{"id":10497,"date":"2024-07-17T03:31:59","date_gmt":"2024-07-17T08:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=10497"},"modified":"2024-07-17T03:31:59","modified_gmt":"2024-07-17T08:31:59","slug":"why-translations-shouldnt-be-too-faithful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2024\/07\/17\/why-translations-shouldnt-be-too-faithful\/","title":{"rendered":"Why translations shouldn&#8217;t be too faithful"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nIf, 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, <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20120621003012\/https:\/\/mogumogubakubaku.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/12\/6-2\/\">this 2011 vintage discussion<\/a> about how several fansubbers translated one particular scene in <cite>Bakemonogatari<\/cite> is right up your street:\n<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nFor some reason, I was watching Coalgirls\u2019s 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\u2019s too stupid to realize it. Incidentally, this part was what got me into the show two years back because the jokes and Hitagi\u2019s all-around verbal abuse here is fantastic. Coalgirls\u2019s translation up to this point can be best described as \u201cunderstandable\u201d despite the translator\u2019s poor sense of style. Or at least until it got to the punchline of my favorite joke in the scene.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Your amateurish virginity will infect me<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cAmateurish virginity?\u201d What the hell does that even mean? Let\u2019s 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\u2019t know Japanese) would do. Interestingly, the translator didn\u2019t even provide a translation note to preach to the viewer about the finer details of Japanese slang.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\nThe writer goes on to compare Coalgirl&#8217;s subs to two other fangroups, Thora and GG&#8217;s, finding the latter to have the best translation. &#8220;Amateurish virginity&#8221; turns out to be Japanese slang for men who only have sex with sex workers and never had a proper relationship. In English you&#8217;d call them incels these days. It&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,2809],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime","category-lost-in-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10497"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10499,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10497\/revisions\/10499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}