Comments on: On Translation

By: Nancy

Nancy — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 05:04:07 +0000

I completely agree that the fact of being a native speaker
doesn’t mean you know everything about your own language.
In my humble opinion, writing well on your mothertongue
is very important to be able to translate well into
other languages.
Greetings from a 17-year-old teen from Argentina, who
wants to become an english translator in the future.
Nancy

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:35:56 +0000

Hmm, I tried posting a comment a good while ago but it never made it through ‘cos of some error or something. Ah well.

This post is really interesting. Sometimes, I do pay attention to things like these while sometimes I don’t. But I remember reading “A Queen’s Knight”(some Korean manhwa) where the translations were so horrendously butchered, it’s even worse than many fan translations I’ve read which at least tried to get the basic meanings across. It made me realize that sometimes, sadly, there is no difference between official and fan translations. In comparison, Blood Alone is really good in its translations: I’m no translator and I speak no Japanese but at least, I feel like I’m immersed in a world where the characters are human, alive and sound like people in keeping with their personalities and personal experience.

Oh and speaking of classical manga, some people apparently did a fan translation of Banana Bread no Pudding.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 23:29:32 +0000

I’ve commented on this at length here:

http://www.genjipress.com/2010/04/lost-in-translators-dept.html

By: TK

TK — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:30:08 +0000

Whoops, didn’t know that the Japanese text wasn’t supported here. The word I was talking about in my last comment was “tsureai”

By: TK

TK — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:29:28 +0000

I can’t agree with this post more. It pains me so much to see the colorful, intricate, three dimensional characters that I find in the original Japanese reduced to two-dimensional words on a page in official translations. Nuance gets lost because translators are too tied to “the words as they are” and don’t pay any attention to the potential for hidden meanings and implications that might be lurking behind the words as the mangaka/author wrote them.

As a member of fandom, this really bothers me because someone who reads the original Japanese winds up getting a widely different interpretation of a character from someone who reads the official English translation. This really shouldn’t be happening. The translators and the companies that hire them should show more respect to the works that they’re producing. I would definitely buy more commercially translated manga instead of just hopping over to Kinokuniya and grabbing the original Japanese if I knew that the English product was going to be something worth my time.

Though not to bash all official translations, I think a great example of a team that’s doing it very right is the Saiyuki manga released by Tokyopop. The lines might not always be spot on word for word but they manage to capture the voice and essence of the characters incredibly well. (Tokyopop’s release of Wild Adapter is also pretty well done, I’m especially fond of one line where a character referred to another as his “????” and in keeping with his ‘voice’ it was translated as “mate”)

By: “On Translation” by Matt Thorn » Note to Self

“On Translation” by Matt Thorn » Note to Self — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:17:33 +0000

[...] doing my usual browsing of the internets when I came across this excellent, thought-provoking post. “On Translation” by Matt Thorn. Manga translation further requires an ear for [...]

By: Linkspam on Translation « by Erin Ptah

Linkspam on Translation « by Erin Ptah — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:13:09 +0000

[...] On Translation, specifically the translation of manga, talking about the importance of voice and attention to detail. Colloquialisms! Expressions! Local cultural effect! …All of which amateur translators tend to suck at. [...]

By: Toren

Toren — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:54:38 +0000

Matt, the quote you opened the essay with is probably one I swiped from somewhere for my Smithsonian Institution speech back in 1997.
“The writer Roy Campbell once said ‘Translations (like lovers) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive.’ ”
Obviously I agree with much of what you say. I’ve always required my translators to have proven abilities to write English on a professional level as well as a mastery of Japanese. Ideally, they’d have experience with dialog-heavy material such as comics or plays. This has yet to be the case, however, and so a rewriter/editor with such training often pokes a head into the room and hopefully handles things with care.
I’ve checked out a few commercially translated manga and (in general) at best they are indifferent. I looked at the new “Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei” last week out of morbid curiosity–there are some things it is futile to try and translate–and it was as much of a train wreck as I expected.
On the Southern accent, I hope you’re not giving me a hard time over “Club 9″ (Heba! Haro-chan)…heh. It was necessary to “regionalize” her speech as it was the source of many droll jests throughout the series, and I spent a lot of time studying Southern dialect, and how others had written it, so that it sounded as good as I could make it. Reviews seem to have been positive, although the effort involved was immense and by the end of the series I faced every script with preemptive mental exhaustion. I certainly could never have done it for whatever they pay these days…$2 a page or whatever.
Here’s a comment I dropped on Clement’s blog before it led me here:
*********************************
Sadly, fans have actually come to prefer the lumpen, half-translated fantrans work. I spoke to a translator last year who had been told by his new editor “not to polish it up so much.”
The fans truly don’t realize how much they are missing in terms of getting the most out of the story, getting to experience things the way the author wanted the original audience to experience them. This sometimes (often) means the translation can vary (when compared on a word-by-word basis) to the original language used. But it’s hard for fans to grasp why this needs to be so and why it’s the right thing to do.
When new translators ask me for advice I tell them: “Know the story; know the characters. The rest is details.” I can and will happily extend this answer, but they’d better grab a beer, sit down, and get comfortable.

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:21:54 +0000

–I think the ability to understand colloquial Japanese, and correctly reproduce that nuance in natural sounding colloquial English, is what really sets apart a good fiction translator from someone who is probably better off making more money doing technical translation somewhere.
—–
I dunno… tone and nuanced understanding of the original aren’t what made Gaiman’s Princess Mononoke so good. I mean, from what I heard about the project, he barely cared what was in the original and just WROTE A GOOD SCRIPT roughly related to the source material.
Fiction, even translated, needs to work as a piece of fiction. Unless you are specifically trying to create a work of mutual comprehension, rather than a piece of entertainment.

Colloquialism and nuance is a good start when you’re only working on the text of an audio-visual work. Say, subtitling a movie, or speech bubbling a manga. Add in translating prose and writing dub-scripts and you have a lot of different tasks that each have their own “most important skill.”

As a side note, I constantly (okay, maybe it’s just 2-3 hours a month) wonder how much of what I think of as “Haruki Murakami’s fiction” is Jay Rubin and how much is Haruki Murakami. But I can certainly tell you that I keep reading them because what is getting bound and shipped is good fiction with an interesting voice. Even if it’s 5% Murakami, and 95% Rubin, it’s still a good read.

By: Niel

Niel — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:43:15 +0000

Matt if you think this way about manga translations then what are your thoughts on Anime companies who do the english subtitles?