Lost in Translation

An interesting sentence from Shoushimin Series episode 4, at least from a translation point of view:

Why does senpai gets to be used untranslated, but kouhai gets translated to junior? You could make the case that it’s just that much less known than senpai that it still needs to, but for a series like this I’d expect the audience to already know it. This isn’t Pokemon after all, but a very dialogue heavy mystery show, one that’s not shy about using proper honorifics or the correct, Japanese name order either. A strange choice either way when you’d normally expect both terms to be translated or kept intact as a pair.

It raises the question of what you translate and what not, what the expectations are for things that English doesn’t really have an equivalent for, like the whole idea of senpai/kouhai, or the use of honorifics to refer to people. I was reminded of what writer/translator Zack Davisson said on the subject of food names two years ago:

One of my Translation Rules: Thou Shall not Translate Food Names. Food names, as a general language rule in the modern era, are kept in their native language. We collectively learned to say pho. We learned to say pasta primavera. We can say onigiri. Time to retire “rice balls.”

Onigiri and rice balls are in a sort of similar tension to senpai/kouhai and senior/junior in that the English terms are perfectly adequate translations for most uses, but don’t quite have the same meaning as the Japanese terms. Partially, as Zack goes into in his thread, it’s of course a question of familiarity: onigiri like senpai is well known enough on its own that it doesn’t need translation anymore in most cases. There is no one correct answer even if I prefer this sort of thing stays in Japanese.

If, like me, you find yourself occassionally nostalgic for the era when anime series could get multiple fansub groups working on them, none of them just ripping off Crunchyroll, this 2011 vintage discussion about how several fansubbers translated one particular scene in Bakemonogatari is right up your street:

For some reason, I was watching Coalgirls’s release of Bakemonogatari. It was the second episode, and the scene was when Hitagi, in her own unique tsundere (read naked) fashion, was hitting on Koyomi, even though he’s too stupid to realize it. Incidentally, this part was what got me into the show two years back because the jokes and Hitagi’s all-around verbal abuse here is fantastic. Coalgirls’s translation up to this point can be best described as “understandable” despite the translator’s poor sense of style. Or at least until it got to the punchline of my favorite joke in the scene.

Your amateurish virginity will infect me

“Amateurish virginity?” What the hell does that even mean? Let’s ignore the Japanese here for now and judge this based solely on the English translation, which is what I would assume most people who watch subs (and don’t know Japanese) would do. Interestingly, the translator didn’t even provide a translation note to preach to the viewer about the finer details of Japanese slang.

The writer goes on to compare Coalgirl’s subs to two other fangroups, Thora and GG’s, finding the latter to have the best translation. “Amateurish virginity” turns out to be Japanese slang for men who only have sex with sex workers and never had a proper relationship. In English you’d call them incels these days. It’s a good example of why a translation should not be too literal or too faithful to the original wording, when this does not make sense in the target language.

Every time an official translator does something remotely interesting, some anti-localisation chud shows up and laments how fansubs have disappeared, because these people knew how to translate properly, giving you exactly what the funny cartoone characters were saying, without using their misguided creatifity to improve things. Oh for the days of fansubs like this:

Goddamn that was rough. The first episode of Tesagure! Bukatsumono — a 2013 part improv slice of moe comedy show — had not prepared me for how bad the subtitles would be in the second episode. Not that official subtitles can’t be bad, but when they’re this bad people notice. Clearly this is somebody who just took what was said in Japanese and dumped it into English, without activily understanding what was said or how it should work in English. For context, she’s talking about joining a strange school club and that’s how it should have read: “in the end I joined a strange club” or I ended up joining a strange club”, depending on taste. Not this monstrosity, with its sentence structure taken literally from the Japanese. I kept watching to see if it got better and sampled some later episodes, but unfortunately, it didn’t.

A shame, because that first episode was funny. But with this being the only fansubs available and neither Crunchyroll nor seemingly any other legal (English language) streamer having it available, I doubt I will ever watch more of it.