Over-localization
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@travis-butler said in Over-localization:
While I can see this point and agree to a large extent, I would argue that 'the original Japanese meaning' is an important part of the reader's experience for people who read light novels to begin with.
Maybe it's just that to me, it's more important to be a fantasy story first and foremost, rather than "a Japanese story that happens to be a fantasy story." (Unless the fantasy is specifically based around Japanese culture, like Touhou.)
Edit: I should also clarify, it's not like I want to eliminate all Japanese-ness out of a Western-inspired fantasy. That'd be impossible without completely changing the story anyway. But I feel like those Japanese elements should come through more naturally, via the content of the story itself, rather than through more obvious indicators like honorifics.
MAL
Beneath the Tangles (the blog I write for) -
@stardf29 said in Over-localization:
@travis-butler said in Over-localization:
While I can see this point and agree to a large extent, I would argue that 'the original Japanese meaning' is an important part of the reader's experience for people who read light novels to begin with.
Maybe it's just that to me, it's more important to be a fantasy story first and foremost, rather than "a Japanese story that happens to be a fantasy story." (Unless the fantasy is specifically based around Japanese culture, like Touhou.)
If all I want is a 'fantasy story', there are shelf-units full of them at local bookstores. I specifically seek out and read light novel fantasy because I enjoy the Japanese flavor; just as I love the Discworld books for pTerry's British tone and sense of humor.
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This reminds me of all those online arguments in the 90s about how the Final Fantasy games were all butchered since they removed honorifics and people were unable to tell that it was a Japanese game or how the characters all felt about each other.
...oh wait.
Whoever said nothing's impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
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I have a hard time coming up with something which would suitable in replacing those kind of honorifics like -senpai. In fact imagining an anime or manga, where one protagonist only calls the other senpai to be changed due localisation issues into the given name instead is one of those example which can destroy the entire atmosphere the story is trying to tell.
And I agree with Final Fantasy. In the MMO Final Fantasy XIV there are so many weird scenes caused by a difference between the voice over and the translation. And it does not stop at difficult words. One scene was hilarious weird to me, where a countdown is reverted from the voice over...
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I feel it worth pointing out that when Japanese translators translate western literature into Japanese for a Japanese audience, they tend to add some minimal amount of honorifics where there were none before. And that's because honorifics are an inseparable part of the Japanese language. Remove them completely, and you get wrong-looking or weird sounding Japanese. The same way you get weird-sounding English when you keep the honorifics around.
It's only natural that Japanese authors use honorifics even when writing dialogue set in a fantasy world with obviously non-Japanese characters, because it's a required part of the Japanese language. And I bet there are plenty of Japanese readers who'd get just as annoyed by reading some lazy honorificless translation into Japanese as I get reading a lazy, honorific-filled translation into English.
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I think there is a degree of “taste” as to weather (and to what degree) you prefer honorifics. There is information in the way honorifics are used (information on how those two people relate to each other) that isn’t conveyed when the honorifics are merely dropped. Titles don’t always work and translators are often walking a tightrope. In the case of “Loki Dear” I am not sure how it could be handled better. Yes, the ‘dear’ sounds old fashioned, but also signals that Alice accepts Loki as a friend, and is calling her a ‘cute’ form of her name out of affection (and to the reader it creates a dichotomy between Loki’s stoic demeanor and how Alice sees (through) her. It is a case of “gap moe “
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@jon-mitchell said in Over-localization:
I think there is a degree of “taste” as to weather (and to what degree) you prefer honorifics. There is information in the way honorifics are used (information on how those two people relate to each other) that isn’t conveyed when the honorifics are merely dropped. Titles don’t always work and translators are often walking a tightrope. In the case of “Loki Dear” I am not sure how it could be handled better. Yes, the ‘dear’ sounds old fashioned, but also signals that Alice accepts Loki as a friend, and is calling her a ‘cute’ form of her name out of affection (and to the reader it creates a dichotomy between Loki’s stoic demeanor and how Alice sees (through) her. It is a case of “gap moe “
Looking more into that certain example with the dear creates even more issues. Like how to translate the Japanese very personal "anata" when a couple is addressing each other. As far as I know that differs between married and unmarried couples too.
Sorry for my bad English - it is not my native language
Give Pens Down, Swords Up: Throw Your Studies to the Wind a try. It is that good! ♡(>ᴗ•)
I like it as much as Realist Hero ♡ -
@serah
I’m not an expert on this but a diminutive form of a name (in American English) often has the same connotation as -Chan (honorific) in that it denotes familiarity and generally used between peers of the “regular “ version of one’s name is used in other situations: so a character might be “Barbara “ as a given name, but might be ‘Barb’ to coworkers and other acquaintances, and ‘Babs’ to close friends, and might have a nickname’Bubbles’ with her significant other. I don’t know how one would create a diminutive of ‘Loki’, to show what ‘Loki Dear’ does.Regarding ‘Anata’ (in American English) : dear, dearest, darling, sweetie, or something else I imagine could be used depending on the personalities of those involved
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@jon-mitchell Still not as bad as ADV mistranslating oji-sama as Sir Uncle instead of Prince in Zone of the Enders.
Man were so many ADV translations garbage.
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To this day I don't think there's been a good English translation for "tsundere". We've had everything from "icy-hot" to "bipolar" to "sour-sweet".
@myskaros said in Over-localization:
This reminds me of all those online arguments in the 90s about how the Final Fantasy games were all butchered since they removed honorifics and people were unable to tell that it was a Japanese game or how the characters all felt about each other.
...oh wait.
I mostly remember that in the late 90s and early 00s, yes. In some Final Fantasy fansites, merely mentioning "Woolsey" was grounds for a ban.
Which, as I brought up earlier, was a little weird, given the attempts to "properly translate" the various Final Fantasy games often resulted in even worse translations.
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@unsynchedcheese said in Over-localization:
To this day I don't think there's been a good English translation for "tsundere". We've had everything from "icy-hot" to "bipolar" to "sour-sweet".
“Bipolar”? Really? Ugh.
I’m normally on the more-localized end of the scale, but that’s one of maybe four words that I think are probably best left untranslated because a literal translation will at best confuse the reader, and adding explanatory verbiage seems problematic in its own way.
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@unsynchedcheese said in Over-localization:
think there's been a good English translation for "tsundere"
I think that English should just adopt the word. 'Tsundere' doesn't really translate well, and there is precedent: 'umami' is a word recognized among English speakers now, and 'savory' really doesn't do justice as a cognate
I read banned books
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@hamsterexastris said in Over-localization:
“Bipolar”? Really? Ugh.
Yep. Thank NISA for that one.
Original
Translation (from the official website)Obviously some of the original Engrish translations CH used are dumb, but "tsundere"-->"bipolar" was horribly wrong.
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@jon-mitchell said in Over-localization:
I think that English should just adopt the word.
I almost want to get a Toyota Tundra pickup so I can change the logo to Tsundere... "I just happened to be hauling these building materials by here. It's not like I did it FOR YOU!"
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@jon-mitchell said in Over-localization:
@unsynchedcheese said in Over-localization:
think there's been a good English translation for "tsundere"
I think that English should just adopt the word.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tsundere already lists tsundere as loanword so we're part way there. I agree that there is no adequate equivalen word in English that has a substantially similar meaning - you basically have to provide a definition of the word to properly convey it (e.g. saying someone "runs hot and cold" or "they act haughty but they also have a bashful side")
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@Microdynames said in Min-Maxing My TRPG Build Vol. 4 Canto II Discussion!:
Especially if they're explicitly avoiding any loan words as that post says, they would be intentionally trying to bring up an image of a Japanese world view and not a German/European one.
Balancing the extent to which having a Japanese cultural filter over things is just a natural consequence of a Japanese writer writing from their own perspective in a way that a Japanese audience would grasp and therefore may be best massaged into a form that produces an equivalent response in an Anglo reader, versus attempting to explicitly add a Japanese flavour and therefore might be better preserved to some extent insofar as such a thing is possible, is certainly going to be a matter of opinion and balance.
I'm don't want to read a book that's been re-interpreted by the translator to convey a different meaning than the author was originally trying to convey. The message to the Anglo audience should be identical (as close as reasonably possible) to the message being conveyed to the Japanese audience. Not re-adapted to the Anglo audience. The translator themselves should be taken out of the equation as much as possible. I read Japanese light novel explicitly because I like the Japanese culture feel and take on the world. That's much more important than the actual story itself.
It's why I don't at all read the Chinese or Korean equivalent of light/web novels for example.
More so the above re-adaptation is very hard to do consistently and it ends up in this novel where you constantly are floating between the Japanese interpretation (the one easiest to translate) and a rewriting toward an Anglo interpretation. So more than anything it's simply inconsistent.
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@mlindner said in Min-Maxing My TRPG Build Vol. 4 Canto II Discussion!:
the authors intended composite European-Japanese scene image. There's a lot of things that are very Japanese that you can read through the stuff that's put in by the translator to the original intended meaning by the author that the translator is erasing.
I disagree with your disagreement :)
In some novels the author intends for a culture to have been affected by multiple Japanese reincarnations, for example in Death March to the Parallel World. It's explicitly mentioned in text. Without an explicit mention of a blended culture in the text or in outside sources by the author such as afterwords and interviews, that isn't certain.
A writer might include aspects of Japanese culture either because they don't know better (not being an expert on the intended setting) or because they want something to be easily understood by Japanese readers. as @Microdynames said. In both cases it's reasonable for a translator to localize those parts that don't really fit into the intended setting.
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@mlindner said in Min-Maxing My TRPG Build Vol. 4 Canto II Discussion!:
I'm don't want to read a book that's been re-interpreted by the translator to convey a different meaning than the author was originally trying to convey. The message to the Anglo audience should be identical (as close as reasonably possible) to the message being conveyed to the Japanese audience.
Now we're dipping into linguistics and what it fundamentally means to convey the author's message. Extracting a certain meaning from a certain set of words is something that is so grounded in cultural context that even something that superficially means literally the same thing will produce a different outcome in the reader's mind. A translator could easily argue that conveying an (as as close as reasonably possible) identical message is precisely what said re-interpretation is necessary to achieve, depending on the precise audience. Else you get shit like Khrushchev's infamous "we will bury you" speech that meant one thing to a Russian and something else entirely to an American despite using the same words, Greta Thunberg saying that world leaders needed to be "put against the wall", or a more recent example of Xi Jinping's speech using the "heads bashed bloody" stylistic turn of phrase that draws on classical cultural references and idioms to convey a meaning that is immediately obvious to the Chinese themselves but would be misinterpreted as more violent than it actually is by a foreigner who isn't a scholar of Chinese culture, which is why the official translation issued by Beijing just said "collide with a steel wall" whereas many news outlets translated it literally so they could have headlines about the PRC threatening bloodshed. If you are such a scholar, then that's great, but a translation that works for you won't work for 99 other people.
These are extreme examples, but when you get right down to the grey zone you'll find places where judgement calls have to be made on the extent of interpretation necessary more or less everywhere. It's easy to pick and choose an example here and there and say "well X should be Y but Z can stay as Z" but ultimately there isn't really going to be a single right answer to every one and you can ask five different translators to translate the same passage and get five different outcomes, especially if outside of their own five different interpretations of the author's intent, they have five different ideas about who the target reader might be and what their level of understanding of Japanese culture is. As involved in Bookworm's discussions as you are, you're probably familiar by now with how even a single translator can make multiple choices at different times within the same work that appear to conflict or contradict each others' rhymes and reasons, and that's just for something as simple as terminology and names. In the kindest way possible, if "the Japanese cultural feel and take on the world" is "much more important than the actual story itself" to you, short of having a personal interpreter with you tweaking things to your own personal precise level of understanding of Japanese culture, you will have a much, much better experience learning and reading in the original Japanese rather than chasing this unreachable ideal of a "as close as possible translation", because how "close" it is possible to get isn't universal to every text and person or even to every weeaboo.
That being said, to bring things back to the main topic, I'm still super super curious to know more examples of overzealous cultural reinterpretation in Min-Maxing TRPG that have really bugged you where the underlying Japanese intent and consequent obfuscation were on full display. I do think personally that it can actually be TOO distracting sometimes if a localisation choice stands out as being far too obviously, flagrantly foreign when the reader knows they're reading a work of translation by a Japanese author, which breaks the immersion and suspension of disbelief and therefore doesn't fulfil the intention. Which is why the Weathering With You subtitles insisting that Japanese use fahrenheit in their weather forecasts and pay each other in American dollars were so distracting, despite it being to allow Americans to quickly understand the implications, with the boneheaded decision to extend this courtesy to non-Americans who don't use those units.
In both cases it's reasonable for a translator to localize those parts that don't really fit into the intended setting.
A counterpoint to that might be that it should be left to the reader to decide what is and isn't ill-fitting. But rarely is everything so simple, because two will disagree on the precise nature and extent of the clash and what the author's real intent was. An ambiguity might be possible to preserve in an ideal scenario, thus kicking the judgement down to the reader, but especially between a pair of unrelated languages that isn't always feasible.
edit: I am impressed that this topic didn't need to get used for three (3) years kek
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@mlindner said in Over-localization:
I'm don't want to read a book that's been re-interpreted by the translator to convey a different meaning than the author was originally trying to convey. The message to the Anglo audience should be identical (as close as reasonably possible) to the message being conveyed to the Japanese audience.
What would you rather a translator do when they can accurately convey either the message (what is literally being said) or the meaning (how it is intended to be interpreted) but not both?
Stay shiny, y'all.
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@Shiny said in Over-localization:
@mlindner said in Over-localization:
I'm don't want to read a book that's been re-interpreted by the translator to convey a different meaning than the author was originally trying to convey. The message to the Anglo audience should be identical (as close as reasonably possible) to the message being conveyed to the Japanese audience.
What would you rather a translator do when they can accurately convey either the message (what is literally being said) or the meaning (how it is intended to be interpreted) but not both?
Which is probably most of the time...
