May we get light novel translations with honorifics
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@otonokakuei The assumption that since it's easy for a software engineer to implement, it must be easy for a freelance translator to implement is, frankly, probably not as correct an assumption as one might think. I've been working in libraries for years and can learn how to use a new piece of cataloguing software quickly. I'm not sure I'd expect an office worker to be able to figure out how to work cataloguing software all that quickly.
My grasp on sanity remains absolute.
Oh, right, the poison, the poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco's poison. ...That poison?
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@thegrimlich said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
@otonokakuei The assumption that since it's easy for a software engineer to implement, it must be easy for a freelance translator to implement is, frankly, probably not as correct an assumption as one might think. I've been working in libraries for years and can learn how to use a new piece of cataloguing software quickly. I'm not sure I'd expect an office worker to be able to figure out how to work cataloguing software all that quickly.
I've never said that the translator should be the one implementing it though? The format (if LaTeX is not used) and the parser/epub-converter should of course be implemented by someone who could. Translators only need to adapt to using said format. And by adapting I meant getting used to writing "\v1{Mr. Bell}\v2{Bell-san}" or whatever syntax the format requires instead of "Mr. Bell".
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@thegrimlich
I believe the initial approach of asking the translators to explicitly encode honorific info has been shot down as too much work already.But still implementing the idea (ie writing the parser to go to the correct format isn't hard), the objection related to, at least in part, the effort involved in do so.
Just wanted to highlight that aspect to support the viability of the 2nd idea since it wouldn't require extra work from the translators ideally.
But I guess talk is cheap. If the claim is in doubt, could draft the script as an example if someone wanted to provide test samples
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part of the practicality assessment of making such a change, I would think, is how prevalent mis-use of honorifics/lack of honorifics is among JNC translations. In my reading of the many, many fora I just don't recall it coming up much. Imouto vs. little sister/ junior, yea a few times but the examples in this thread (other than the 1 from Realist Hero) seem to be from works translated by companies other than JNC (i.e. Danmachi, published in English by Yen Press) This would require investment in labor/training/tools - what is the return on the investment? This looks like a problem that largely doesn't need fixing (at least not by JNC)
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I was going to avoid jumping into this discussion, but as someone who's been doing software development for years and has a basic knowledge of how Japanese -> English translation works because he's worked with translation projects in the past, it seems like some of the software developers here have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Japanese to English translation works, and are therefore making incorrect assumptions about how much work would be involved in their replacement mechanism.
There is no one-to-one reliable way to translate Japanese to English. This is why machine translation from Japanese to English sucks so bad. The structure of the language is fundamentally different, and many things that English requires you to spell out specifically are only inferred by context in Japanese, so you need the surrounding context taken into account.
Just the "simple" aspect of whether or not you have honorifics is not just a one-for-one swap out, and even if you're letting the translator create the alternatives, in a lot of cases it's the entire sentence or a whole paragraph that needs to be changed because of the presence or absence of honorifics, and not just the person's name. There are a lot of subtleties in the Japanese language which are expressed by which honorific is used in a name. When that subtlety is important to the meaning of the story for it to be preserved, doing so in a language like English that doesn't have those subtleties often requires massaging the entire surrounding paragraph to find some other way to express that subtlety in a way that still sounds natural in English. Taking that and adding the honorifics back into it afterwards would just sound really really strange, even if you do understand the honorifics. If you're going to have an honorific version and a non-honorific version, you'd want to exchange the entire paragraph in that case so that you don't need all the extra sentences explaining the subtlety that would inevitibly end up getting added in the non-honorific version.
The example I've always seen used to get this point across is when someone who has been using a specific honorific when speaking to a specific person changes which honorific they use because they've become closer friends with someone than they used to be. Usually this doesn't need to be explained in Japanese. Person A uses a more-familiar honorific, Person B is suddenly really happy. Everyone knows why Person B is happy because it's a natural bridge to cross when becoming more familiar with someone. In Japanese. In English we don't even have this concept. Person B suddenly being happy is important to the story. If we're doing it without honorifics, now we have to come up with a way to explain why. A lot of the time, the only way to pull this off is going to be to add an additional sentence spoken by Person A explicitly pointing out "I feel like we've become closer now" or similar. There's a whole sentence added that didn't even exist in the original Japanese, but to leave it out would remove meaning from the story.
Doing it both ways also requires the translator to actively think about two different ways to do it, which isn't really conducive to speedy translating. I suspect even if they tried this, it would slow down releases by a lot more than you think. It would work better to throw two different translators at it, one tasked with translating it each way. And that's more money spent on translators and twice the effort.
Just my opinions.
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Have you considered the impact a dual system would have on series where we do use honorifics? I'm game to change Iroha's affectionate "Sumire-chan-sensei" to "Teachy-teach Sumire" if you're all up for it, but I feel like some consideration ought to also go to series where we do use honorifics.
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@pcj said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
I was going to avoid jumping into this discussion, but as someone who's been doing software development for years and has a basic knowledge of how Japanese -> English translation works because he's worked with translation projects in the past, it seems like some of the software developers here have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Japanese to English translation works, and are therefore making incorrect assumptions about how much work would be involved in their replacement mechanism.
There is no one-to-one reliable way to translate Japanese to English. This is why machine translation from Japanese to English sucks so bad. The structure of the language is fundamentally different, and many things that English requires you to spell out specifically are only inferred by context in Japanese, so you need the surrounding context taken into account.The automatic replacement mechanism was not meant to be a cure-all solution. It should only be there as a way to automate some of the more trivial replacement processes. I also mentioned some pre-requisites in order for it to function correctly. In cases outside of those, it must be done manually.
@pcj said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
he example I've always seen used to get this point across is when someone who has been using a specific honorific when speaking to a specific person changes which honorific they use because they've become closer friends with someone than they used to be. Usually this doesn't need to be explained in Japanese. Person A uses a more-familiar honorific, Person B is suddenly really happy. Everyone knows why Person B is happy because it's a natural bridge to cross when becoming more familiar with someone. In Japanese. In English we don't even have this concept. Person B suddenly being happy is important to the story. If we're doing it without honorifics, now we have to come up with a way to explain why. A lot of the time, the only way to pull this off is going to be to add an additional sentence spoken by Person A explicitly pointing out "I feel like we've become closer now" or similar. There's a whole sentence added that didn't even exist in the original Japanese, but to leave it out would remove meaning from the story.
Fair point. Although I find it odd to do it like that, if the translator does decide to translate it that way, then it would make adding a version with honorifics a troublesome matter, especially if this occurs often.
@pcj said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
Doing it both ways also requires the translator to actively think about two different ways to do it, which isn't really conducive to speedy translating. I suspect even if they tried this, it would slow down releases by a lot more than you think. It would work better to throw two different translators at it, one tasked with translating it each way. And that's more money spent on translators and twice the effort.
I would certainly not suggest having 2 translators work on the same series.
Perhaps I've been too shallow in my thinking that a "name" can simply be replaced with another "name". I will add no further to the discussion, as I lack a real understanding of the intricacies that come with translating Japanese names with context to English.
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@pcj
I think the misunderstanding lies more in how "perfect" the translations would be with honorifics forcibly added. I don't claim it would be as ideal as a person manually adding them, but I think it would be good enough. In your example with Person A/B, we'd had the extra line and also the honorific change. I don't think the redundancy detracts from anything.I think the idea would be immediately shot down if it had to involve extra translating effort. There have been some cases that the the simple find/replace mechanism can't handle, but for the ones it can, it seems to work fine without extra translator thought in most cases.
I'd love to hear edge cases/counter examples so the idea can be improved. -
So if this issue could be mollified by simple find/replace mechanisms...
I've heard of people editing the epub files that JNC's premium e-books come in, to do stuff like change the spelling of certain names to their preferred spelling. So it seems to me that such find/replace mechanisms are already possible on the consumer end. If that's the case, all we really need maybe would be a place on the forums where people can share whatever find/replace parameters they think might work to adjust the text to others' liking.
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@taapaye said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
I'd love to hear edge cases/counter examples so the idea can be improved.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding - I think that the idea of a computer generating correct honorifics is basically science fiction. If that's what you're proposing, I can think of a couple difficult cases, but I wouldn't even consider these edge cases.
Example One: Suppose that the translation says, "Mr. Sugimoto," where Sugimoto is the character's family name.
Most of the time, I think the safest re-honorificification would be "Sugimoto-sama." If the translator went as far as to use any honorific at all (Mr, Lord, etc.) in the English, the honorific in the source text was probably on the more formal side.
However, that's not always the case. In a school setting, the most likely correct replacement would be "Sensei." (Maybe sometimes "Sugimoto-sensei," if the speaker needs to make clear which teacher they're talking about).
This would be possible for a skilled human to get right most of the time (which is better than most cases of trying to losslessly reverse a translation), but for an algorithm, I'd go as far as to say it's basically impossible. (Even a neural net would struggle because it would have to correctly identify the setting.)
Example Two: Suppose that the translation says, "Tanaka," where Tanaka is the character's given name. Suppose that your algorithm has a table where it can look up that the character's family name is "Sugimoto"
Unfortunately, this one is almost certainly irreversible. The algorithm has no way of knowing whether the family name or given name was used in the source material, and with what honorific (san? kun? chan? was there no honorific used at all?). Choosing the "correct" honorific would require the algorithm to understand the dynamics of the scene and the characters, and even then, it would probably get it wrong some of the time, because the source material might not have used the "correct" / most likely honorific for the situation.
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@rsog412
Thanks for the examples. Don't know how I overlooked the teacher case. I was thinking how Professor/Master/Dr could work but overlooked how either '-san' or '-sensei' could have led to Mr. Thank you this breaks one of the assumptions I was making.For the 2nd example, I agree it is a lost cause if the honorific is dropped. I don't know under which cases nor how often that is true. One example that was brought up was was during narration, but I did kinda assume honorifics wouldn't be completely dropped in speech generally.
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@taapaye said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
I'm going to do one more response here, and then I'm going to show myself out of this thread because, ironically, it's cutting into my productivity.
In regards the automatically replacing "Mr. Tanaka" with "Tanaka-san", I don't yet fill this is infeasible. The high level assumption was "Mr." would also come from "-san" and not "-san" to "Mr." I don't know if this assumption holds, but "-san" being translated to possible multiple things isn't a real issue. The only other example I no Fuji-san being translated to Mt. Fuji. So in this limited example we could map
Mt -> san
Mr -> san
Mrs -> sanI'm not completely sure I'm understanding you correctly, but you seem to be suggesting that this would be a simple matter because -san will map to "Mr./Mrs." (or vice versa) and so on and so forth. But to reiterate, I think the age when J>E translators felt compelled to make a 1:1 correspondence between -san and Mr. (etc.) is dead, and good riddance to it. Maybe you've seen some of those late-'90s or early-2000's high school anime where students address each other with "-san" and in the subtitles you end up with kids the same age calling each other "Mr. Sugimoto" and "Miss Hanako" all the time. It wasn't a wise choice then and it wouldn't be a wise choice now, and the fact that the right choice is sometimes (often?) to drop any "title" at all and account for the familiarity via voice and tone would undermine an auto-replace system from the start. (And -san is frequently a neutral or even familiar honorific, far more so than the vibe I would get from "Mr." whoever.)
To clarify, the -san of "Fuji-san" isn't an honorific; it's a quirk of the language by which the character for "mountain" (山) is read san in some contexts. (In other cases, it's pronounced yama.)
Now if it just gets dropped, that is unfortunate. However, it would claim that if it gets dropped or if the many to 1-to-manny mapping isn't true then we've already lost the info and are no worse than the current version at the very least
I'm not sure what you mean by this. If the system makes arbitrary, mistaken, or inappropriate conversions, then we wouldn't be "no worse" than we are now; we would have a mangled English text that not only fails to provide the particular kind of insight into the Japanese that you're asking for, but actively misrepresents that feature of the original. (All of this in a form which, as I've argued above, might be fundamentally compromised from the start in deference to this system.) Frankly, if I were a Japanese author and found out that something like that had been done to one of my books, I would be pretty upset.
Your explanation about the pronouns seems convincing enough to accept that it is too much work. For the narration, it also seems fine omitting the honorifics since they don't seem to add anything.
I think it's interesting that you recognize that the honorifics don't add anything in certain contexts. I would push you to see that, in terms of the English translation, they don't (or shouldn't) add much in any context.
Think of it this way: recall the last time you read a book that was originally written in English. Presumably it didn't include anyone calling anyone else -san, -sama, or whatever. (I know, I know, there are some quasi-exceptions in parts of the fantasy genre.) How in the world did you know how the characters felt about and related to each other?
Naturally, you knew by the words they used, the tone they took with each other, and the register they spoke in. That's because those are the expressive resources the English language has to represent many of the dynamics Japanese represents with honorifics. (Among other things, including good old narration and internal monologue! Again, I think a fixation on honorifics is shortsighted.) A good English translation from Japanese will leverage those same resources to re-create the dynamics represented by the honorifics in the source text, and again, this is likely to result in a translation that's fundamentally at odds with any ability to blithely substitute one name or word for another. If you're reading a translation that doesn't bring those things across, then worrying that you're missing out because the honorifics aren't there is misguided; you've got a target-language text with deeper problems.
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@kevin-s said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
and the fact that the right choice is sometimes (often?) to drop any "title" at all and account for the familiarity via voice and tone would undermine an auto-replace system from the start.
Yeah if the title is dropped, I think it kills most automated approaches.
But to reiterate, I think the age when J>E translators felt compelled to make a 1:1 correspondence between -san and Mr. (etc.) is dead, and good riddance to it.
That is interesting. I don't disagree with the point. I guess I just consume more subbed anime than light novels and assume too much of the awkward translation stuck. I do see how light novel have more freedom in translation to actually use tone/voice to convey the intent.I think it's interesting that you recognize that the honorifics don't add anything in certain contexts. I would push you to see that, in terms of the English translation, they don't (or shouldn't) add much in any context.
Perhaps there was too much emphasize on the benefit of the honorifics. Sometimes the English version just feels wrong. Let me try to purge any anime from my mind and focus on just the limited novels I've sampled here... Things like "Brother dearest" break the flow for me. Honestly anything different name or name + title that differs from the anime (or whatever form I consumed the source from first) just feels off. I acknowledge this is completely subjective and comes down to personal taste.
Trying to take my arbitrary bias out of the matter, adding back in honorifics seemed like the most general solution. (It seemed to be a superset of the problem of name/term conversion) Clearly I was underestimating the diligence of the translators in their efforts to convey the similar meaning.
So it was less of honorifics are "correct" or "always better" but more of just what I am used to and would prefer to see.
I'll concede automatic honorifics don't seem to be generally practical at the moment because of how works are currently translated and there isn't a desire to change how things are translated.
I personally still feel like it still has some merit in many cases that are annoying to me (straight name/term changes for example), but doesn't look like this would have general appeal. Probably just build that functionality into my custom app/reader.
Would again like to thank everyone for their input.
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Honorifics should be included since they add context which exists in the original work but is then lost in translation. It could be added as translator's note/footnote when they appear (for those unfamiliar) to explain the context.
Too much westernization like changing names can ruin the atmosphere of the content.
