Over-localization
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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...
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@Shiny - I think advocates of more raw translations would say that this is a false dichotomy. The "both" option is available with "TL notes," where the literal message is translated and the meaning is explained.
I'm not a fan of TL notes in light reading, personally, but I do acknowledge their value for people trying to learn Japanese or learn about Japanese culture. If that desire for learning is why someone picks up translated light novels in the first place, then I think TL notes would be their preferred world.
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@Shiny I personally think the meaning should be the most important thing pursued in translating a work to an intended audience, now if there is multiple probable meanings and the original author (or team) is not available to express the intent than falling back on what is verbatim seems fine. Now I might be in the minority but I started reading here not because of any disire to immerse myself in Japanese culture but for my love of books, story’s and to read something a bit different.
Now with that last statement you might say than why change the word why not translate it verbatim if you are looking for something different then western novels.
Well I can say that by keeping it verbatim in English it has corrupted the work itself and lost its intent, if the story translated verbatim when read in English changes the very meaning or intent behind them without the translation siting the reader down to explain why, than I believe that is a failure of the translation. If the verbatim text changes meaning between languages than that something different from a different culture has already in my belief been lost and is a failure on the translators part to both the story and the foreign audience.
Now of course this can be all very relative and a tightrope to walk, but that’s just my Toonie of an opinion.
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One thing to make clear is I'm fine and even happy when the isekai'd Japanese character's own POV is translated more literally. A Japanese MC will think in yen, love sushi, rice, miso, etc.
It's the other world culture and native POVs where that makes less sense to me. A Western medieval-ish country is not going to be drinking sake out of wine bowls, they're more likely to drink wine from a wine glass. The natives will think in gold pieces not yen. They're also less likely to include cultural traditions like kneeling to be corrected, writing 30 reports as punishment, or calling upperclassmen sempai.
When an author includes those in a LN and they are translated literally I have to remind myself that the author is Japanese and is perhaps unwittingly making the other world more Japanese out of ignorance or intentionally to make it easier for their audience to understand.
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I see my post got moved to this moderator's "dustbin collection" point. Unfortunate.
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I'm not trying to stir up a hornets' nest but:
There is no such thing as "direct translation" or "literal translation" from Japanese to English. The structure of the language is different. (and this is why machine translations are, more often than not, terrible to the point of being unreadable). Just as one cannot translate from apple to orange.Translators and editors are forced to Interpret works. Cultural items that may be left unsaid but are important for understanding the intent of the author need to be inserted, Cultural references that are casual mentions (to the original Japanese audience) maybe need contextual explanations/expansion so that readers 'get it'. Also, even in works that don't have a setting in Japan, linguistic cues exist that are shortcuts to comprehension (like honorifics) that either must be carried over, or ignored, or substituted with something else that conveys the authors intent- which is a judgement call. there isn't a 'one size fits all' solution
I read banned books
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@Sam-Pinansky As long as there is a foot note explaining what it means culturally.
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@Jon-Mitchell I got that when I tried to read a machine translated version of Sorcerer King of Destruction. It made no sense!
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@Folker46 said in Over-localization:
@Sam-Pinansky As long as there is a foot note explaining what it means culturally.
I'm all for footnotes or annotations, but I also realize that this is extra work. If the API allows it; I'd pay more coins (say 799 vs 699) for some works if they had annotations/footnotes (as long as they can be turned off) or a glossary
I read banned books
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@Jon-Mitchell Some manga's do that, the translator will leave a note in the spaces between panels, I learned a lot from those.
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Isn't there at least one JNC title with TL notes at the end of the parts, or am I thinking of other publishers?
I'm against having the notes interrupt the main text unless that can be turned off. It throws me out of the story.
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@HarmlessDave Some series have translation notes, but that's premium content.
Or maybe you're thinking of D-Genesis that explains some citations/annotations at the end of some chapters/sections? But I believe those are included in the LN itself rather than being additions by the translator.
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When I read "Saga of Tanya the Evil" on Kindle, it has footnotes that open a pop-up window when I tap the link in the text, and then I can just close the window when I'm done.
I haven't seen any other LNs with this feature though, I think it might be nice if JNC could do that with their e-books.
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@Terabyte said in Over-localization:
@HarmlessDave Some series have translation notes, but that's premium content.
Or maybe you're thinking of D-Genesis that explains some citations/annotations at the end of some chapters/sections? But I believe those are included in the LN itself rather than being additions by the translator.
Yep, D-Genesis. I hadn't realized those annotations were coming from the original version.
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@BlueDragoon said in Over-localization:
I haven't seen any other LNs with this feature though, I think it might be nice if JNC could do that with their e-books.
D-Genesis also does this with its footnotes. JNC just typically don't make footnotes
