translation – Wis[s]e Words

What you get when you pay your translators $80 per episode

Published on October 5, 2023Leave a comment

The quality of the subtitles for the Yuzuki-san Chi no Yonkyoudai series was so bad, even the ANN reviewers took notice:

The entire episode is nigh-unintelligible thanks to what is almost undoubtedly unedited machine translation. On the lighter end of things, there’s almost no proper punctuation. Four out of five sentences end without a period. Later in the episode, there are sections where two versions of a subtitle will appear side by side for reasons I cannot even figure out. I’m pretty sure every line in the subtitle script was fed individually through a translation program – because every line starts with a capitalized letter, regardless of whether it’s a new sentence.

Girl asks a moody looking boy: What's the matter? I'm in a bad mood early in the morning.

The examples given are indeed egregious, but I want to focus on some less obvious mistakes, mistakes you can find in other anime as well. In the screenshot above, the translator has confused who is the subject of the sentence. When watching, it’s clear that she’s talking about him, not herself. Even if not clear from the scene itself, it should be clear from the preceeding ones, which saw him getting upset by his brothers not trusting him to do house work. It’s the sort of error you can make when you only have the to be translated text to go by, not the actual footage. An editor should’ve caught this, but how well if at all is any subtitling edited at Crunchyroll these days?

Guy complaining about his homework being copied: 'Just arrived and copied other people's notes as if nothing had happened'

Here the tense is obviously wrong: it’s should be copying, not copied, as they’re still doing it. Ending on “as if nothing had happened” is also weird, a bit of a cliche translation of “atarimae darou”, more literal, as if it’s obvious or the most normal thing in the world to do. It does get the gist of what he’s saying, but it’s slightly awkward and lazy.

Two lines of subtitles saying roughly the same thing, one with a typo

Watching through the rest of the episode it all gets so bad that it completely ruins the show. I cannot believe any human looked at this and thought it was good enough to release. You wouldn’t tolerate this reading a scanlated manga, let alone from a paid for service. The one thing Crunchyroll offers other than a convenient place to watch anime at and they fuck it up like this. Hope you weren’tlooking forward to this show.

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.

Unexpected ikemen in the bagging area

Published on March 7, 2022Leave a comment

Bear with me. One of the more irritating ‘controversies in anime/manga/light novel/etc fandom is the localisation versus literal debate about translations and subtitles. There’s a small but loud group of mostly rightwing fans who prefer their translation to be as literal and as much like the original Japanese as possible and who see all other translations as suspect. This usual goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories about Funimation polluting their precious bodily fluids with SJW language in their translations. The idea that there’s an art to translation, that you can’t just go word by word like some robot and expect anything good or even understandable to come out of it just doesn’t land with these people.

This hasn’t stopped professional translator Sarah Moon, here comparing the excellent, slang laden puntastic official subtitles of My Dress-UP Darling/Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi o Suru with an as literal as possible translation of the spoken Japanese. It’s brilliant and hilarious and it shows just how stilted and awkward this insistence on literalness makes things. You end up with sentences that still make some sort of sense but are just never said in English, sentences that sound as if you had a stroke. It also shows just how good the unknown translator/subtitler of the series is, being able to put so much character in such a limited space. I wish Crunchyroll and other parties would actually credit their translators (and other staff) like Hi-Dive does.

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.