Lost in Translation – Page 3

Making English gender fluid is only difficult to lazy translators

Published on March 20, 2019Leave a comment

This shows a lack of imagination on the part of Toni Pollard:

Clara Ng’s “Meteors” is a deceptively simple tale of a sweet relationship between an alien and an earthling. Set in a distant galaxy, it plays with the dimensions of space and time. However, reading it in Indonesian likely provides a different experience than reading its English translation. This difference is due to another element that the author is consciously toying with—that of gender. The gender fluidity that exists in the Indonesian is almost impossible to translate satisfactorily for English readers.

[…]

For example, in a story I translated a few years ago, “The Lighthouse” by Linda Christanty, it is not until near the end that a relationship that began during a chance meeting on a beach is revealed to be a lesbian relationship—prior to the end, only the main character is identified as “she.” In the English translation, because of the pronoun “she,” this aspect of the story had to be revealed much earlier.

In the end Toni Pollard decides it’s all too difficult and just assigns (rather, makes up) genders for the characters rather than attempt to keep the gender ambiguity or fluidity of the original story. There are always challenges when translating a story, but really keeping the characters gender consistent in translation shouldn’t be one of them. English offers plenty of ways to be gender ambiguous, but the simple singular they is usually sufficient. That this person rejected it over the expressed wishes of the original author, even if the latter according to them was pleased with the end result, speaks of a lack of imagination and too much ego. Even if they themselves couldn’t have found decent alternatives, why not ask gender fluid people for solutions? Plenty of people on e.g. Twitter who’d be eager to help.

On another level it also seems a bit, how to say it, cultural imperialist to smooth out the gender fluidity of the original Indonesian this way? One of the minor things that annoys me about watching anime is when subtitles either straight up ignore things like honorifics and/or try to find English language equivalents for them. In the first case you lose a layer of meaning, in the second you’re trying to force a round peg into a square hole and you get aberrations like translating “onee-sama” as “missy”. In either case the end result is that something distinctively Japanese is lost in translation to adhere to outdated notions of what good English is like. Here too, with this refusal to keep the gender fluidity of the original, something irreplaceable is lost.

Watching television like cinema

Published on April 8, 2018Leave a comment

How we’re watching anime when we’re watching anime.

So the point made is that when you watch television in your own language, you can get away with not paying a hundred percent attention to it. A lot of television is watched while you’re doing something else after all, like the way we used to listen to the radio. Maybe you’re doing the dishes, or eating, or faffing about on the internet, but the assumption is that you’re not giving your full attention to whatever is playing on the screen. This as opposed to watching a movie in the cinema, where you’re forced to pay your full attention to the movie. But with anime, if you’re not fluent in Japanese, if you cannot rely on hearing the dialogue to tell you when you have to pay attention again, you tend to watch a show in the same way as if you were watching a movie in the cinema. If only because you need to see the subtitles to know what’s happening.

And because, like most television, an anime series is created with the understanding that it will be watched by people who are not giving it their full attention, so there will be redundancies built into each episode. Exposition, recaps, repeats of important information from earlier in the episode, etc. Which is fine for the original Japanese audience, but if you’re a non-Japanese, non-fluent viewer who relies on subtitles for your understanding, this redundancy stands out because you are paying attention all of the time. Especially if you’re binging a show that was originally meant to be watched weekly. You’re watching something in a way that it wasn’t meant to be watched and because you cannot look away, its redundancies are even more evident.

This is something I very much noticed in my own anime watching, where I can sometimes get annoyed by the seemingly unnecessary exposition and recaps because I am paying such close attention to it. Especially with a more ambitious series, I sometimes don’t actually want to watch as much as I want to have watched it, because I cannot look away for fear of missing something yet there are long stretches where nothing interesting seems to happen. At those times I’d rather watch something simpler, a kids show like Precure or Aikatsu which I can watch while doing something else, as they have a set formula that guides when and when not to pay attention. This is occassionally frustrating, but at least I was used to reading subtitles already.

In conclusion then, it pays to take into account for which audience and medium a series is made, whether it was intended to be watched week by week, or binged like a Netflix series. Whether or not it was intended to be paid close attention to or rather had built-in redundancies for an audience not expected to pay full attention to it. It’s still fair to criticise a series for over exposition or a reliance on recaps or repeats, but if you don’t take into account these things, you cannot understand why a series does what it does.

Another reason to prefer subs

Published on February 2, 2017Leave a comment

Sometimes a small, seemingly insignificant change can make you lose all trust in an adaptation. Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon recently got an English dub courtesy of Funimation, but when the first episode aired it turned out a small, but important line was altered.

In the original Japanese dub (and English subtitles) Kobayashi-san says, in answer to Tohru’s declaration of love: “But I’m a woman though”. Which, as MayaScientist demonstrates on Twitter, is an old, old Yuri cliche, when a woman is first confronted with another woman’s love for her. in context, what with Tohru’s unfamiliarity with modern life and Kobayashi’s overall appearance, it also makes sense for her to say something like that, to drive the point home to both herself and Tohru.

The dub changes this line to “I’m not into women or dragons”. Which is an outright rejection of Tohru, rather than a gentle confirmation that Tohru knows what she’s doing. Worse, it turns Tohru’s displays of affection from amusingly over the top to downright creepy.

There's a reason she can't tell Tohru that living with Tohru makes her happy, but she can tell Lucola.

— Andrea Reventon (@andrearitsu) 2 February 2017

In the original manga and the anime series so far, though Kobayashi never states it outright, it’s clear she accepts Tohru and her love at some level, that it is more than just friendship. The entire series is as much about Kobayashi coming out of her shell as it is about funny dragon antics, as Andrea Reventon argues in the series of Tweets linked to above. Yet you cannot get there if you start with her outright rejecting the possibility of being lesbian, of falling in love with another woman. That’s why this is such a bad change and such an important one, as it means that Funimation will probably change more things in the anime, erasing the queer (sub)text of it.

Inarticulate spaces

Published on November 22, 2010

At Making Light, Abi talks about learning Dutch and, as with learning any language, finding new concepts absent in her mother tongue:

But equally strange are the vocabulary items that teach me some concept which has been lurking all my life in the inarticulate space between the English words I know. One such word is anderhalf. Literally, it means “another half”, but it is actually “one and a half”.

These “inarticulate spaces” are what most often trips me up when trying to write an English post about something I’ve only got Dutch sources of. Frex, why doesn’t English have an expression as simple as “er vraagtekens bij zetten“, putting question marks to some explenation offered to you? Or even as simple a concept as “bestuur“, a nebolous group of people who administrate an organisation and where it doesn’t matter who they are exactly? Or something generic like “gemeente“, not quite translateable with city council or municipality or “wijk“, which is not quite a neighbourhood and might be the same as a borough, though I’ve mostly seen that used for New York rather than as a generic term.

And why oh why is it so difficult to get an English translation of hottentottententoonstellingstentjetoegangspashoudercontroleur?