's amusing particularly because the Detective Conan series is *very* Japanese and a majority of the cases rely upon an understanding of the Japanese culture or language (wordplay).
The ironic part about translation is that the more “invisible” the translator attempts to become, the more the original author’s voice is lost. A literal word for word translation is really clunky, awkward, and probably grammatically incorrect. Obviously, this is an extreme, but it goes to show that a translator must to a certain extent reword things so it makes sense. To be good, you actually have to be able to really understand the original text, and create a new voice for the author; something that’s your own style.
An interesting example I’ve seen is the English version of Azumanga Daioh. In the manga, there’s a character from Osaka, and the stereotype is that people from that area (Kansai) all speak in the kansai-ben (also the case in Kyoto) – essentially, it’s different from standard Japanese (Tokyo-style). As such, she supposedly speaks in a different dialect, and this is translated into English by giving her somewhat of a Boston accent, which doesn’t seem to fit perfectly in my opinion, but the spirit of it makes sense. I think it was chosen because it’s not as subtle and hard to notice as an American Midwestern or West Coast accent, and not nearly as heavy as a Southern drawl. At any rate, this is a good example of creativity in translation that helps to preserve the original *intent* of the author.
On a related note, it’s interesting that a lot of Japanese songs will use English words in them, sometimes randomly, sometimes making sense in the context of the song. Now what is fascinating is the fact that at a certain level, the English used in these songs is its own language – rather, it seems more like an expansion of the Japanese vocabulary, despite being ostensibly in English – this is because the words can mean something to Japanese people, and yet something else to native English speakers.
Thus when it comes to translating Japanese lyrics to other languages, what should you do? Say you want to translate a song from Japanese into English, and there are English lyrics or words in the song. If you just directly bring the English over, then something’s inevitably missing, given that the context is different. To repeat the point, the very scenario of seeing an English word in the middle of a Japanese song must be preserved. For example, perhaps translating that English word into a French word, to retain the original sense and intention of the song – the “exoticness” of the English as its perceived to Japanese people.
This brings up my final issue – I am often asked, “Do you think in Japanese or English or Chinese etc…” to which I used to respond that it would be whatever language I was speaking and being spoken to in, which is something that is possible only after you have a solid enough grasp of the language and vocabulary. However, after further thought, I feel that I’m not necessarily thinking in Chinese or English specifically per se – rather, I know vocabulary and ways of formulating thoughts based on the different subtleties of each language, but I’m thinking in *ideas* - this ability is merely enriched by any knowledge of additional languages.
Hope this made sense.
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United States1719 Posts
captured alot of what goes on in my head when I translate, nice blog
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Fascinating stuff. I envy you multi-lingual guys a lot. Wish I was younger so I could learn a new language.
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As a spanish-native speaker, I must say I agree 100% with your blog entry. Fascinating blog.
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Very interesting read. I'm still unable to speak another language, but I've taught myself some amount of japanese over the years. Enough that I can occasionally understand a line from a song, or a sentence spoken in an anime. I've always found that I could "think in ideas" in the sense that I understand both the english and japanese form of the sentence/line simultaneously.
I'm much better at reading and interpreting a language than I am at forming ideas in the language, but I've found I could understand things written in romance languages (to varying degrees, based on how close the language is to latin) by being familiar with the latin roots, and being able to guess the use of grammar.
It's actually kinda annoying, since I seem to have a natural talent for linguistics, but not the ability to stick with it long enough and put in enough effort to become fluent.
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Good read. I'm not nearly as familiar with this as you probably are, but I've seen enough anime to realize this problem exists. Japanese puns are probably really annoying for translators who try to keep the original meaning as much as possible, but obviously, there is a limit to what they can do.
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As far as fiction is concerned it has come to be my belief that one of the translator's many tasks is killing the language within the language, which in some cases, as OP has already outlined, may be a insurmountable task. When such problems arise, sacrifices must be made if an ideal or close-to-ideal solution cannot be found. Compensation (i.e. Josh Ninetails) and omission being prime examples. In this regard it is useful to look at the history of translation in the field of manga and anime, done both professionally and under the guise fan publications.
In the field of professional translation the operator is keenly aware that his public is potentially vast and - this at the very beginning of the west's cultural assimilation of manga - probably ignorant of Japanese customs and conventions both cultural and linguistic, which is why we end up with the above mentioned donuts as opposed to the erroneously overlooked rice balls. Many factors can come into this type of choice, the most important being general cultural relevance (what are rice balls anyway?!) and the specific competence of the viewer, in the case of Pokemon, children, though obviously they were not counting on teenagers and grown men watching it. This is the reason you never encounter the many honorifics present in Japanese and why it is necessary we always lose some of the subtlety; it is also the reason you will never read a book or a story written by a Japanese author translated in the voice of a Japanese person - the target translation will always be natural because to the target reader (i.e. the Japanese one) the language originally employed is perfectly natural and there is no reason to subject the foreign reader to the strangeness of the original language. This is an ever present error in the many scanlations present on the Internet, and a conspicuous one even in the eSports scene and indeed on this very forum.
The one big difference between professional translations and amateur ones is the enduring strangeness of the original code. That language within the language which I have mentioned needs killing (in fiction at least) if an optimal result is to be reached. But it's not really so bad in this case. In the real market sacrifices must be made to ensure optimal comprehension, and, after all, we are not interested in reading annotated versions of books, which while offering more depth and insight ultimately distract us from the text. This is all dependent on reader competence, which in the world of scanlations is probable to be much higher, which is why we do not mind the present -sans and -kuns and and the many other cues of social interaction embedded in Japanese. Being not only familiar but aware of them we welcome their presence. This tendency can also detract however. It is not rarely possible to encounter strange syntagms and typically Japanese expressions rendered ad litteram when they should have been naturalized. This does not do much damage in and of itself but a speaker of, say, Spanish, may strengthen his English through his passion for manga and end up speaking a language which is, yes, English, but not quite.
Book upon book has been written on the topic of translation, but the one question that is ever relevant is this: What does it mean?
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Thanks for writing this and all the people who made the comments. I'm currently aspiring to being a translator/interpreter and basic forms of these thoughts have come through my head while I've been trying to translate things, i.e. thinking conceptually as opposed to in a language per se and how literal and adaptive to be to the target language to make it as natural as possible and how much to kill/reword (I always try to reword the minimal amount to make it sound natural, but I also strive to refrain from modifying the core meanings of words).
I really enjoyed this read and would read any more blogs on translation if they ever came around.
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On January 20 2012 15:59 Suc wrote:
Thanks for writing this and all the people who made the comments. I'm currently aspiring to being a translator/interpreter and basic forms of these thoughts have come through my head while I've been trying to translate things, i.e. thinking conceptually as opposed to in a language per se and how literal and adaptive to be to the target language to make it as natural as possible and how much to kill/reword (I always try to reword the minimal amount to make it sound natural, but I also strive to refrain from modifying the core meanings of words).
I really enjoyed this read and would read any more blogs on translation if they ever came around.
Hum, I can't believe I didn't see this response. I didn't mean to ignore you or let this topic die, because it's one of the things that really interests me. Regarding being adaptive to the target language to make it sound natural while retaining the "feel" it provided the readers of its original language is always an interesting process to observe. I'll help illustrate this with an example from the manga "Kodomo no Omocha/Kodocha.
As mentioned above, I believe the best way to translate is to express original author intentions and nuances, rather than simply the words. The English fan scanlation that I read (of Kodacha) didn’t express this particularly well (there were actually various lines of dialogue where the original Japanese was left untouched, which actually helped me in this ironically), but the Taiwanese anime adaptation of Kodocha was interesting, particularly in the way that it chose to portray dialect. I hadn’t actually remembered until now, but the character Fuuka (風花) was originally from Osaka, and thus has a different way of speaking Japanese, compared to the other characters. (much like the character Osaka from Azumanga Daioh – her name is Osaka precisely for that reason)
In the Taiwanese version, this was done by actually giving her a Taiwanese-Mandarin accent (台灣國語), with minimal rolling of the tongue for “r”s, and more of a “th” sound in some word pronunciations. I thought that was an interesting decision, and something that fascinates me – how countries localize accents, and decide on the most appropriate ones. For example, I probably wouldn’t have liked it very much if they had given her a Beijing-Mandarin accent with its heavy “r” rolling, because the feeling is too different from the Osaka accent compared to standard Tokyo. It's just not equivalent. In Taiwan, the Beijing-Mandarin accent sounds either "educated" (in a sense, somewhat similar to how the sound of English-English is perceived in the States), and at the very least it's quite obviously "foreign", in that it's used in China, and definitely not in Taiwan. It's two different countries, rather than two different regions of the same country. (apologies in advance to Chinese unification advocates) In contrast, the Osaka accent, while somewhat different from the standard Tokyo accent, definitely doesn't feel "foreign", as if it was a Korean speaking Japanese. By using the Taiwanese-Mandarin accent, the series was able to preserve a sense of "otherness/oddity" while still making it easy to relate to and not overly jarring.
Now what I want to know is if this nuance was captured in the Chinese manga version, using written words. In Japanese, it isn’t a problem, as the different forms of speech are expressed by different hiragana spellings or different vocabulary, but in written Chinese it’s harder to make that distinction. Of course, this is a pretty specific example to Japanese/other translation.
On a side note, another translation issue was that of her name. In the original, there is an amusing point where Hayama (羽山) mistakenly thinks her name is “Buuka” rather than “Fuuka”. In Japanese, this is a very small difference – just two dots next to the written hiragana will change it. The two letters look *very* similar, so it's understandable that a little kid might make that mistake. In the Taiwanese version, it was a difference of “Buhua” (布花) and “Fonghua” (風花). This is correct as far as the pronunciation of the Japanese kanji is concerned, but the difference is significantly larger, both written and spoken. Just a random thought.
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Baa?21243 Posts
Interesting blog, not much to add myself so I'll simply leave a quote here:
"Any theoretical remarks offered by a translator are bound to be an apology for his failures. Obviously no sane translator can allow himself to dream of success. He asks only for the best possible failure." -John Ciardi, on translating Dante's Divine Comedy
^^
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On a related note, it’s interesting that a lot of Japanese songs will use English words in them, sometimes randomly, sometimes making sense in the context of the song. Now what is fascinating is the fact that at a certain level, the English used in these songs is its own language – rather, it seems more like an expansion of the Japanese vocabulary, despite being ostensibly in English – this is because the words can mean something to Japanese people, and yet something else to native English speakers.
Thus when it comes to translating Japanese lyrics to other languages, what should you do? Say you want to translate a song from Japanese into English, and there are English lyrics or words in the song. If you just directly bring the English over, then something’s inevitably missing, given that the context is different. To repeat the point, the very scenario of seeing an English word in the middle of a Japanese song must be preserved. For example, perhaps translating that English word into a French word, to retain the original sense and intention of the song – the “exoticness” of the English as its perceived to Japanese people.
I'm happy someone finally explained this to me. I had a faint idea that was what it was, but you put it so articulately.
The whole thing was great; I love reading about languages. 5/5
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cantonese/english/mandarin speaker here. could really relate to your post.
i usually think in english cuz that's my best language, but in the couple times i went back to hong kong to visit family, i began exclusively thinking in canto by the second day of my stay there. makes things a lot easier. oh, and when im studying mandarin and having conversations with my friends, i think in cantonese as well. that way, the mandarin sentences flow easily as i speak/think, but if i dont know a word in mandarin, i just substitute the canto equivalent and hope that my friends understand haha
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EPT
