Manga – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

Translating means rewriting too — Martin’s increasingly petty translation rules

Published on February 25, 2023Leave a comment

A manga panel showing text balloons with the text from this book I learned all about magic

You can feel it sometimes, can’t you? You’re reading a manga or a light novel and while the English seems fine and you can understand what’s being said, but it still feels off somehow? Especially if you’re being a bit naughty and reading a scanlation. It’s readable, but it doesn’t flow nicely. Like in that example to the left I came across today. That’s not the way we’d structure that sentence in English, is it? You’d normally say “I learned all about magic from this book”, not the other way around. But if you understand Japanese enough to follow the flow when watching subbed anime, you may have noticed that its sentence structure is different from English, often switched around from what you’d expect in English. In Japanese, that sentence makes sense; in English it’s still perfectly understandable but doesn’t flow.

Which is one of the most obvious, simplest reasons why you just cannot translate text like this and not rewrite it. Not to shame the person who did this translation, but this is very much a first draft attempt. What they should’ve done next is walk critically through the entire text and rewrite and remove any such awkwardness. Because while this manga might be readable, all these little errors and awkwardnesses make it harder to enjoy it. Not that I mind too much when it comes to amateur translators doing this as a hobby. It’s not as bad as e.g a supposedly professional translator not realising something is an idiom and translating it literally, just awkward. Not that I haven’t seen that same mistake done in scanlation, one time the translator had used the literal Korean saying, which made no sense in English, then had added the English equivalent in a translator note. At which point you’re being deliberately obtuse, but it touches upon one of the greater sins of scanlation. A misguided desire to keep the translation as close to the original as possible, even if it comes at the expense of readability, to make it seem as Japanese (or Korean…) as possible in English.

I understand that desire, really I do! You want to give people as close to the same experience as you, who can read Japanese. But it makes your translations suck. English awkwardly constructed to function as much as possible as Japanese suck. Endless repetitions of the unnatural “this child” when referring to somebody rather than using a proper pronoun or even their fucking name sucks. Not translating names or phrases when there are perfectly good English equivalents sucks. Yes, you shouldn’t translate onigiri as jelly donuts but rice balls gets the meaning across just as well. You can translate 水に流す (mizu ni nagasu) as “water flows”, but “It’s all water under the bridge” is better understood. (From.) Translating means rewriting, to make your prose flow better, read more easily and be more understandable to your audience. If you don’t, you’re only doing half your job.

Your Happening World (weeaboo edition)

Published on October 15, 2022Leave a comment

A desperate attempt to clean out some browser tabs, this time focused on anime & manga.

Mutsumi Inomata and Atsuko Ishida Discussion on 80s Cute Girls Anime — I swore I would never translate something as long as the six-part Akio Sugino interview ever again, yet this one is not far off in length… That said, thankfully, this one was not nearly as painful to translate. Maybe I’m getting better at this, though I find that unlikely. Anyway, I’m probably going to take a break again. The pendulum has swung too far into reading about anime and not actually watching it. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back.
Mizuki Shigeru and American Horror Comics — When you think of influences on Japanese comic book legend Mizuki Shigeru, names like Basil Wolverton, Bob Powell, and Warren Kremmer don’t usually spring to mind. After all, those artists drew for 1950s American horror comics like Tomb of Terror and Crypt of Horror. They hardly seem like source material for a young man thousands of miles across the ocean. Where would he find them? And if he did find them, how could he read them?
Students, statistics, and bloodthirsty beasts — Gunparade March is a game that’s constantly refreshing itself and expanding its own horizons, always finding new ways to surprise you (and itself), the flexible and highly interdependent nature of its many, many, systems allowing new situations to manifest in the same way a butterfly flapping its wings may end up creating a hurricane.
How to make an “unwatchable” tv series into a tight OVA — What Japan got instead was something called AWOL Compression Re-MIX, which truncated the entire production from twelve 24-minute episodes into four OVAs which were released on VHS & LD from August to December the same year; episodes 1-3 are around 53 minutes long, while episode 4 is around 43 minutes. Taking into consideration the fact that the OP & ED are only used four times instead of twelve, roughly four episodes worth of content was removed to compress everything! Does that make AWOL actually watchable now? Hell, is it as “speedy & powerful” as it’s claimed to have been made into?

Is this how Japan treats people with ADHD?

Published on September 3, 2022Leave a comment

This is almost a too on the nose example of Japan as an ultra conformist society. From Caitlin Moore’s review of How My Brain is Different:

One of the consequences of allowing people to speak in their own words is that there are stories where, even though we share the same condition, I struggle to understand the narrator’s perspective. Iku describes how it feels once the ADHD medication Strattera starts working. Her head feels clearer and she’s able to function professionally, but her emotions feel muted and she’s largely lost interest in most of her hobbies. Despite the disadvantages, she feels positive about her experience with Strattera.

During my brief attempt at taking Strattera, I had similar side effects, which to me put it squarely into “not worth it” territory. I hated the sensation of my passions and emotions being dampened. Horrified at the idea of living like that long term, I insisted on going back to stimulants.

Regardless of my own feelings on the matter, Iku’s experience and priorities are just as valid as mine. This could even be culturally informed; in Japan, Strattera is the first-line medication, with the only alternative being Concerta if the Strattera doesn’t work. All other forms of stimulant medication—Adderall, Ritalin, and Vyvanse, which are popular options in the US—are illegal.

If Japan forbids the use of medication that allows ADHD sufferers to keep more of their personality, while the main drug available is one that turns you into a functional but emotionalless drone, what does that say about the country?

Is it just Oda being stubborn or has the Shonen Jump culture poisoned his brain?

Published on February 19, 2022Leave a comment

Over at Anime Feminist, Lilian King writes about One Piece and Oda Eiichiro’s backslide in writing good female characters.

Some… things… certainly changed. Long before I ever interacted with One Piece seriously—before I knew anything but the most basic details of the premise—I remember people joking about the huge change in the way female characters looked after the timeskip. This is egregiously sexist character design, enough that people with no vested interest in representing female characters well still took note when it happened. Oda took the timeskip as an opportunity to respond to female complaints and male desires: look, everyone, he said, look at my female characters now.

As Lillian King argues, early One Piece had its flaws in how it treated women, but still had female characters as important parts of the cast. As the series grew in popularity and especially after the timeskip in chapter 597, this changed and they mainly served as fan service rather than important characters in their own rights. King blames this on the stubbornness and vindictiveness of Oda, not being able to handle criticism of his characters and instead doubling down. But is this purely just another example of a famous author getting high on his own farts, or is there more to it? Because I can’t help but think that the criticism aimed at Oda and One Piece here apply just as strongly to a lot of other famous shounen battlers. I wonder if the editorial culture at Weekly Shounen Jump might not be just as much to blame as Oda’s own idiosyncrasies. Especially the references to “a boy’s fantasy” as an excuse for the sexism and stereotyping seem part and parcel of WSJ’s culture. This after all is a magazine that only a few years ago rejected the idea of female editors because they couldn’t understand “a boy’s heart”. I don’t claim to have an indepth knowledge of Shounen Jump, but it does feel to me that it has grown more conservative rather than less in the past three decades, less willing to try new ideas, more stuck to its formula and the sacred readers feedback system. A culture that in its hearts of hearts might just feel happier if only boys read the magazine.