“Translations are like wives: the faithful ones are not beautiful, and the beautiful ones are not faithful.”
A horribly misogynistic quote to begin an essay with, I know, but it’s a quote that has stuck in my head since I encountered it a quarter century ago. I could have sworn I read it in Edward Seidensticker’s introduction to his translation of The Tale of Genji, but looking over it now I can’t find it. I may have attributed the quote to Seidensticker after the fact, since he was a translator who understood that what makes translation enormously difficult–and arguably impossible–is not whether or not you know the “words”, but rather the task of recreating as faithfully as possible the experience of reading the original. Seidensticker said, “I always liken the translator to a counterfeiter … his task is to imitate the original down to the last detail.” Some translators of manga today might misinterpret that simile to justify the inclusion of Japanese honorifics such as “-san,” “-chan,” “-sensei,” etc., but they would be missing the point. Seidensticker wrote beautifully, and he knew what made writing beautiful. One word that comes up again and again in his writings is “rhythm.”
There’s no diplomatic way to say this, so I’ll be blunt. The vast majority of my kouhai, my juniors in the field of manga translation, have no sense of rhythm, so sense of meter, so sense of what makes a line worth reading, and no sense of how to write a line worth reading. This becomes painfully clear when you read something they’ve written that is not a translation. A blog entry, for example. I recently read a self-introduction by a professional translator of manga in which the word “awesome” was used three times, without irony. Other essays by this same translator read like…well, like the blog entries of just about any non-writer with a basic grasp of grammar but no flair for writing whatsoever.
I was fortunate enough to major in creative writing as undergraduate, and though I never realized my lukewarm desire to become a novelist, I did learn to write well. I wrote fiction, non-fiction, and poetry under the tutelage of very good writers. In a sense, I think what I learned in my poetry classes has served me better than anything else I studied. I have little patience for modern poetry (I’ll take Dr. Seuss over Ginsberg or Plath any day), and I have never written poetry “for myself” (ugh), but Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams taught me the importance of rhythm, of meter, of juxtaposition and alliteration.
And Twain taught me to use the right word, not its second cousin.
Manga translation further requires an ear for voice.
In any decent manga, each character has a distinctive style of speech. In some cases it is more subtle than in others. It seems that most manga translators today (Have any of them lived more than a year in Japan?) have their noses buried in their dictionaries, translating word by word, rather than looking at the speech as a whole, and considering the personality, background, and mindset of the speaker.
They cannot see the forest for the trees.
And even when they do manage to glimpse the forest, they simply lack the skills and knowledge to capture it. Like children in art class, they draw a bunch of brown trunks topped with green blobs and call it a forest. A character appears who speaks a regional Japanese dialect, and the translator, by default, renders it as a poor caricature of what the translator imagines to be “Southern English.” Another character uses a sophisticated vocabulary indicating a high level of education, and the translator awkwardly conveys this by using “fancy” words–again, like a schoolchild doing an embarrassing imitation of a stereotypical highbrow intellectual.
I should confess at this point that I rarely read translated manga. But it’s not for lack of trying. The fact is I can rarely get through more then ten pages of a translated manga before my blood pressure begins to rise and I put the book back on the shelf for the sake of my own health.
For obvious reasons, I am trying to avoid naming names here, but I will give a specific example here that illustrates some of the points I have tried to make. I love Nodame Cantabile. It’s one of my current favorite manga. Ninomiya has a talent for creating distinctive characters who often border on outrageous, yet never lose their believability. One day, while flipping through the English translation in a bookstore, I had one of those groan-and-slam-the-book-shut moments. I have neither the translation nor the original on hand, so I can’t recall the precise language, but there is a scene in which Chiaki’s ex-girlfriend calls him a maké inu. This translates literally as “losing dog,” but essentially means “loser” as that word is used in vernacular English today. In his response, Chiaki calls the woman a mesu maké inu, or “female losing dog.” This is admittedly a hard one to translate, because, while it sounds normal enough in Japanese, it sounds odd, to say the least, in English. I think I would probably translate the phrase, “If I’m a ‘loser,’ I guess that makes you a ‘lose-ette.’” The translators of the Del Rey edition instead had Chiaki call the woman a “bitch.” In Nodame, Chiaki is the foil, the straight man for the more eccentric characters around him. But he is by no means generic. He comes from a wealthy, upper-class family. He has a sharp tongue and can be insensitive, but his upbringing renders him incapable of vulgarity, let alone crude misogyny. If he were a native English speaker of the same temperament and upbringing, the word “bitch” would simply not be in his vocabulary. The translation was jarring, and grossly unfair to the character. But it was fairly typical of the kind of “errors of voice” that occur on almost every page of translated manga today.
To my kouhai translators, let me offer this advice. Learn to write English well before you attempt to translate Japanese well. Being a native speaker of English by no means makes you a master of English. That is why some people are paid to write, and others are not. “Knowing” Japanese is of course essential (and some of you need to work on that, too), but fluency in Japanese alone does not a translator make.
Here are a couple of books I would recommend:
- all the fun’s in how you say a thing: an explanation of meter and versification, by Timothy Steele.
- Writing Fiction, by the Gotham Writers’ Workshop
I would also recommend that you read lots of well-written books, both fiction and non-fiction, and analyze what makes them good. Compare, for example, Ursula K. LeGuin and, say, Terry Brooks. Brooks is certainly prolific and widely-read, but he is, frankly, a hack.
Finding out the meaning of a word and figuring out the best way to Anglicize a sound effect…. These are the hammer and screwdriver in the translator’s toolbox. If you think they are the only tools you need, well, it’s time to wake up and smell the o-cha. Don’t allow the praises of a few hardcore otaku go to your head. As far as they are concerned, an ugly wife must be a faithful one (and, conversely, a beautiful one must be unfaithful, and therefore suspect). They are simply unqualified to judge your work. The sad fact is that many of you are producing translations that are both ugly and unfaithful, and that is the very worst kind. You need to look at your own work with a critical eye.
To publishers of translated manga: You get what you pay for. I’ve heard industry people attribute declines in sales to any number of factors, but never to the quality of their own product. We’re both professionals, so let’s not mince words.
Your product sucks.
The manga generation that grew up on Pokémon and Sailor Moon is outgrowing your product. And publishing work targeted at twenty-somethings is not going to keep them buying if the quality of the translation remains at a junior-high-school level.
Sure, you can find any number of doe-eyed, young otaku who are willing to work for peanuts. But seriously. Do you actually read the translations they give you? I don’t mean proof-reading. I mean reading as if reading for pleasure. Do you, as an adult who has no doubt read plenty of excellent fiction, really think that what you are getting for the slave-wages you pay is of a quality to be proud of? Or have you lulled yourself into believing the otaku’s syllogistic fallacy that an ugly translation must be a faithful one?
The readership is growing up quickly. It’s time for the translators and publishers to do the same.
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Thank you very much, Suzu. You have just made the best case for not retaining honorifics: Your mother found them confounding. Too many otaku think manga translations should be crafted to the tastes of otaku, who are more likely to be interested in Japanese minutia. That might be fine for manga that were originally made for Japanese otaku, but most manga (Antique Bakery being any excellent example) are intended for more mainstream readers. Their translations should, logically, be tailored for a parallel English-speaking audience. And it seems extremely unlikely that such readers are going to want to read something that requires them to refer to a glossary.
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>”I would be grateful if you or anyone else could recommend some good translations.”<
Whoever translated the Boogiepop light novels for Seven Seas was awesome awesome awesome (new meme!) and presented the philosophical ambiance and profundity so well that it’s the first time I ever considered the importance a highly skilled writer/translator.
On the contrary, I can’t figure out if the child-like writing in The Vampire Hunter D novels from Dark Horse should be blamed on a dated, ’60s-style, pulp sci-fi original or just a rushed, inelegant translation.
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“But then, I’ve also seen people who fancy themselves scholars saying that honorifics add nothing to a story or character motives, thus dropping them is fine. That frustrates me to no end”
It shouldn’t be “they add nothing”, but “they don’t necessarily add something”. And if they do, they don’t necessarily add something good, i.e. they add confusion, misunderstanding, (mystification),… especially for a mainstream audience, that just wants to read a good story and not get a lesson on japanese honorifics.
“I don’t understand why someone would translate something in a way nobody could understand.”
I have been wondering about that, and I believe it is because they don’t realize that other people don’t understand them. As a translator you know at least a bit of japanese, and it seems that some of them simply forget that other people reading their translation don’t have that knowledge.
Also, a good example was given in the Yotsuba review linked to some posts above. Why translate a joke with using a japanese word and a footnote, which for sure a large part of the readers won’t be able to laugh at anymore, because they don’t understand it? I suppose it’s because the translator did understand the joke when reading it in japanese and he laughed. But he did not realize *why* he laughed. Because nobody had to explain the joke to him, he understood it right away.It’s very weird, but I don’t see any other reason … apart from laziness (really translating a joke is much more difficult than just keeping the japanese word and explaining it) or “they just don’t care”.
And btw, in Germany mangas keep getting more and more expensive. They were very cheap at the beginning (about 5 Dollars). So it’s kind of the opposite of the US market? Means the german market isn’t doing well?
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black13, thanks for the recommendation. As for Vampire Hunter D, I’m guessing it’s a bad translation. As Terry Brooks proves, you don’t have to be a very good writer to be a successful writer, but if the original Japanese was as bad as you describe, it would not be such as a long-running, successful series here in Japan.
minikui, we agree again. I think in some cases the translators and their otaku fans are colluding to create a sort of “secret society handshake” that is undecipherable to non-otaku. We’re all otaku here, but I think we can agree that there is a tendency among a great many otaku (around the world) to take a certain pride in commanding large amounts of information that is unknown to others. They can too often be like little boys creating a kind of “seekrit clubhows–no girlz alowd,” and they don’t like non-otaku barging into their domain and rearranging the furniture (particularly if the party-crashers are the kind of popular kids, jocks, and bullies who teased, ostracized or ignored them in school).
I was in Germany in 2005(?), and was impressed at the amount of translated manga in the bookstores, but comics culture in Germany is not as lively as it is in some other European countries (which is sad, considering Germany gave the world Wilhelm Busch). I assume that prices have gone up because 1) print publications of all kinds are suffering from digital competition, all over the world, and, 2) the manga fad has passed its peak in Germany, resulting in lower sales and requiring an increase in prices. (As I wrote somewhere above, the higher the print-run, the lower the cover price, and vice versa.)
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Interesting article! I like what the Author said about bad translation. It should also be pointed out the fact that languages such as Spanish, or English are not the same in all the countries where they are spoken. For instance, Spanish spoken in Colombia could be different (especially in some specific field: legal, medical and so on) from the Spanish spoken in Argentina, Guatemala, Panama or Spain. For this reason, it’is really important to use bilingual translators, experts in that specific field and who come from that specific Region or Country in which the translation is requested.
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I am somewhat late on this entry, but it’s never too late for some great thoughts (Matt’s, not mine
).This reflects on some of my feelings. English is not my native language and even I can easily perceive the poor quality of much of translated manga (officially or not, it doesn’t matter to me).
“Whoever translated the Boogiepop light novels for Seven Seas was awesome awesome awesome”
Andrew Cunningham. He also translated Iwaaki’s Parasyte for Del Rey. It is one of my favorite mangas, so I am very picky when it comes to judging the translation. He is good indeed (my Japanese is on the beginner level, but I take the translation as a meaningful whole and do not consider faithfulness here). A scanlation of the same manga (which I had read prior to the books) has some sentences that comes close to the border with retardation and even cross it. But, luckily, it hasn’t damaged my love for the material, only my experience of reading it. Honestly, I would be embarrassed to write that Aztecs lived around 16. century B.C. (as in a fan-translation of JoJo’s Adventures).
And do you know what they use to do in my country? Translate Yukio Mishima from English, Italian, etc. !!!???!!! And, mind you, I do not live in Alice’s Wonderland. But that is not the fault of the translators. They receive money and everyone is happy, including public. What do you have to say about that?
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Thank you for sharing this, it’s really helped me further understand the responsibilities and care that goes into translating. Though my actual career goals lies in conceptual art, illustration, comics, etc., I’ve been looking into the translator field as a temporary job while I continue searching for a more career related position.
Though I’ve got a minor in Japanese, lived in Tokyo, and worked at BookOff in NYC; I know my Japanese isn’t nearly as fluent as I hope it to be someday. Though translating isn’t my primary career goal, I’m always interested in improving my knowledge of the language. Your article made me realize that I don’t intend on approaching any translating opportunity lightly.
I love conveying character into my own work, and so I expect the same with all other forms of story telling. And I think being a translator is like an extension to that.
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Pingback from Good reads from 2009 « MangaBlog on December 30, 2009 at 4:58 am
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On a side note, have you heard about this book:?http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%AF%E5%A4%A9%E6%89%8D%E3%81%A7%E3%81%82%E3%82%8B-%E6%96%B0%E6%BD%AE%E6%96%87%E5%BA%AB-%E6%9F%B3%E7%80%AC-%E5%B0%9A%E7%B4%80/dp/4101480125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262164450&sr=8-1
I just bought it, so haven’t read much yet, but it’s also about translation and apparently how japanese is so awesome that you can translate everything into it? I’m hoping for an interesting read, since the author is apparently a famous translator.
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The title makes me a bit dubious. (What language isn’t “genius”?) But you have to give kudos to anyone who would try to translate Finnegan’s Wake into Japanese.
(° °;) -
and apparently he did a good job with it ^^; At least so far he mentions some funny and interesting examples of difficult translations. “You are a Full Moon” being misheard as “You are a fool, Moon” and the fact that “Evil” backwards is “Live”.
And I was already stuck when trying to translate “????????????”?/ “????????????”?in Black Butler XD Wonder how Yen Press will handle that one?
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mh? no japanese support? the sentence is “boku ha akumade (or akuma de) shitsuji desukara”
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Yeah, hard to believe, but WordPress doesn’t support Japanese characters on English-language blogs. Sorry about that.
I would need to read an English-language translation of Finnegan’s Wake before I could judge the quality of the Japanese translation. (<- Yes, that was a joke.)
I love to find a good translation of a difficult work. MATSUOKA Kazuko’s translations of Shakespeare are quite good, much better than an earlier translations.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you! When I first got into manga, I remember reading things like Battle Angel Alita without really realizing they were foreign and things like Crying Freeman without really noticing the fact that they were translated even though, by that point, I’d presumably realized I was reading Japanese comics.
Sure, there was some censorship, and a whole lot of things were totally unavailable in English, and the bindings were dreadful and often fell apart even though I was paying nearly $20 a volume. On the other hand, I felt like I, as a non-comics fan, could pick up basically any volume on the shelf at Cody’s and find something readable and accessible. (In retrospect, it looks like quite a few of those translations were yours, actually. Bravo!)
These days, when I venture into the considerably larger manga sections at Barnes and Noble, I find bindings that hold together, volumes for half the old price, and absolutely nothing I would want to read. It feels like you have to be more of a hardcore manga nerd now than you did then, which is saying something considering that back then I was a teenage girl buying woman-alienating series like Crying Freeman (it’s brilliant, but let’s be honest here) from sketchy comic book stores that seemed to be run by and for guys. (Well, ok, and Cody’s, but you still had to go to comic book stores to get a good selection back then.)
I remember reading an angry blog exchange a couple of years ago between one of those scanlator bloggers who analyzes pro translations line by line, complaining that the order of bubbles has been changed to match English sentence order instead of Japanese, and the translator in question who rightly pointed out that the other blogger was missing the point but then him- or herself failed to understand why “my home is my castle” might not actually have quite the same connotation as “sumeba miyako”. (Forgive me, translator and blogger, for singling you out, but it’s too good an example not to use.)
The translator’s comment was: “Maybe we’re just being nitpicky here, but if living there makes a place your capital, wouldn’t that also make it your castle? Since most castles are in the capital?” If that’s the grasp of English idioms you need to be a translator these days, sign me up! (Or sign me up for more Japanese classes because English translations are clearly a lost cause.)
Reading through the comments, I have to say that I didn’t find your use of ‘kohai’ inappropriate at all. I too have hated basically every single translation I’ve looked at in the last few years and yet generally liked most of the ones I read when I was younger. And it’s not the effect of being able to (more or less) read Japanese now because even rereading in Japanese doesn’t make me despise those old translations. They’re simply better, and there’s no point in trying to put this gently and tactfully. All of that “Ranma Honey” crap in old Ranma translations may not have been 100% graceful, but it got the point of the billions of different nicknames across far more effectively than the endless rounds of “-chan” and “-kun” do.
The truth is that French and Spanish titles and manners of address generally aren’t included. There are a few particular words like ‘Don’ and ‘Mademoiselle’ that have been used in English for centuries. These are so overwhelmingly familiar to any educated reader of English that it sometimes makes sense to include them. Of course, there are cases where the new connotations that the established loan word has don’t match the original context. I’d be willing to bet Mlle. gets translated as “Miss” most of the time to avoid the sense that a character is talking to the au pair or speaking in some bizarre affected manner. Similarly, while Zorro serials usually leave all the Dons and Doñas intact, any modern character calling someone “Don so-and-so” is being sarcastic and needs a translation that reflects that.
Regardless, these few long-fossilized borrowings are not at all the same as borrowing new words into a work of fiction and expecting readers to get them. Sure, self-proclaimed otaku think they know what the standard Japanese honorifics mean (though they’re wrong more often than they’re right), but these words don’t have a long history of use in English, and they prevent someone with an interest in good stories and good quality English prose from getting into manga. I am sick and tired of being told by lazy, brainwashed translators and obsessive nerds (aka my friends) that one has to borrow tons of words in order to translate. Anyone who really thinks that would be better off writing Japanese textbooks than doing anything with translated manga.
Maybe academic articles on Buddhist hierarchy or historical novels about the navy are better off using the original terms with a massive glossary explaining all their particular shades of meaning (particularly, say, when two navies with two different sets of ranks are interacting), but that approach makes absolutely no sense for a standard high school romance or the vast majority of other types of manga getting translated.
It may be more common in Japanese for characters to change how they refer to each other at crucial turning points in their relationship, but it’s hardly unheard of in English. What X-Files fan could forget the few times when Mulder finally called Scully by her first name? I remember watching that episode of KOR where Kyousuke calls Madoka “Madoka” instead of “Madoka-kun” for the first time and thinking that it was very similar–the moment of stress, the slip of the tongue, the big soundtrack blip or reaction shot just in case you missed how absolutely pivotal it was.
I’m certainly not saying it’s easy to translate these things, especially if you don’t know they’re coming ahead of time, but that doesn’t mean that the graceless hack of including honorifics is the way to do it. It just means that translation is hard. Period. Now and always.
Having spent a lot of time reading Hon’yaku (that mailing list for E>J and J>E technical translators), I am quite skeptical of the idea of hiring both “translators” and rewriters. A translation that requires a major rewrite for style is a crap translation by someone who knows both languages well enough to get the literal meaning but who probably can’t write in either of them. That’s not what we expect from translators of novels, even shitty novels, and it’s not what we expect of translators to or from languages other than Japanese. If the translated manga industry wants good translations, it should start paying market rate (which based on the comments on that list can be 2-10 times what it currently pays) and requiring translators to produce a product that is essentially ready to publish as-is. If that’s too expensive, then it’s the rewriters who need to be trimmed from the payroll.
When it comes to the concern-troll type responses (that your post is written in the wrong tone so it won’t actually reach the people it needs to), I can only say that if you talk to technical translators, especially on Hon’yaku, their comments are less “Your product sucks” and more “You are a worthless human being and deserve to be eaten by rats!” Fan translators who are angry about a pro translation generally think the rats are too mild an option. Your comments are positively tame in comparison.
The simple truth is that incompetent translators, like incompetent writers dreaming of that big book deal, will be constitutionally incapable of understanding your point no matter how you phrase it. Competent translators who are hampered by low rates and idiotic style sheets already know all this and can do nothing. The only people who are actually going to get anything out of an internet rant are readers who are currently clueless about translation. And, if you ask me, an enraged tone might actually galvanize them.
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Thanks for your comments, Franzeska. The example you mentioned of the translation of sumeba miyako as “my home is my castle” is mind-boggling. I think the translator understands neither idiom.
I agree that re-writers, ideally, should not be necessary, but that would require publishers to pay a rate that would actually attract first-class translators (or at least second-rate translators).
And judging from the buzz this post and its comments have generated, the tone of my post seems to have been just right. A toned-down, Kumbaya kind of post would have gone unnoticed, and a “You are a worthless human being and deserve to be eaten by rats!” kind of post would have been dismissed as an angry, mindless rant.
I just hope it got the attention of some of the industry people who are in a position to actually do something about it.
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Matt, have you read any translations that you’ve enjoyed recently? The best I’ve seen recently was The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya by newcomer Chris Pai. Marketed for young readers but they knocked one out of the park IMO. Book 1 was decent (Melancholy) but Sigh was phenomenal IMO.
(disclaimer: I’m a prose translator.)
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Matt,
Thank you for this very interesting read. I’m an amateur/aspiring J-to-E translator (cutting my teeth on j-music songs), and also someone who’s interned for a major manga publisher in the past, both in LA and in Tokyo (hi, Jake, if you’re still hanging around!). I currently work for them as a freelance rewriter, so I rewrite the already-translated script into better-sounding English. That part of the process wasn’t really discussed here in the comments, though, maybe because it’s sometimes optional.
I have to say that if I didn’t know Japanese myself (I just took JLPT 2 this past December and have studied abroad in Japan, plus 4-5 years of song translation experience and one translation course under my belt–but yes, I am in the beginning of a translating career) that job would be very, very difficult.
As it is I’ve had to rewrite just about every translated manga script I come across. It’s not about that their style is different from mine and I don’t like that or feel threatened by it. It’s really not that. I respect good translations (that I’ve encountered after becoming one myself). It’s that they just don’t know how to write in English and come too much from the fan community. I have to edit out all kinds of “Whelp” “Okies” and other completely unacceptable fanspeak words, and I’ve also come across many a sentence done flat-out wrong. Or embellished for no reason. Or with parts omitted, again, for no reason.
I think the biggest example was where a sentence said, literally translated from Japanese, “I’m so happy… I’m so glad…” and the translation I got said “I’m so happy and so sad…” What? Sad? It didn’t say that anywhere! Yet if it hadn’t been me doing the rewrite, someone who knows Japanese in addition to being able to write well in English, it would have passed through and been published. And there are many more where that came from, including a major detail about a character that they mistranslated in the first volume that I unfortunately did not catch. Ugh.
I’ve complained to my managing editor about this kind of sloppy, shoddy, and often flat-out wrong translation numerous times. I’ve even provided examples. Nothing changes.
I’m an English major whose day job is an editor at a book publisher, and I consider creative writing to be a MAJOR component of translation. If you can’t write in your native tongue, you can’t translate into it, period.
I plan to get a master’s degree in translation and I’ve recently discovered that you can get an MFA in translation from the U. of Arkansas, and they emphasize the importance of creative writing in translation. That is ABSOLUTELY the right way to go!!
I have quite a few translators I admire, both in manga and in Japanese fiction translation. I think both of the translators of Haruki Murakami’s work, Jay Rubin and, generally do an excellent job. As for manga, the translator(/rewriter) teams behind “Fruits Basket” and “Ouran High School Host Club” I have generally found to be EXCEPTIONAL. I can’t recommend them higher. There may be others I’m not recalling. But they are the exception, not the norm, which I hate.
In fact, as a result of my latest rewriting endeavor, where I was faced with a bad translation I had to rewrite again, I decided that my new goal was, after becoming an accomplished professional translator myself, in 10 years or so to open my own manga publishing company, in order to ensure high-quality, beautiful AND faithful translations–because I’d do them myself, haha, and only hire other people whose translations I truly respected.
I think it’s possible to have both. That’s my translation philosophy–beautiful AND faithful. If you put enough work into it, you can have both: I truly believe that.
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Oops–Murakami’s two translators are Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel.
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frecklegirl: Very interesting comment. I wonder who are those translators. If you, who says from yourself that you are still studying japanese, have to correct them … then maybe your japanese is better than theirs? But then, why are they the translators? and where did they come from? What have they studied? Or could they do better, but just don’t care (maybe because of the low wages mentionned earlier?).
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Thanks for the comment, frecklegirl. Congratulations on passing the JLPT 2. Strictly speaking, JLPT 1 should be a minimum requirement for professional translation, but when publishers are offering just $3 per page, it’s no wonder they are hiring people who could not even pass JLPT 2. But, as you note, the bigger problem may be that they simply don’t know how to write English well. I love the way Jonathon Clements summed it up in his response to this post: “Pay peanuts, get monkeys.”
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Well, results aren’t in yet, so I don’t know if I’ve passed, though I’m hoping I did! I did a lot of studying and am definitely at that level now, at least. I agree that JLPT 1 should be a requirement for translation (which is why my ultimate plan is to return to Japan to live and work, then go to grad school, then I will feel I am qualified to translate professionally). That’s why I don’t work for said publisher as a translator, only a rewriter, but I can’t help myself correcting all these mistakes when I see them and they’re so obvious.
I would really like to know what these translators’ credentials are… I helped a friend of mine get a job as a translator there, and he’s not a professional, but his Japanese IS at an extremely high level and he had translated on his own for years. For him, the submission process was as simple as submitting a script of a translated volume he’d already done. They checked over the English (I’m assuming that was all they did, since I doubt they happened to have a copy of that manga volume lying around to check the translation) and he was hired. While I’m glad I could help him out and I know he produces quality translations for them, I feel like the process should be a bit stricter.
As for the pricing, I actually feel like it’s pretty good. Or I did until I read this post and the comments to it!! It’s nothing to live on but it’s a good side income–for me at least. I had no idea that was on the lower end of the scale (we’re paid a flat fee per book). I do remember when manga used to cost $15… and I didn’t realize it was due to paying for quality translation. Definitely something to ponder…
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Very interesting discussion Matt and contributors, thank you.
I’ve worked as both a translator and a rewriter/proofreader (of Chinese, not Japanese) and the point that I like to beat into the head of very reader/fun subber would-be translator here who doesn’t understand it is:In order to translate into English one must be able to write well in English to begin with.
Just because one can read, it doesn’t necessarily follow that one can write…even moreso where there is a change in languages in the process.
For myself I can say that there certainly been occasions where I have understood the Chinese perfectly well, but found that to express the situation in English to someone who doesn’t know the context is very difficult.
As a rewriter too, I also saw many poor translations that required my own knowledge of Chinese to correct, (so god only knows how any book editor would have picked them up), but I also saw adequate translations that nevertheless made me cringe as I read them.
Just as a side note, (to really make you shudder in horror) much Chinese to English translation that I saw in China and Taiwan was done by Chinese native-speakers, because their pay was so low that it even still proved cost-effective to hire someone like myself to proof read it…).
The funniest ever mistranslation I saw was someone who had translated ‘police volunteer/auxilary policeman’ as ‘vampire’. That required reading the original text to sort out…
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frecklegirl, $3 per page is outrageously low. Back when manga TPBs were $15 a book, it wasn’t necessarily quality translation you were paying for. Low print-runs/sales means higher price per unit. This is the universal law of print publishing. Although it’s true that TokyoPop was originally able to get the price down to $10 by cutting lots of corners, after print-runs/sales rose to much higher levels than ever before, it follows that publishers should have been able to keep the price below $10 and improve production values, including paying reasonable translation fees. But as our friend Simon Jones pointed out with refreshing candor, “we [publishers] would try to get away with the least amount of work and investment as you would allow us.” Forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but when a publisher says, “We can’t afford to pay more for translation,” I can assure you s/he is lying. What s/he actually means is “We refuse to budget more for translation, because readers continue to buy our product despite the crappy translation quality.” Lesson: Complain loudly, and vote with your pocketbook. The other publishers followed TokyoPop in its “race to the bottom” (to borrow another phrase from Simon) because TokyoPop’s product began outselling their own. TokyoPop is now tanking, by all accounts. If a publisher starts putting out higher quality product, and outsells its competitors, the competitors will follow suit. Today, no broadcaster could get away with airing a TV drama made using the production values that were common in, say, 1990. That’s because competition from cable TV raised the bar for TV dramas, um, “dramatically.” Hopefully, ten years from now, people will look back on translated manga published today and ask, “God, how did they put up with this crap?”
John, I’m dying to see the original Chinese that was translated as “vampire.” In Japanese, the Chinese characters used for “vampire” are pretty self-explanatory: “suck”-”blood”-”demon”. That is just too hilarious.
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Manga translators sound as though they should probably take some drama courses. Everyone’s point of view is different so why not at least learn how how a character is created in a story. If so-so said this and yet it didn’t match his/her earlier choice of words, then its clear that you have to go back and revise, or else it upsets the *balance* of character interactions. You don’t understand someone unless you’ve walked in their shoes. Manga translator’s need to keep that in mind, because their telling a *story* and they need to know what makes the character’s work to get that beautiful story.
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Wow, this thread really expanded since I first stopped by.
Thank you to those with kind words for my translations. I’m certainly proud of everything I translated. I’m also looking for work!
I tend to share Matt Thorn’s anger about the state of translations — not because I have excessive confidence in my own abilities, but because I think what I did is the minimum quality level, and I know it could have been so much better. I would have loved the luxury of doing several rounds of corrections on each text, tweaking things to perfection. Every project I worked on simply swept through the editing process into publication, with no way for me to correct errors, or correct things in my own writing that lead to errors. Fortunately, I had a friend who would read over my translations and point out things that were ambiguous in ways I didn’t intend them to be. It was a big help, but there’s always more to learn.
One other thing I’d like to point out — I spent a while grading translation samples for an outsourcer I used to work with. While the majority of applicants simply didn’t speak enough of either language to be taken seriously, there was another type that struck me as particularly worrying — they could write English prose convincingly, and they clearly had more than enough Japanese to pass the JLPT 1, but they had no feel for colloquial usage. The translation sample had a line that ended in “dou suru.” This type of translator inevitably translated that literally, as if the character were literally wondering what the listener was going to do…when, in fact, they were mocking an action the listener had already taken.
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. -
For anyone interested, the “sumeba miyako”/”my home is my castle” discussion mentioned by Franzeska is at http://completelyfutile.blogspot.com/2007/09/fruits-basket-translation-notes-vol.html
One thing that has struck me over the years is that many of the anime/manga industry translators don’t even seem to have access to a decent dictionary (based on what I’ve seen them list as their tools of the trade). It especially boggles the mind that these translators themselves don’t seem to see anything wrong with only ever looking things up in the free online JE dictionaries. It’s almost as if they’ve never even heard of the Green Goddess, the Koujien, etc.
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Wowza.
I should start by saying that I don’t read manga translated into English; I usually read it in the Japanese original or in Chinese (out of Taiwan). I was in university (and therefore poor) as English-translated manga were becoming big, and I soon therefore moved to China. The Chinese translations that we get aren’t always the greatest (though compared to what I recall seeing in English, they’re pretty darned good), but they generally seem to understand that one should translate so that it is readable by one’s audience; only every now and then do translators add in comments to explain cultural items (e.g. Japanese articles of clothing which are called by their Japanese name but with Chinese pronunciation, as per normal use) or jokes that may not have gone over well (or where the joke was changed — this often happens with puns, e.g. in Yotsuba&, or “Little Sister Yotsuba” as it’s called here).
But blah blah blah, that’s not why I had wanted to post a comment. I now work for a group that publishes a number of English, Chinese, and bilingual publications, so we rely on a number of translators (top-notch translators paid at the standard or above) to get our work done. After the translators submit their pieces, we give everything an in-house translation check and edit, and this is where my beef lies: often, our head editorial board will change, e.g., the English translation to match the Chinese, usually by adding in a literal translation of a word or phrase where there is another in common English use (especially with jargon) or by simply romanizing the Chinese and then following with a literal translation in parentheses. (For E->C translation, this almost never happens. Additionally, for the majority of the board, Chinese is their native language and they have training in neither editing nor translation; I’m native English with fluency and high-level training in both.) This is in part due to their not having the background required to understand these texts (this frequently comes up with articles on economics and foreign affairs), but it’s also due to their simply not understanding how to translate for an English-speaking audience (or, I bitterly think at times, not understanding what makes a good translation at all).
I’m not a great writer. Given a topic, I’m more likely to stare into space or ramble for hours (as here) without getting to a point. But I am an excellent editor and a decent translator, I do know how to make a good translation for my audience, and I do know a good translation when I read one. The embarrassment I feel when I read some of our publications is enormous, but my arguments against these practices (and more polite suggestions for changes to these practices) go unheard, alas. Rant rant rant rant rant.
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Matt if you think this way about manga translations then what are your thoughts on Anime companies who do the english subtitles?
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–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.
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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.
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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:
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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. -
Pingback from Linkspam on Translation « by Erin Ptah on February 23, 2010 at 10:13 pm
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Pingback from “On Translation” by Matt Thorn » Note to Self on March 16, 2010 at 7:17 pm
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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”)
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Whoops, didn’t know that the Japanese text wasn’t supported here. The word I was talking about in my last comment was “tsureai”
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I’ve commented on this at length here:
http://www.genjipress.com/2010/04/lost-in-translators-dept.html
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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.
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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
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