May we get light novel translations with honorifics

stardf29

@shiny said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I can think of some potential issues with this:

It means the epubs would not work by default.

It would introduce a complexity for the pre-pubs.

If JNC did a print version they couldn't print both and it could be jarring for people to go between the two for a single series (similar for those moving from the Kindle version to the epub version).

If people are following existing series that didn't have honorifics then it can be jarring to switch between that and a series which uses honorifics.

The amount of additional work would be unlikely to result in significant increased sales.

So a lot of effort for something which would arguably create more problems than it solved.

One other issue is that the idea of "toggle-able alternate translations" is a slippery slope which allows for people to request all sorts of things to also be available as "alternate" text, like sibling addresses ("onii-chan" and the like), speech tics ("-desu"), or even stuff like the bear puns in Infinite Dendrogram to replace the "-kuma"s. It's the kind of thing that can easily get out of hand, for something that ultimately won't really affect sales much.

TAAPAye

@shiny

I don't think this has to be true. The default format could just pick what we currently use. Like have the default option be the one that removes honorifics so that the raw files looks the same as it is and works by default. Having the combined format just makes it easy to switch between but doesn't have to be presented to the user by default
Would you elaborate on the complexity for pre-pubs vs finished volumes. I had thought they would be the same problem?
I completely agree. I had hoped people who would take advantage of this would know and be ok with this not being the default/print release. Would think people who would appreciate this would prefer this over nothing
I agree. But I feel like that is similar to coming off the anime (at least the sub) and seeing character names changes. I'm new here, but the first series I had checked out, Crest of the Starts, had the main character's named changed from Jinto to Jint.
I would be inclined to agree that I wouldn't really help sales, but at least for me it would remove a main pro of fan translations
Are you referring to the extra effort required of the translators or the extra UI work to integrate the feature? Or just the act of switching between them?

Thanks for the links.

TheGrimLich

@taapaye I think what @Shiny means by "the epubs wouldn't work by default" is that most default epub readers wouldn't know how to work with those; I haven't heard of an epub with alternate text before, and I'm fairly certain it wouldn't be considered a standard feature, but rather something one would have to script in...

And I, for one, am about as good at scripting as I am at breathing saltwater.

EDIT: Also, regarding point 4, romanization is never exact. Sometimes anime, manga, and light novel subtitles/dubs romanize names differently because there are multiple equally-valid romanizations.

Jon Mitchell

as a feature, it's intriguing. I think that if a reader app supported different editorial choices it could add to the enjoyment of the story, or be distracting (so the default should be JNC Editor's choice)...but I wouldn't stop at honorifics. Some series lend themselves to annotations, footnotes etc. and in general there are elements of Japanese culture that in a translated work are often left unexplained in detail for the sake of the flow of the story, but, depending on how many previous LNs a reader has had experience with, might be interested in knowing more about without having to stop and do a google search.

for example:
Imagine a scene in a high school romcom, the MC and her boyfriend meet at a Tanabata festival for a date. He compliments her yukata, she thanks him and they agree to stroll before the fireworks start. They enjoy some local specialties; takoyaki, yakitori, grilled corn and for a treat some cotton candy. They were going to play more of the typical festival games but the boy says he doesn't know what he'd do with the fish. (they both giggle about his joke) ...
They tied their wishes to the tree just as the first skyrockets burst. The fireworks illuminate the writing that they had each hastily scrawled on the strips of paper:
"I want to stay with him forever"
"I wish to stay with her forever"
As the last of the fiery blossoms in the sky start to fade, he tentatively reaches for her hand...

there are half a dozen +/- cultural references in that tableau I just made up.
If I went and tried to translate everything, it might lose some of its 'flavor', "fried octopus balls" just doesn't sound appealing, and if I tried to add context to define everything, it would be twice as long. Readers familiar with the genre, or who've watched anime would 'get' the references and why they are important. Someone new to the genre wouldn't - now if I had a way to turn on/off annotations or footnotes, the new reader would know that Tanabata (or the Star Festival) is a festival in July and it's details/significance, how it ties into the writing of wishes, hanging wishes on a bamboo sapling etc. Something about Yukata, what Takoyaki and Yakitori are, that a stereotypical festival game is catching goldfish with a delicate paper 'net' - hence the joke, how young folks being in love at a festival that celebrates lovers can be sweet etc...

oh and yea then you could toggle honorifics on/off too

edit to add: this would only work in epub/finals - couldn't do it in print, and pre-pubs are not accessible in a reader app, I know that Apple's e-reader app has a 'turn annotations on/off" feature - I imagine other reader apps do too.

TAAPAye

@jon-mitchell
For a series on JNC, I would bring up Crest of the Stars. While the most off putting thing was the change of character names, Jinto -> Jint, think the lack of honorifics does detract enough by itself. There's the common trope of the main character being very casual with royalty and think it is easier to forget without honorifics ever being present.

For other series I've tried on here, I haven't seen the media in other forms so don't have a point of comparison

TheGrimLich

@taapaye "Jint" as a romanization for "Jinto" is perfectly acceptable. A lot of the time, when a word with an ending /t/ is brought into Japanese, it's transliterated as "to" (e.g. "Arbeit" --> "arubaito"). Removing an "o" from a final "to" isn't all that odd in terms of "how do we transliterate this".

Additionally, while I'm not 100% certain on this, I'm at least fairly confident that JNC translators get the original author's approval for any romanizations of names. I know that is for certain the case with Bookworm, with Quof sending a list with his romanization choices for all the new names in every book for Kazuki-sensei to look over and approve. I wouldn't be surprised if the other translators also did this.

TAAPAye

@thegrimlich
I'm not trying to imply that it is wrong but just that it is different than the Funimation subs.

Terrence

This never really bothers me one way or the other (as long as it's not a video game / anime with an English voice actor trying to use honorifics, which I find cringe; rather they don't use them there).

When I see big bro, I replace it with Oniichan or aniki in my mind (I don't think aniki stays in most translations?); when I see Mr Takeru I replace it with Takeru sensei in my mind (or vice versa). Sometimes you do come upon a story point where there's an honorific pun that they keep in, then go back to ignoring the honorifics after it, and that does feel off. Otherwise, don't notice it too much.

TAAPAye

@thegrimlich
I see the confusion. I'm not too aware all variation of epub files if any had such convenient features built into the spec. If they did great, but I was more suggesting that JNC just internally store the novel in the combined format and present 2 users 1 of the 2 "final" forms. Like having an option to download the "Westernized" version or the "non-Westernized" (for lack of better terms). Wouldn't require any end-user scripting.

I do agree with @Jon-Mitchell that this could easily extend beyond just honorifics. The other examples given like translations of local customs would be easier for programs to infer and probably wouldn't require explicit, repetitive human effort once the initial mappings were established

stardf29

@taapaye There are so many instances of anime adaptation subs using different spellings than the official light novel translations that it's honestly something you'll just have to get used to. And it's not like the anime subbers will go out of their way to prioritize consistency with the light novels, either; Crunchyroll's subs for Ascendance of a Bookworm uses "Main" instead of "Myne" and "High Priest" and "Head Priest" instead of "High Bishop" and "High Priest", and that anime came out after the light novel translations started.

And a number of anime subs also remove honorifics. All things considered, if the reasoning behind this is to "be like the anime subs", that's not really a good reason.

Beyond that, the question of whether honorifics are really necessary to understand concepts like formality in speech, or if they're just a crutch for those who are too used to Japanese speak... well, that's a subject for another thread. The real question is whether logistically, trying to account for individual preferences in translations as an active feature is feasible or not, and honestly, I don't think it is, for the reasons mentioned before.

Jon Mitchell

@terrence said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

This never really bothers me one way or the other (as long as it's not a video game / anime with an English voice actor trying to use honorifics, which I find cringe; rather they don't use them there).

When I see big bro, I replace it with Oniichan or aniki in my mind (I don't think aniki stays in most translations?); when I see Mr Takeru I replace it with Takeru sensei in my mind (or vice versa). Sometimes you do come upon a story point where there's an honorific pun that they keep in, then go back to ignoring the honorifics after it, and that does feel off. Otherwise, don't notice it too much.

I quite agree, its habituation- I find myself mentally inserting honorifics if they were removed (and it is relevant). For the same reason I prefer 'subs' to 'dubs' when watching anime - I'll hear the honorifics even if the subtitle lacks it.
BTW A high school tough guy would never call his peer/leader "oniichan" but would call him "aniki". I can imagine my kid calling his buddy "bro" or "bro-seph" in the same way

I digress - and want to once again give kudos to the translators and editors at JNC - as anyone who subjected themselves to MTL knows - translation/interpretation of a work from Japanese to English is as much an art as it is a 'science'. And the folks at JNC are gifted in this regard. Just about everything I've read I've found enjoyable (and if I eventually dropped a series it was because of the story, not the translation) The fact that so many JNC members enjoy such a wide variety of translated works and discuss story and nuance more than criticizing translation choices is a testament to the skill of the JNC staff

Kevin S

@taapaye said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I propose asking the translators to just encode both options in the source.

One thing I don't think anyone has brought up yet is that I just don't think this would be nearly as simple an undertaking as it initially sounds. I'm thinking of the dozens of times that names appear in any given part; making sure every one of them is accounted for and that the correct honorific is used (remember that each character won't necessarily be addressed with the same honorific all the time); the additional time and complexity not just for the translator, but for the editors and QA staff making sure everything is correct and accounted for... And then there's the question others have raised of where it stops. -san and -chan might seem simple enough, but when characters refer to "Consort Gyokuyou" in The Apothecary Diaries, would that have to be encoded so it could switch to "Gyokuyou-hi" on command? What about places where a character is being addressed directly, and "Taro-san" has been translated as "you"? (Because in Japanese, it's quite common to use a person's name as a second-person form of address.) I guess I can only speak for myself, but I feel like the hit to my productivity would be unlikely to be worth the gains.

All that is to set aside my philosophical objection to the idea, which in my mind puts honorifics on a pedestal in a way that I'm not sure is conducive to good translation. (The OP says the translations are "very Western," but what they are is translated. Which brings us back to the question of whether it's really not possible to usefully and successfully represent the meaning of honorifics in a target language that doesn't represent those social dynamics in the same way. Which is the question I was allegedly going to leave alone. And a fine job I've done of it, too.)

Travis Butler

@jon-mitchell said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@taapaye
I must admit, I don't notice when honorifics are used well. (kind of like a good haircut doesn't look like you just got a haircut) Can you indicate which titles you find the lack of honorifics have a bad effect on the work?

I don't really notice when they're used well; what I notice is when they're replaced badly.

Constructions like 'Young Miss Aisha' are usually disruptive and interrupt the reading flow, just to name one example.

Travis Butler

@bartzbb said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I don't mind if the honorifics are removed as long as the setting is not based on Japanese culture.

If the setting is in a medieval fantasy then it's fine if they are removed but if in that medieval setting there is a country or culture that is based from Japan then I expect that the people there would use honorifics and it would only be exclusive to that place.

But if the story uses a Japanese setting I would prefer to keep the honorifics as is. Even if the setting also has some sci-fi and supernatural elements.

To me, it's all about how smoothly it reads; I don't really care about Japan vs non-Japan setting. If an honorific can be replaced smoothly, I don't mind, no matter where it's set; if it's expressing a distinction that requires awkward phrasing to reproduce, then I don't like it being translated.

I expect the latter case would be more common in Japanese settings, but some of the worst translation hiccups I've encountered have been in fantasy settings.

Rahul Balaggan

I am going to reiterate my point from earlier.

As this is a topic for a feature suggestion any further comments in this topic should be in regards to the feature request itself.

Any further comments related directly to the use of honorifics will be moved.

Thank you for your cooperation.

TAAPAye

@kevin-s
Thank you for your perspective. I have no notion to the difficulty of translating so it is good to know that always asking both forms to be encoded may be too much.

I am encouraged to hear that the general idea itself didn't get strong objection.

So let me propose another way of doing it that hopefully would be less of a burden. Let me ignore your case of switching from a proper name to "you" for a second. Assuming there is a many-to-one mapping from the English version to the Japanese honorific, we may be able to completely automate the process. Like find "special" words like Mrs./Mr. or Teacher/Master/Dr. followed by some set of proper nouns and translate them to some set of proper nouns + "-san" or "-sensei" respectively. This way there's no extra burden on the translators and it could extend to arbitrary things. A similar process could be use to untranslate arbitrary common terms and also handles potential character renaming. So all the effort would be in building that mapping which probably already exists somewhere.

It would be great if it was this simple, but I believe the assumption that the Japanese honorific can always be deduced isn't always true. I believe sometimes they are just dropped on the floor. And then there's the pronoun issue I've been ignoring. For those cases we could

Ignore them (both or just the when the pronoun changes)
Ask just these cases to be marked/encoded. I hope these wouldn't be the majority so it would be less of a burden.
~~Do some fancy NLP on the translated and untranslated versions and produce a translated version~~. It is probably possible, but seems a bit overkill

Hoping that even with option 1, we'd be able to cover the majority of cases.

OtonoKakuei

Having a format where translators can input more than one translation versions for certain words or even sentences, before being converted to epub is a fantastic idea! Having more options is always good. I don't think it would require that much effort either to implement. LaTeX can do this for example.

Some positives that I could think of:

Derive statistics to show which version is more popular to the reader base. Which should be an interesting info for JNC (or any other publishers) to know.
No more honorific/no-honorific "debates".
It could be applied not just to honorifics, but other stuff as well, such as:
- Versions with translator notes and version without for stuff like Tanabata, etc (as mentioned before by Jon Mitchell)
- R-18 and non-R-18 or PC/non-PC versions (say goodbye to controversies where translators censor stuff off their own judgment. Now we can decide for ourselves which version we want to consume)

It might also become an industry standard, just like how dual audio is now becoming the norm compared to some years ago.

stardf29

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

It might also become an industry standard, just like how dual audio is now becoming the norm compared to some years ago.

On the one hand, what's being asked here is very different from "dual audio", which involves two very different productions, the Japanese dub and the English dub. Here we're dealing with two different translation philosophies, but they're both on the English production side. Making that an "industry standard" is probably not a good idea, especially with all the extra work it puts on the translators.

On the other hand, it might very well be possible to simply provide the original Japanese text to anyone who bought the English e-books. Sure, you'd need to learn some basic Japanese to recognize common honorifics and addresses and whatnot, but honestly, anyone who cares that much about honorifics and being closer to the Japanese text should be learning some Japanese anyway... It'd also help with the whole translation censorship problem, since it'd be easier to hold the translators accountable for major changes.

That said, I'm sure there are logistical issues to this idea as well, both in terms of licensing (probably the big potential issue) and implementation (not tech-savvy enough to know how easy/hard it is to set up a toggle between two languages in e-books). Bookwalker might actually be the easiest place to implement this, since one account there can buy both the original Japanese LNs and their English releases, so if the two were linked somehow, you could make it so buying one would allow the other to be available for free or a reduced price. Again, though, the licensing negotiations for this would probably be a headache, so I'd just file this under "a crazy idea that shouldn't be seriously pursued unless it's actually less crazy than I thought".

Jon Mitchell

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

R-18 and non-R-18 or PC/non-PC versions (say goodbye to controversies where translators censor stuff off their own judgment. Now we can decide for ourselves which version we want to consume)

I don't think that would be a good idea:

may be a violation of copyright / license agreement- that is editing/censoring a work, not merely translating it
it'll open a can of worms that JNC likely would prefer closed- see all the flak other publishers got for editorial decisions that were seen as censorship
I have a (personal) moral objection to the 'sanitization' of art - who decides 'what' is objectionable

now if an original publisher/author wants to edit a work for a different audience, they OWN it, and can do what they want and JNC can translate that edition

below is my opinion, not a response to @OtonoKakuei

to bring this back to the original topic of discussion- everything that technically can be done, should not necessarily be done. I am all in favor of (unobtrusively) adding: annotations, footnotes, end notes, glossaries, indices, supplementary materials, translator notes, commissioned art, audio tracks, media tie-ins, what have you. I believe API's for various epub readers support 'hiding' or 'revealing' this content- I am not in favor of changing the original content to meet political sensibilities. And to bring this more laser focused to the topic at hand. I don't see the value in having an entire work translated multiple times to suit different styles (toggling style "a" w/ honorifics and style "b" without) I trust the translators/editorial staff at JNC to make good artistic decisions when interpreting a work. Honorifics and foreign language words add 'seasoning' to a story, too much/too little seasoning can ruin a dish. A professional chef knows how much to use. I want to order a meal and have it be delicious. JNC is like a quality restaurant. I can order my steak cooked to the level of doneness I prefer, and I can take suggestions for what wine pairs well...I'm not going to tell the chef how to do the cooking. Toggling 'style' would be more liking going to Subway than dining at a restaurant, I mean it's still technically food but not particularly good. and combinations of ingredients might not go together well- but I made the decision to put olives on tuna salad. The idea is that I shouldn't 'choose', a competent professional interpreter makes the artistic choices, I get to enjoy them - like a fine meal prepared by a competent, professional chef. (annotations would be wine pairing, suggested by a sommelier in my analogy)

Kevin S

@taapaye said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

So let me propose another way of doing it that hopefully would be less of a burden. Let me ignore your case of switching from a proper name to "you" for a second. Assuming there is a many-to-one mapping from the English version to the Japanese honorific, we may be able to completely automate the process. Like find "special" words like Mrs./Mr. or Teacher/Master/Dr. followed by some set of proper nouns and translate them to some set of proper nouns + "-san" or "-sensei" respectively.

It would be great if it was this simple, but I believe the assumption that the Japanese honorific can always be deduced isn't always true. I believe sometimes they are just dropped on the floor. And then there's the pronoun issue I've been ignoring. For those cases we could

Ignore them (both or just the when the pronoun changes)

Ask just these cases to be marked/encoded. I hope these wouldn't be the majority so it would be less of a burden.

~~Do some fancy NLP on the translated and untranslated versions and produce a translated version~~. It is probably possible, but seems a bit overkill

I'm going to try to talk about this chiefly in technical terms, but it's tricky, because as @stardf29 says, the real hurdle with this idea is a philosophical one. To prepare a translation that would be amenable to either the specific ideas here or the broader one we're discussing would be already to make some particular choices about how the localization is going to be handled, choices that are more far-reaching than you might first think.

Let's take a simple example. Your initial paragraph above suggests simply automatically replacing "Mr. Tanaka" with "Tanaka-san." The main problem is that in many (not to say all) cases, translating -san as Mr. or Mrs. is not a good idea, and a thoughtful translator won't do it. So to create a translation that did use "Mr. Tanaka," even where doing so was poor English practice, purely to accommodate this system of automated replacement, is already to begin by producing a suboptimal experience in at least one of the forms.

Even if we turn to situations where such a system might be more applicable, there are problems. To go back to my example of "Consort Gyokuyou"/"Gyokuyou-hi" from The Apothecary Diaries (which I'm highlighting because I work on it, so I have more insight into the translation process than I would on another series), she's referred to this way not just by other characters, but consistently throughout the narration. While I generally retain her title in dialogue (because of course it's important that other characters regard and refer to her that way), once it's appeared in a given segment or passage, I'll often gloss over the title in narration. To include it every single time would be unbearably tedious and redundant in English; we simply don't refer to characters in narration that way. But I would have to in order to make the proposed system work.

By the way, none of that is to mention cases where the most natural translation for "family name + honorific" might actually be a character's given name, because in English we simply tend to favor given names in a lot of ordinary, casual situations.

As for cases where a name + honorific has been translated as a second person pronoun, these would almost certainly have to be ignored, because otherwise they would need to be completely rewritten. Consider a sentence like:

田中さんはどう思いますか。
Tanaka-san wa dou omoimasu ka.

The most natural translation would probably be either "What do you think, Tanaka-san?" (if the conversation is turning to him for the first time) or simply "What do you think?" (if the speaker has already been talking to Tanaka-san). The second case in particular bothers me. If this was to be re-coded to "include the honorific," what would it look like? Does it become "what do you think, Tanaka-san," even though this might not be entirely natural within the flow of the conversation? Or is it "What does Tanaka-san think?", even though that isn't the way we address people in the second person in English?

Again, while I recognize that there are real questions about fidelity surrounding the handling of honorifics (a subject which, somewhat indirectly, I've addressed elsewhere), I think a system like this one plays to a preoccupation with this one aspect of the source language, in a way that won't be healthy for the resulting translations and still wouldn't be easy to implement.