JP formatting elements in translations
-
@hatguy12 I actually agree with you on that one in Realist. I've generally nixed those everywhere else, and on Living Poltergeists itself on later occurrences. That one's one of those early hiccups while I was getting used to dealing with the formatting. You shouldn't see any more of them.
-
Personally, I don't mind the usage of brackets for things that are a little out of the ordinary, such as magic spell names or looking at text on a screen or text box, as it gives them emphasis without making them confusing (using quotes or speech marks), changing the tone (changing cases such as all caps, superscript, etc) or making them more difficult to read (underline). That said, in most cases italics or bold could replace brackets without a problem.
My issue comes with using full width brackets rather than half width brackets. Whenever full width brackets are followed by half width punctuation, it looks pretty unnatural to an English reader as the punctuation looks like it's just floating in space. For example, "Fear my terrifying spell ［［ Full Width Brackets ］］!"
-
I'd honestly prefer less "..." lines, but only because my text to speech reader can't handle them. Every time dots pop up without any line after them in quotation marks, the reader says "QUOTE" audibly aloud (the literal word "quote", not quoting the ellipses or pausing).
@Terrence, Thank you for bringing this up. It may be a niche concern, but that doesn't mean it's not worth mentioning. (I certainly would never have thought of it otherwise.)
Personally, I usually convert "..." or "...!" type lines to narrative. I (and I think most readers) understand what they represent, and they work fine so far as it goes (except for audio readers!), but as I did more and more LNs I couldn't help thinking that there had to be a smoother way to represent them in English.
Light novels have a number of conventions surrounding dialogue, and translators massage those conventions all the time to get natural-sounding English--so in my view there's nothing to prevent doing it with these lines as well.
-
I'm sure Steiner will reply here eventually about smartphone, but we ran out of "normal" punctuation to use basically.
instead of italics are used to indicate when something is in the language of that world and "translated" to something Touya can understand, and the [ ] are used specifically for the english words in spells that have plot specific significance. We originally removed them but then a later conversation makes showing them as being "literal english words" somehow was important, so we decided using [ ] was a valid solution here. Italics are already used for monologue and normal emphasis, so using them also for this purpose would get even more confusing.Generally, I fully agree that Japanese specific punctuation be converted as much as possible. But LNs tend to use more varieties of brackets than english for sometimes plot crucial meanings, so sometimes we need to pull out "alternative" brackets.
Another example is brackets used for telepathic powers, where you're supposed to realize other characters can't hear the conversation. If you're already using italics for monologue the only more "englishy" thing to do would be use normal ( ), but that also looks kind of wonky. -
@Sam-Pinansky It's not like there aren't examples of English works that use unique punctuation for psychic conversations anyway. If I recall, the Animorphs series used [] for it. Not exactly high literature, but what series with psychic conversations between people who transform into animals is?
-
@Sam-Pinansky said in JP formatting elements in translations:
I'm sure Steiner will reply here eventually about smartphone, but we ran out of "normal" punctuation to use basically.
instead of italics are used to indicate when something is in the language of that world and "translated" to something Touya can understand, and the [ ] are used specifically for the english words in spells that have plot specific significance. We originally removed them but then a later conversation makes showing them as being "literal english words" somehow was important, so we decided using [ ] was a valid solution here. Italics are already used for monologue and normal emphasis, so using them also for this purpose would get even more confusing.I will admit my claim of "could be removed or replaced in all these cases" was evaluating them on an isolated basis. As you point out, it may not be that simple on a larger scale, particularly if it's involved in some important plot point (the one I vaguely remember was a relatively small point regarding the meaning of "bubble," but there may be more than that).
From a purely preference standpoint on Smartphone, I find the spell names appearing so heavily emphasized and so frequently in narration (like [Gate]) to be jarring. It sounds like there was already significant thought put into the matter. I'm suspicious I would personally still be more aggressive about their removal even if I was properly evaluating the issue on the overall scale, but thanks for talking some about the reasons.
Sean McCann said
It's not like there aren't examples of English works that use unique punctuation for psychic conversations anyway. If I recall, the Animorphs series used [] for it. Not exactly high literature, but what series with psychic conversations between people who transform into animals is?
Thanks for the example of a case it might be used in English. I haven't read Animorphs and don't think I've read much with psychic conversations.
I don't think I was paying close attention to the psychic conversations in Smartphone (I may take a look later), so I might agree there that something outside the basic English formatting set would be appropriate.
-
@Sean-McCann said in JP formatting elements in translations:
@Sam-Pinansky It's not like there aren't examples of English works that use unique punctuation for psychic conversations anyway. If I recall, the Animorphs series used [] for it. Not exactly high literature, but what series with psychic conversations between people who transform into animals is?
You also have the Valdemar series that used a combination of colon and italics :like this: to denote mindspeech, which is all kinds of fun now with forum markup.
-
@hatguy12 said in JP formatting elements in translations:
@Terrence said in JP formatting elements in translations:
I'd honestly prefer less "..." lines, but only because my text to speech reader can't handle them.
While reading, the "..." isn't something I notice much personally. But when I was skimming through to compare some of the translations to originals, by coincidence, I did notice one instance of the translator converting "..." into narrative.
So there is at least one person working in your favor with respect to "..."
It's me, isn't it.
EDIT: Oh, maybe it's Kevin. :)
-
@Liz said in JP formatting elements in translations:
@hatguy12 said in JP formatting elements in translations:
So there is at least one person working in your favor with respect to "..."
It's me, isn't it.
Yup. I had been somewhat expecting Narrow Fantasy Online to have some special formatting when appearing in the original and was curious, so I was looking through that one when I noticed.
-
Hrm... I agree with you guys on some things, and others not so much. But it's definitely an interesting conversation to have.
First off, regarding the use of《, we would have used regular <<'s, but those can get muddied up and confused by some HTML programs, and we use those for our epub assemblies.
If you don't take spacing problems into account and just look at it from a functional perspective, at least in Uchi Musume, I almost get an "echo-y" feeling from that formatting, which helps convey the power of the spell. For me, anyway. :)
I think that now that everyone has access to computers and other digital writing implements, you may end up seeing more weird formatting making its way into English. It wasn't that long ago that everything had to be sent off to a printer for pressing, and I wouldn't be surprised if that prevented format evolution. Interestingly enough, this is kind of reminding me of My Little Sister Can Read Kanji... @Sam-Pinansky .
It's one of those things that initially made me cringe, but as an editor you also have to learn to roll and adapt.
(Side Note: Although this isn't prose, many English-language comic books have interesting formatting in their text to convey different things, not just telepathy. It's like comic book formatting is leaking its way into novel text, in a way.)
-
(Side-Side Note: While I didn't like the book itself, if you want to see an example of some extreme and experimental text formatting, pick up House of Leaves. Get a physical, color copy.)
-
@hatguy12 That's funny! Yeah NaroFan is straight up. We get the << >> around skills and arts names and initially I put quotes around every instance, but one of our proofreaders recommended that we just put quotes around them the first time they appear or else it gets too distracting. I was fine with that; out they went.
@Terrence We got that complaint about "...quotes!" early on, and I took that to heart. If it was a serious concern for our earliest readers, it's a serious concern for me, and it also wasn't something I'd ever have considered if it hadn't been brought up. So please, definitely bring that stuff up!
-
@Sean-McCann said in JP formatting elements in translations:
@Sam-Pinansky It's not like there aren't examples of English works that use unique punctuation for psychic conversations anyway. If I recall, the Animorphs series used [] for it.
Funny, because this was exactly the example I was going to bring up. I recall the books using pointy single brackets (<>) for thought-speak, not square ones. FWIW, I've also seen more than one example of English-language comics using pointy brackets to indicate when someone is nominally speaking in a non-English language.
-
@Kevin-S And don't forget the venerable translation of Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga which used < > to denote foreign language,
