Putting it into Practice

I wrote most of this at about 4 AM so I may be a bit incoherent. I did revise it a bit just now but no guarantees. Also, everything expressed in these posts is my personal opinion, etc. etc. only listen to me if you feel I'm worth listening to.

More walls of text, more eyecandy to tide you over. Picture unrelated again. Source: http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=84705

After I posted my last essay, I had three more essays on general topics planned in my head, and this was supposed to be the last one. However, I ended up completely flipping the order from what I had planned because I realized too much of my later argument rested on this.

I’ve ranted on in the last two essays about some theoretical stuff and also given some examples, but I haven’t really touched on how to apply these ideas to the practical process of translation. What sort of things should you keep in mind while writing each line? What sort of criteria should you use in order to decide on your conventions?

What I consider to be the three most important considerations in translation are: your material, your audience, and your goal. To put it differently: what are you translating, who are you translating for, and why are you translating?

I’ve already given an example of how what you’re translating—i.e. your material—can affect the translational choices you make. Something like OreImo that is all about otaku culture might be better off with otaku terms left untranslated, just like something like Mushishi that is all about Shinto mythos might be better off with mythological terms left as-is. I also mentioned that in a drama like Hourou Musuko that depends heavily on character relationships, dropping honorifics may cause viewers to miss out on important subtleties of the story. But your material affects more than what to leave untranslated.

A lot of my friends say they like the Baccano! dub better than the original Japanese. I think both are good (though the Japanese version has the advantage of Wakamoto Norio) but the dub is definitely a cut above most other dubs. A lot of people say one reason the dub is so good is because the show is set in America, so it feels a lot more natural for the actors to be speaking English in 1920’s American accents.

This is the where style comes in. Should the translation for Baccano!, which is set in early 20th century America, sound the same as the translation for your average modern school life anime set in Japan? The dub sounds natural not only because of the voices and accents, but also because of the way the script was written: the use of casual turns of speech and wording that fits with the 1920’s. If you want to get really fancy, you might even research and make use of 1920’s American slang (anyone here read Lackadaisy Cats? Aside from researching the cars, fashion, and architecture of the 20’s, Tracy Butler also looked up some authentic period slang to write the dialogue with).

I criticized Crunchyroll’s translation of Gosick earlier for one of its conventions, but that was mostly because it clashed with other conventions on the site. Now I’m going to offer the translation a bit of praise instead: it captures the feeling of a small pre-war European country quite well. It’s hard to give specific examples, but the diction and voice is wonderful, and the pretentious and aristocratic characters speak with suitably pretentious and aristocratic translated dialogue (one line that I do recall off the top of my head was Grevil saying, “You may avail yourself of that [elevator].” I rather liked the word choice there; it fits his character). In short, as an American, I can say it suitably lives up to my stereotypical image of Europe.

All kidding aside, I do think it was a good choice to aim the style of translation to match the European setting of the show. In keeping with that, I would have preferred honorifics and such to be localized to English or French equivalents, but I already covered that earlier so I won’t repeat myself. Hopefully this and the other examples I provided speak for themselves: how you translate depends quite a lot on what you’re translating.

Next up: your audience. I’m going to write another essay (tentatively titled, “Viewers are Stupid, Viewers are Geniuses”) expanding on one way the audience affects translation, but here I’m going to give a general overview.

It should be pretty easy to see why this one is important, but I sometimes get the feeling translators, including myself, get too focused on the material they’re translating and forget who they’re translating for (this is also intimately tied to the third consideration. After all, why would you be translating if not for the sake of the audience?).

It’s easy for a translator, as the person writing the text, to forget to look from the point of view of the people reading the text. It’s vitally important to ask yourself, “How will the audience see this? If I were in the audience, would I understand?” The failure to consider the audience’s point of view is what I feel leads to incidents like the “baku” line I mentioned in the last essay. I can see the translator (and I say this because this happens to myself) thinking over the original Japanese line quite hard and deciding on what translation would best go with the material, or best fit his or her rules of localization—but forgetting what would be best for the audience.

We fan translators can’t really take statistics or run focus groups on our audience, but we can try to guess what the audience wants, and I for one try my best to answer to that. I remember hearing the story of how the official English releases of Marimite were later changed to include honorifics at the request of fans (if it seems like I use honorifics a lot as an example—well, I do. They’re probably the most noticeable and most debated convention in the translation of anime and manga). Certainly you can’t please everyone, but at the end of the day a translation is written to be read, and it’s important to take those readers into account.

There are also more subtle considerations: how much to localize, the clarity of the translation, and when to use notes, to name a few. Since I’m devoting a whole essay to the audience later on, for now I’ll just repeat: remember who you’re translating for.

Finally, the last consideration: your goal. I’m also going to write an essay on what may be the most important goal in translation (namely, equivalence; the essay is tentatively titled “The Meaning of Equivalence”) so I’ll try to keep this short.

There are many goals a translator might have: equivalence is one of them; so is pleasing the audience; so is pleasing yourself. One goal that many fansub groups and even more official translators use is, “Produce a translation that is accessible even to non-anime-fans or new fans.” One goal that I use is, “Never write a line that a native English speaker would not say.” Another goal of mine is, “Write a translation that makes sense independent of the original material,” but if you ask me this should be a given for any translation. You should always assume that the viewer is relying on nothing but your own translation, because most of the time this is true.

In general I make no judgment calls on your goals as a translator. They depend on your philosophy, your audience, and your opinions. However, I believe it’s extremely important to have them. Certainly, goals should be chosen wisely, and I can hardly say I approve of a goal such as, “Troll the viewers as badly as possible.” Nonetheless, having goals, whatever they may be, will provide you with something to keep in your mind and guide your translation as you write it.

My personal top goal goes something like this: “Write your translation so that if somebody points at any line and ask you, ‘Why did you translate it this way instead of some other way?’ you will always have a good answer.” In other words: have a good reason for every single translational decision that you make.

Of course, this is an ideal, as are most goals. Translating involves a lot of trade-offs, and meeting one goal often means you have to sacrifice another. It may be impossible to fully achieve, but that’s the ideal I strive for, and that’s what motivates my idea of “smart conventions,” since they’ll inherently give you a good reason to back all your decisions.

One last thing that I’d like to mention about smart conventions: the examples that I’ve given that I consider “smart” are not by far the only ones that work. I advised a convention in which honorifics are kept when the work is set in Japan, but dropped or translated otherwise. On the other hand, if you want honorifics to be kept in all cases, or alternatively dropped in all cases, there’s no reason that cannot also be a “smart” convention. The important part is to remember why you follow the rule and not just follow it blindly, and to as a result know when it’s okay to break the rule. Once you’ve considered your material, audience, and goals, the decision is all up to you.