Over-localization

myskaros

I am telling thatif we leave the "sweet spot" (and yes, I know said spot is different for everyone), I'd prefer translation to be on a side without unnecessary changes.

I can agree with this.

GodsGoldenPubes

I'm just going to throw in my own two cents. Mr/Ms sounds so unnatural that it makes me cringe every time I see it. English high school kids or friends wouldn't call each other "Mr/Ms" every time they talk to each other, So I think that should be dropped entirely and translators should just use their names and that's it. Readers can fill in the rest while reading if they know which Japanese honorific to use/even want honorifics.

Everything else is fine and if there's a part that could be better in the reader's opinion, they can read it in their head how they want it worded.

Jon Mitchell

my $.02:

there are elements of Japanese culture that I enjoy being in the gestalt of LN (and anime, and manga) including but not limited to (and if they were completely removed would detract from the art):

Honorifics
activities that Japanese students do at school/dates/ living that are different than American (clubs, festivals, typical dates, vending machines, karaoke, meals etc)
religion (or the lack thereof)/religious practices/holidays
food (whats for breakfast etc)

how some of these things get localized (translated) requires nuance, and for the most part JNC translators have done a pretty good job (Loki-dear in Magicmaster still feels weird, but I've seen honorifics handled much worse)
in general I prefer less localization over more, and had to look up what "Oyasuminasai" meant as it became a plot point in Lazy DM, but I'm glad it wasn't localized to "nighty-nite" )

myskaros

@jon-mitchell said in Over-localization:

Honorifics

You're dead to me now.

hiroto

@wellwisher said in Over-localization:

Good idea. JP books are cheaper, too.

Not always:

Bookworm Part 1 Vol 1 Kindle Japanese $8.75 vs English $6.86.

Jon Mitchell

@myskaros

I guess we have to agree to disagree- "sempai/kohai, -san, -sama" etc. it's difficult to translate and still carry the same "weight" - there's a line and not everyone agrees where it is and how it's handled

Mr./Ms. can be "-San"
but calling a classmate "senior" or "junior' as part of their name - sounds stilted and weird, but if once in a while I call my mentor/upperclassman "sempai" it seems ok

SomeOldGuy

@godsgoldenpubes The problem with dropping honorifics is that, in many cases, use or non-use can imply anything from a belittling insult to excess familiarity. English doesn't have direct equivalents that show the "subtle differences" in formality as concisely, but yes, you have to learn that separately from the text.

The Irregular at Magic High School has lots of examples of poor localization, especially with honorifics, in the print edition. When they convert all metric measurements to feet and inches... as if English speakers haven't heard of "meters"... it's especially cringe-worthy!

myskaros

@jon-mitchell My eternal rebuttal is that in any other language, there are millions of books that somehow don't have anything like a magical honorific to tell you how characters are related to each other, yet no one's voiced any complaints yet. It's not impossible to translate, it just requires effort in both the writer and the reader.

Jon Mitchell

@myskaros
Tolstoy threw me for a loop the fist time I read it (as a translation from Russian) “why is everyone referencing that guy by his last name? Wait, that’s not his last name, it’s his dad’s fist name with ‘0vich’ added! Why don’t they just call him ‘Peter?”

HarunaChieP

In regards to honorifics, I think it would depend on how often it is being mentioned of its usage by the character in their monologues or how it's emphasized by the other characters to use x honorific, etc.

I do appreciate that most of the translated ones I read here so far kept those intact.

Also, with localization in general, the only type of over-localization that would annoy me so much is completely changing the location of the story (see Ace Attorney / Gyakuten Saiban )

HamsterExAstris

@harunachiep said in Over-localization:

Also, with localization in general, the only type of over-localization that would annoy me so much is completely changing the location of the story (see Ace Attorney / Gyakuten Saiban )

That’s something that the translator said they’d change if given a do-over. Based just on the first game it was a reasonable choice; by the time later games made it more and more implausible, the ship had already sailed.

hiroto

Bookworm is translated without any use of Japanese honorifics. Here is one interesting technique I saw Quof employed in translating very specific use of "-chan".

In Bookworm Part 2 Vol 1 - Cleaning Up the Orphanage; his translation:

But still... Delia sure is being unreasonable here, isn’t she? What a cutie.

In original, it was more like:

But still... Delia-chan sure is being unreasonable here, isn’t she?

No where else Myne ever refer to Delia as "Delia-chan" in the original, but here, it was added in Myne's internal voice for the effect of Delia being cute here. Quof expressed that feeling very naturally with addition of "What a cutie.".

It is hardly a generic technique and it can be used in very specific context, but I just wanted to present it here as an example of what translator go through.

Travis Butler

@myskaros said in Over-localization:

@jon-mitchell said in Over-localization:

Honorifics

You're dead to me now.

Honorifics are one of the worst offenders for me, because most of the over-localizations do the opposite of what they're supposed to - they call attention to themselves instead of vanishing into the background.

-chan seems to be one of the worst offenders - 'Young Miss Aisha'? 'Young Miss Naden'? Really? Does anyone really think that sounds like natural speech? Presumably Fuuga's use of Aisha-chan and Naden-chan was meant to make him sound casual and overly familiar, but that kind of translation makes him sound stilted and overly formal.

yumenokage

Personally I really prefer honorifics to be kept intact if the setting is in Japan and maybe sometimes in fantasy worlds, but I do think there are some cases where they really probably shouldn't be kept in, like if something is set in 1800s England or something.

SomeOldGuy

@myskaros But, in other languages/cultures, is there the same sort of hierarchy involved in interpersonal social relationships? The number of honorifics in common use in English is not what it used to be, but they still exist.

Paul Nebeling

Honorifics. I guess it depends on context.

Keeping in mind that we're reading Japanese Light Novels, I kind of assume that there are honorifics in the original text. Now if it's a story with Japanese characters, especially if it's set in Japan, like Kokoro Connect, I expect to see honorifics. If it's not set in Japan (isekai), my expectation of honorifics really can vary widely. Outbreak Company would seem wierd without them while Smartphone and a few other seem fine. Stories where the characters aren't even Japanese really would be jarring with them.

Farmerdad

@travis-butler said in Over-localization:

Honorifics are one of the worst offenders for me, because most of the over-localizations do the opposite of what they're supposed to - they call attention to themselves instead of vanishing into the background.
-chan seems to be one of the worst offenders - 'Young Miss Aisha'? 'Young Miss Naden'? Really? Does anyone really think that sounds like natural speech? Presumably Fuuga's use of Aisha-chan and Naden-chan was meant to make him sound casual and overly familiar, but that kind of translation makes him sound stilted and overly formal.

I absolutely agree that most attempts to localize honorifics is a short road to disaster. I was accused of trying to advocate for the over-localization of a certain LN, but I actually prefer some native flavor. Either leave the honorific or just drop it entirely and hope context conveys the relationship. Some work, such as changing -san to "Mr./Mrs." and -sama to "Master/Mistress" but you probably can't change some but keep others. That lacks consistency.

For me, the worst offenders is when the personal titles are used in place of names such as onii/onee, senpai/kohai, etc. I don't know about you, but I never called my brother "brother" when addressing him in the normal course of the day. Translating Onii to "brother" breaks the flow. It's better to just leave it as Onii or use the characters actual name. Same goes for coworkers, bosses, and the like. I called my boss either Jill or Mr. Gruber, depending on how high up the food chain he was. If I tried to get his attention with "Boss", I would likely get written up for insubordination (well, not that far but you get the idea), and that is the impression I get when I read scripts where people are called "Boss/Manager" -- lack of respect.

HamsterExAstris

@farmerdad said in Over-localization:

I called my boss either Jill or Mr. Gruber, depending on how high up the food chain he was. If I tried to get his attention with "Boss", I would likely get written up for insubordination (well, not that far but you get the idea), and that is the impression I get when I read scripts where people are called "Boss/Manager" -- lack of respect.

As you said, it depends on how far up the chain they are. I have called my direct boss "Boss", and could see myself doing the same to her boss, but not anybody higher up than that.

Kevin S

It’s interesting that the question of over- or under-localization, at least as it’s shown up on this thread, is primarily revolving around specific, individual linguistic or cultural cases: do the characters address each other as “Mr. Y” or “Y-san”? Does she call her big brother “onii-chan,” “Big Bro,” or “Taro”? Do the characters eat rice balls or doughnuts? Even broader language concerns are focused on individual instances: itadakimasu or “let’s eat”? O-yasumi nasai or “Nighty-night”?

Partly this is probably because any discussion like this one is going to need individual examples at some point, but I think it’s worth noticing how much of the disagreement seems to be about particulars, and then remembering how much more translation involves than hauling concepts from one tongue to the other like some sort of inter-linguistic beast of burden.

Consider a sentence like 太郎は学校に行った (Tarou wa gakkou ni itta). As far as I can tell, no one here is suggesting that it should be rendered “Tarou as-for school to went,” although this would probably be the least “localized” form of the sentence in English short of simply rendering it in romaji. Barring some special reason for doing otherwise, most readers would probably prefer the more natural “Taro went to school.” This sentence doesn’t touch on any questions of honorifics, cultural background, or any other thorny issues, yet the average translator is going to make this sort of conversion far more often than they must make any calls about -san, sempai, or natto.

Other potential features of a text come to mind. For example, when is kibishii "strict," when is it "severe," and when is it "harsh"? When does neru mean to "go to sleep," and when should it be rendered "go to bed"? (For that matter, how about “hit the sack”?) Choices such as this have, in my opinion, as much or more to do with the tenor of the final text than more prominent and controversial decisions about things like honorifics.

Looking at the text at a higher level, it’s not uncommon for LNs to structure their dialogue like this:

“Blah blah blah.”
“Boo hoo hoo!”
Character A said, and character B wailed.

At best, this is a little awkward in English. So if a translator recasts it as:

“Blah blah blach,” character A said.
“Boo hoo hoo!” character B wailed.

--is that “over-localizing”? To the extent that it serves to turn a natural-souding Japanese text into a natural-sounding English one (in my mind, generally the goal of translation—but isn’t that just the issue?), certainly not.

All I’m really saying is that there’s more to localizing (or indeed translating – part of the problem here may be that we haven’t defined our terms very clearly) a text than using a few specific knotty points as litmus tests. Does the text communicate in the target language? (And _what_does it communicate?) Does it read smoothly? For that matter, are those the goals of the translation? (It should be clear from reading this thread that part of the issue is people who want mutually conflicting things from their translations, or even people who want the same thing but prefer different ways of getting it.)

I’m not suggesting there are obvious or easy answers to these questions—or even that we’ll all ever agree about the answers—but rather that they deserve consideration. We can’t say translation is an art while at the same time issuing categorical imperatives about what translations must or must not contain. Reflecting on the sorts of things I’ve outlined here, and above all on the aims and purposes a given translation ought to serve, might help us to better articulate what we want from our translations, or at the very least may remind us to hold our dogmas lightly.

yumenokage

One thing I would like to see translators be more proactive about is explicitly indicating who is talking. I hate it when there are multiple characters talking at once or even sometimes two characters and you can't tell who's who because the Japanese relied solely on speech quirks and the translator didn't bother to add like "X said", "Y cried", etc. to make it clear in the English. I haven't noticed any particular JNC series that have been particularly problematic in this regard, though.