Over-localization
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@farmerdad said in Over-localization:
Translation involves rendering the language from one to another, while localization is rendering concepts from one culture to another. [...] Translating is pulling the proper objects out of the fog of context and constructing a complete sentence.
Good! This is exactly what I meant about staking out some definitions as points of reference. Broadly speaking, I can agree with this definition (although personally I would consider Taro/Tarou to be a matter of style more than localization). I would suggest, though, that even with this description, translation and localization exist more as a spectrum than as two sides of a coin, precisely because in constructing that "complete sentence," the translator frequently has to make decisions about things like the kibishii/neru renderings that I mentioned in my example. The translator is a reader first, and (almost) no translation is going to be completely free of any reflection of the translator's reading. In some cases that will have more of an effect than others. (This is of course to leave aside instances where the source text is itself ambiguous, garbled, or otherwise in need of specific interpretation or emendation.)
On the other hand, itadakimasu, yoroshiku onegaishimasu, honorifics, and such represent concepts that do not exist or exist in English.
This is always an interesting question to me. It's possible to make too much of a sacred cow of things getting "lost in translation." Do English speakers, for example, have a single phrase that they inevitably say before meal, harking back etymologically to an expression of gratitude toward some other power for providing the food (itadakimasu literally means "I humbly receive")? Maybe not in those exact terms. But do English speakers sometimes say things like "Let's eat!", "Down the hatch!", or "Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub!"? (Or for that matter, and perhaps a better parallel, "We thank you, Lord, for this food...") Sure they do. To exchange one for the other is, as you say, a certain kind of localization, but I don't believe that (except, as ever, with perhaps some very specific exceptions) it's doing any kind of cultural violence to the text.
Thus too yoroshiku onegaishimasu: I readily grant that it covers a far wider range of situations than any one expression in English, but are there things people say in English quite naturally in most of those situations? Sure there are, and again, I don't think the translation gains in most cases from retaining an elaborate and not necessarily familiar Japanese phrase.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the same extends even to honorifics. English very much has registers, word choices, and other elements of speech that are modulated according to the relationship between two speakers--very much like honorifics in Japanese. Again, they aren't identical, but I think it's possible to make too much of their failure to completely overlap.
In the examples of "kibishii" and "neru", the rule is to try to convey the original intent.
I agree, but as you seem to imply in your next couple sentences, I think the exact same statement applies to all of the cases above – that the question is one of degree, not kind. (If kibishii can cover "harsh," "strict," "severe," "stern," and more, then would it be fair to say that 'the concept of kibishii doesn't exist in English'? Or perhaps we could argue that discrete concepts of harsh, strict, etc., don't exist in Japanese?) One of the points I wanted to make by highlighting a simple, uncontroversial sentence like "Taro went to school" (which you've bookended by pointing out that there are upper limits to interpretation) was that much of this discussion about under- and over-localization actually takes place within a relatively narrow slice of the localization spectrum.
There is a series put out by a certain publishing team that contains phrases and ways of speaking that I found jarring.
This is an important point, and I appreciate your putting it in just this way. A lot of these discussions about what is going too far (or not far enough) in translation seem to revolve around what individual readers find takes them out of the reading experience – either by sounding unnatural ("Big Brother!") or by requiring too much background knowledge ("What's onii-san mean?"). As others have pointed out, the "comfort zone," as defined by the thresholds of these respective extremes, is going to be different from reader to reader. But it also implies something that goes beyond light novels: people rarely question a translation that sounds smooth to them. This gets back, maybe, to why so much of this discussion focuses on particular flashpoints like honorific usage: these are things that can draw people's attention in a positive or a negative way, thus people who have no other way of judging the quality of the translation use them to sort out the "good" from the "bad." But perhaps I'm getting too far afield here. (And I'm certainly not denying that deftness of style isn't a hallmark of good translation in most cases – although there's always the question of source texts that are themselves poorly written.)
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@kevin-s said in Over-localization:
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the same extends even to honorifics. English very much has registers, word choices, and other elements of speech that are modulated according to the relationship between two speakers--very much like honorifics in Japanese. Again, they aren't identical, but I think it's possible to make too much of their failure to completely overlap.
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seems to me some of this is a matter of taste, and translators/editors walk a tightrope- I might like less localization than some and am tolerant of glossaries/indexes/footnotes... others might hate what I like
you can't merely translate (like a machine) and correct for sentence structure. The result i suspect would be unreadable (or at least not easily enjoyed)
the challenge is to discern enough of the authors intent to preserve the 'flavor' of the story / characters/ dialogue etc. and at the same time modify the literal translation to make the story flow/be readable and relate-able to an English speaking audience
I applaud the efforts of translators (actually interpreters might be a better term) and editors that take on this task (and do it so well here at JNC)
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@jon-mitchell said in Over-localization:
translators (actually interpreters might be a better term)
From what I understand, people who do "text translation" are referred to as "translators" while people who do "verbal translation" are referred to as "interpreters." At least in my experience working for hospital systems, it was 100% always interpreters that walked around with patients who didn't speak English, although their department was still called "translation services" :<
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@myskaros said in Over-localization:
@jon-mitchell said in Over-localization:
translators (actually interpreters might be a better term)
From what I understand, people who do "text translation" are referred to as "translators" while people who do "verbal translation" are referred to as "interpreters." At least in my experience working for hospital systems, it was 100% always interpreters that walked around with patients who didn't speak English, although their department was still called "translation services" :<
This is correct – by and large, transferring material between two languages in a written format is called translation, while doing so verbally is called interpreting. Trying to get the average person to draw the distinction can feel like a lost cause sometimes. But (if I may guess) I think what @Jon-Mitchell was getting at with his "interpreters might be a better term" comment was that going between languages, in whatever form, involves a good deal of "interpretation" in the sense of parsing the text, understanding both its broad and subtle meanings, and then trying to make those meanings accessible in the target language. ("The translator is always an interpreter" is of course a tired old saw by now.)
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For those not following on Discord, this is what Quarkboy said in response to my request for more speaker tags in Rokujouma when I raised it:
For rokujouma we kind of purposefully didn't add in many speaker tags
It would have been an even greater task to do that for the Vols 1-22
And it's actually pretty clear who is speaking based off characterization or description. You just have to pay attention.
Going through and changing that now consistently for earlier volumes beyond just a qa pass would actually add months to the delivery.I'll judge how easy it is to follow the dialogue when I get it...
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@shiny Did you mean Quarkboy?
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@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.
In this particular case, the honorific in question is -jou. The same jou as in Ojousama. It's also being accorded to them out of respect, something he doesn't bother to show Ruby or Kaede in the same sentence, who get no honorific.
The way people in Realist refer to each other actually is pretty stilted and formal. There aren't a ton of -sans and -chans, and the translation largely ignores those there are. The most common honorific thrown around in the series is -dono, which basically everyone gets referred to with, followed by -sama.
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So, one of the most famous over-localization relates to translating food items in other culture.
How much of tolerance would you have to see name of foods you are not familiar with? Do you care to learn about new Japanese foods or alien ingredients, or does it get in your way of your reading pleasure?
How about something like Nikujaga? Very common staple food in Japan but it is not something you see served at Japanese restaurant. But it is very common so I can find many recipe written in English.
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@hiroto said in Over-localization:
So, one of the most famous over-localization relates to translating food items in other culture.
How much of tolerance would you have to see name of foods you are not familiar with? Do you care to learn about new Japanese foods or alien ingredients, or does it get in your way of your reading pleasure?
I think that if the name can be translated it should be (e.g. prefer "rice balls" over "onigiri"), but I'd rather see unfamiliar food terms than have them be changed to something else entirely.
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Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned tatami mats as an unit of measurement. Recently, someone in a translation described a room as "about six square meters". I thought that was an oddly specific size and I've previously seen "six tatami mat" as a common Japanese idiom for a small room, so checked the source and saw that six tatami was indeed used and indeed rounded to one square meter. Knew a tatami mat is about one meter by two meters and therefore knew that six was definitely wrong by any measure. So looked up the real size and found out the most common size is 0.91 by 1.82 meters. So a six tatami mat room is 9.9372 square meters, and a proper translation is "about ten square meters". For us folks using imperial measurements, a nine foot by twelve foot room is less than 3/4ths of an inch too large in both dimensions. Definitely close enough. But there's a part of me that wishes the result wasn't ten square meters. Actually want any number but ten. Reason is due to rounding. If I see nine, or eleven, I think "rounded to nearest whole unit" and know that the actual sizes are somewhere between 8.5 to 9.5, or 10.5 to 11.5 respectively. But with ten, I have the additional option of "rounded to one significant digit", so the actual size is either between 9.5 to 10.5, or between 9.5 to 15 and the mental jarring as I determine which interpretation to use is annoying.
Frankly, if the translator used any value other than six, I probably wouldn't have noticed and continued reading. But now that I've done the research and the math, it's likely that if any translator uses any number other than ten, it's likely to trigger my doing a cross check. But still really wish the result wasn't a ten.Morning and Mourning sound alike for good and sufficient reasons.
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Well put. Having unfamiliar foods don't trip me up as much as having something that sounds out of place like having someone in Hokkaido making home-cooked tacos because us gaijin don't know what Nikujaga is.
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@hiroto there's also issues with reader expectations even if translation issues are not involved. For instance, Eric Flint in a novel of his described some Roman shields as "laminated wood" which quite accurate, instead of the shorter and just as accurate "plywood" because to his audience, "plywood" is a modern development and has no place in a story involving Roman legions. Just as in your example, do you introduce a foreign word to the audience or say "meat and potatoes", or perhaps " meat and potato stew".
Morning and Mourning sound alike for good and sufficient reasons.
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In general if the food have it's own name I'd prefer it to be left intact. Even if I can't make out what it is from a context, googling it is not a big deal, unlike trying to reverse-engineer what it was initially. Thanks, I already have enough of that with converting everything back to metric.
As an example, something like onigiri is very specific while "rice balls" can mean anything from a huge selection of dishes that fall into this category. -
@hamsterexastris said in Over-localization:
I think that if the name can be translated it should be (e.g. prefer "rice balls" over "onigiri"), but I'd rather see unfamiliar food terms than have them be changed to something else entirely.
Yeah, onigiri is one typical staple food which is not in the common English vocabulary like sushi. I guess because it is not served in Japanese restaurants. I'm still waiting for some entrepreneur to create national onigiri franchise and make it popular in US. It is so much more versatile food than sushi.
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@jcochran said in Over-localization:
"meat and potatoes", or perhaps " meat and potato stew".
That is a valid option in this particular case.
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Unless we are talking about actual Japanese house and the room size is important subject matter in the plot, quite often author using 4.5 tatami mat, 6 tatami mat, and 8 tatami mat as coarse estimating of the room size. They are really really rough number to begin with.
Also, there are different tatami mat size, and 6 tatami mat can be anywhere between 8.67 sq meter and 10.94 sq meter, adding even more fuzziness.
So translator has great amount of flexibility in deciding how to covert these numbers.
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@hiroto Oh, I know about the different sizes such as Kyoto, Nagoya, Tokyo, and even found a company that makes mats in custom sizes. That's why I said "most common size". Honestly, would prefer the translator just keep the tatami mat convention in place to add a bit of local flavor. But then again, this entire thread is dealing with the issues of under or over localization, so doubt than any one preference is superior to another.
Also will say that this entire thread is extremely interesting. Learned about the green/blue aoi issue here today and wonder if it's at the root of a few recent posts in the P2V2 Ascendance of a Bookworm forum.
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Back when I was reading Lazy Dungeon Master, I believe there was also some confusion because the translator decided that "anpan" was better recognized as "jam bread".
So my opinion is that food and cuisine should be left as is. If there's an obvious translation, then certainly use that (eg "omelette rice" or "rice in an omelette" for "omurice"), but switching references should never happen.
Because so far from what I've seen in JNC translations, every attempt to make something more "familiar" to English readers assumes an American cultural base. Which means now I have to figure out what this weird new foodstuff or reference is, thus the point of making it "more familiar" is lost.
@farmerdad said in Over-localization:
Well put. Having unfamiliar foods don't trip me up as much as having something that sounds out of place like having someone in Hokkaido making home-cooked tacos because us gaijin don't know what Nikujaga is.
And then there's Okinawan cuisine, where "taco rice" is actually the usual taco fillings over (white) rice. Pronounced the same as "tako" (octopus) too, for extra confusion when I visited.
@hiroto said in Over-localization:
Unless we are talking about actual Japanese house and the room size is important subject matter in the plot, quite often author using 4.5 tatami mat, 6 tatami mat, and 8 tatami mat as coarse estimating of the room size. They are really really rough number to begin with.
Also, there are different tatami mat size, and 6 tatami mat can be anywhere between 8.67 sq meter and 10.94 sq meter, adding even more fuzziness.
So translator has great amount of flexibility in deciding how to covert these numbers.
Of course, we have an actual series where the six tatami mat room is part of the title, much less an important subject matter in the plot.
From what I can tell, the term "six-tatami" when used in Japanese media is generally not so much about the exact dimensions, but more about how small the place is. Not so tiny that it's unusual, but more that it's the sort of flat someone looking to save money on living space would rent/buy, especially if they're living alone. Small living space, basic amenities, and certainly not the sort of place you'd expect to be invaded by a number of supernatural factions.
So I think it's fine to avoid measurements entirely, and instead use the cultural equivalent. Searching Wikipedia, apparently this is called "studio apartment" or "micro apartment" or "bachelor pad".
