Do you have a defense for the practice other than "thats how its always been done"?
Posted under General
Fencedude said:
Do you have a defense for the practice other than "thats how its always been done"?
Soljashy said:
Yes, translators should be invisible. For a good translation, it should not be apparent from the resulting text that it was even translated, which is why I lean towards Western customs when translating into English.
Next time read my posts before you reply to them.
Soljashy said: Your argument is starting to sound like zpozi's when he claimed that full stops should be left out in translations because they weren't present in the original.
This is where people on your side misinterpret (often intentionally) the argument. There is a major difference between the fundamentals of grammar and spelling and the handling of proper names and cultural differences like honorifics, or holiday names, or historical references, or other things of that sort. It's not like I'm saying that you should remove all the spaces between words. Well, I sure hope you don't think that I'm saying that, at least.
Yes, translators should be invisible. For a good translation, it should not be apparent from the resulting text that it was even translated, which is why I lean towards Western customs when translating into English.
It's information loss at worst, information replacement at best. And neither are very good. Actually, replacement can be worse because it can give a false impression of what happened. When translators talk about localizing customs and such to be more familiar to the end user, they're assuming that true equivalents really exist. That's dangerous and often wrong.
(They're also assuming we *need* equivalents, which is honestly insulting to me)
If someone wants their entertainment to perfectly cater to what they're used to in every day life, if they want to avoid anything that is different, then they should really stick to material made with them in mind. I have no patience or respect for any viewer/reader who picks up a book created in x country in x language by an x person and aimed at x audience and then complains that it has some specifically 'x' things in it and they don't understand because it's different from 'y'.
As for text and audio matching... I honestly don't see how that is as an important factor when the two are in different languages to begin with.
This boggles my mind. If someone says "Kinomoto Sakura" and the subs read "Sakura Kinomoto", that's so distracting. It makes me break away from what is going on and focus on the subtitles themselves, on the actual act of localization itself. Not on subtitle as mere translation aid, but on subtitle as a separate thing itself, an entity getting between me and the show. That's never good.
Sorry about putting words in your mouth, jxh, I guess it was a reaction to your claim that I was trying to "leave my mark" on my translations (which I resent, by the way).
Your arguments are the same in that you are both claiming that leaving the text closer to the original in a way that does not affect content is somehow being more considerate of the creator.
Mind you, I've never complained about leaving the names in their original order. I just don't see the big deal about switching them around.
About the subtitles being distracting, I'm sorry but I just can't relate. Maybe it's because it's been a while since I've paid any attention to subtitles. It boggles my mind just as much that you should care about such a detail as it boggles yours that I don't.
Fencedude said:
I did read it. And I disagree.
Then say that and don't ask me for things I've already told you.
Fencedude said:
I'm not interested in your interpretation of what a western equivalent of some Japanese thing is, I'm interested in WHAT THEY ARE SAYING.
And they are SAYING someone's name. Did I miss something?
Soljashy said:
Then say that and don't ask me for things I've already told you.And they are SAYING someone's name. Did I miss something?
Yes, the fact that you feel we're too stupid to understand that Japanese, being a different language, does names differently.
You wouldn't reverse a Chinese or Korean name, would you? So why do you reverse Japanese names?
Its silly.
Soljashy said: Sorry about putting words in your mouth, jxh, I guess it was a reaction to your claim that I was trying to "leave my mark" on my translations (which I resent, by the way).
But "leaving a mark" is what is happening, even if I'm sure it has nothing to do with staking a "Soljashy was here!" claim over the work.
Your arguments are the same in that you are both claiming that leaving the text closer to the original in a way that does not affect content is somehow being more considerate of the creator.
Again, not of the creator. Of the work. I firmly believe that a work, once created, becomes a separate entity from its creator. Once something exists, it gains a degree of autonomy. To some degree, it escapes the one who made it. And as much as I respect, even love, the creators, my allegiance lies above all with the work itself.
Now, a "work" it not something that can feel resentment or offense, which is why those concepts don't apply. I don't know this zpozi person, so maybe it's different for him, but I can only speak for myself.
The only resentment and offense involved is that which I feel when a translator believes things need to be altered for me. No thanks. Not in my name, please.
Soljashy said:
This is where Fencedude spectacularly and intentionally misunderstands my case, and then repeats his earlier argument to which I have already responded. Can you see how you're just adding noise here?
Your point is that you don't see a problem with reversing names.
My point is that there is no reason to do so, and you wouldn't do so with any language other than Japanese.
jxh2154 said:
But "leaving a mark" is what is happening, even if I'm sure it has nothing to do with staking a "Soljashy was here!" claim over the work.
Thank you for acknowledging that.
jxh2154 said:
Again, not of the creator. Of the work. I firmly believe that a work, once created, becomes a separate entity from its creator. Once something exists, it gains a degree of autonomy. To some degree, it escapes the one who made it. And as much as I respect, even love, the creators, my allegiance lies above all with the work itself.
All right, you've sufficiently distanced yourself from the other fellow's argument. I retract my comparison.
jxh2154 said:
The only resentment and offense involved is that which I feel when a translator believes things need to be altered for me. No thanks. Not in my name, please.
I see. My reason for doing so is not so much that I feel it needs to be altered for a certain demographic for their lack of understanding the differences in culture or language, but rather that I feel I should make the translation process itself as transparent as possible to the final reader, as that is what I believe translation entails.
As for Fencedude, I can only shake my head at your inability to comperehend my argument even after I quoted it for you the first time you missed it.
Soljashy said:
As for Fencedude, I can only shake my head at your inability to comperehend my argument even after I quoted it for you the first time you missed it.
"Leaning towards western customs" makes the translation LESS transparent, not more.
I do understand your argument, I just didn't realize I had to explicitly spell this out, since jxh has done a fine job of it as well.
And you still haven't answered my question about why Japanese gets flipped, but Chinese and Korean doesn't.
I'm pretty sure we had this discussion not too long ago in the "howto:translate" thread, but I feel compelled to throw in my two cents again.
jxh2154 said:
When translators talk about localizing customs and such to be more familiar to the end user, they're assuming that true equivalents really exist.
Not really. The assumption that's at work here is that something's going to be lost regardless: either you leave the source language concept in place and risk confusing and distracting your audience, or you replace it with a target language concept and risk significantly altering the original work.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that leaving names in their original order has no downsides, but it does: there really are people out there, quite a few of them, who don't know that Japanese names are family name first, and will be confused to learn that fact. Not stupid people, either, just people who aren't familiar with the practice; even if you told them in a big note above the work what the deal was, they'd still get confused once or twice, because it's just not something they're familiar with, and from a translator's standpoint, getting confused over a minor issue like name ordering (and it is almost always a minor issue, barring the possibility of name ordering tying into the plot of a work in some bizarre fashion) is not optimal.
Admittedly, Danbooru's audience does not consist of those people, but general audiences do, which is why professional translators prefer to flip Japanese names. Ditto for honorifics, and "itadakimasu", and all sorts of other cultural artifacts that get ironed out all the time. I don't think this is particularly culturally insensitive, either; I would certainly expect a EN->JP translation to add honorifics, for instance.
I will admit that I hold something of a hard-line position on this issue, but I don't think I'm alone; I would advise you to look up Jay Rubin, the translator for Haruki Murakami's books. Rubin basically does mad science on the things (reordering chapters, deleting paragraphs) in his attempts to preserve the meaning of the work while transferring it into a new language, and Murakami himself (who Rubin works in close concert with) approves, which is a pretty big endorsement, in my opinion.
Fencedude said:
And you still haven't answered my question about why Japanese gets flipped, but Chinese and Korean doesn't.
If I had supreme control over the universe, all three would be flipped, and English names would be flipped when going into those languages. In English, given names come first; in East Asian languages, family names come first.
Unfortunately, due to the lack of consensus on the matter, you pretty much have to stick a big note at the top of your translation saying which way you're doing things, regardless of which way you choose. By that point, you've already paid the price of distracting the reader, so you may as well stick with the source language ordering.
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Wow big fight here. The only time I would care about name switching is when a surname alone gets switched for a given name alone because that completely screws with the familiarity / formality of the phrase, which is very important in Japanese works.
That said, I agree with Glasnost and others that you can decide to either cater to people who have some familiarity with Asian conventions (They know surname comes first), and those ignorant of them (say the general populace that reads news articles).
For fans of anime & manga, and hence Danbooru's viewership, I think we are right to maintain the original ordering. If you are an anime / manga fan, you ought to be familiar with Japanese customs or you are missing out on things anyway. If you aren't familiar, then you deserve to be confused for a while until you are.
I don't think unless you are changing the outright *meaning* (like I said above with the surname / given name thing) that switching the order does any harm or offense to either the original creator or the work. I will hand it to
jxh2154, though, that reversal in subtitles does lead to a bit of cognitive dissonance.
tldr; Switching the name order isn't particularly harmful provided the meaning is preserved, and whether you do or not should depend on the target audience. Anime/manga audiences are better served by not switching them.
Double posting because I just thought of a thought experiment that exemplifies what I'm trying to say so well it deserves its own post. (Edit: Well, it was a double post when I started writing it, at least.)
Imagine you're translating a novel from Japanese to English and you run across the sentence "靴をはずして家に上がった。" (Which is probably not very good Japanese; this is off the top of my head and I'm not a native speaker by any stretch of the imagination.) Translated, this would be "He took off his shoes and entered the house."
Now, you and I know why he took off his shoes: Japanese culture dictates that one take off their shoes while inside someone's home. But seeing this line unmotivated would confuse just about every non-Japanese person who read it. And here's the important bit: even people who know that factoid about Japanese culture would still go "Huh?" for a moment before they realized what was going on, and when they figured it out, they would say to themselves, "Oh, yeah, I'm reading a translation." When somebody reading your translation remembers that it's a translation, you've lost, as surely as an novelist loses when suspension of disbelief is broken in the middle of his novel.
Now, we could patch things up by sticking a footnote at the bottom of the page to ease the reader's mind slightly, or we could go a step further and put a description of Japanese culture right smack after the table of contents, reminding people to expect things like people taking their shoes off before they enter a home. But these are stopgaps which still necessitate reminding the reader that this work used to be in another language.
Would it really be that awful if we replaced "He took off his shoes and entered the house" with "He wiped his feet on the mat and entered the house" (or perhaps just "He entered the house")? It's certainly an alteration of the work, yes, but assuming his lack of shoes doesn't turn out to be a plot point, would we really be harming the work? Reverence for the work you're translating is a good thing, but in sticking with "took off his shoes", you're revering the work's text at the expense of its spirit. (The finger pointing at the moon rather than the moon, for all you Zen Buddhists out there.)
And here's where I go even farther than I did in my previous post: this principle does apply to Danbooru's audience, as well. Let's take an example that was thrown around a lot in the "howto:translate" thread: honorific switching. Imagine a single Danbooru post, a comic in which a switch from "Keine-sensei" to "Keine" takes place. Under some circumstances, even in the context of Danbooru, I might translate these two phrases as "Teacher" and "Keine".
Not because Danbooru's audience doesn't know what it means to drop "-sensei"; I know they do. But even if they know what it means, there's the possibility that they won't notice it immediately (or at all), simply because it's not a part of their culture. Even the most hardcore anime fan doesn't hear honorifics being thrown around every hour of the day; I myself have, on occasion, read over honorific switches without noticing them while translating, which tells me that this is a potential problem. In contrast, I don't think any Japanese reader would overlook such a transition. By translating into "Teacher" and "Keine", you give the English reader the same privilege, at very little cost to the integrity of the work. (It goes without saying that if there were extenuating circumstances that meant that it would affect the integrity of the work, I wouldn't make the change.)
This same principle, that even Danbooru users need some localization, is what leads me to render "-sama" as "Lord" or "Lady" whenever feasible. Due to "-sama"'s prevalence in anime, the standard weeaboo may not realize that "-sama" is quite rare in Japanese speech. (To the best of my knowledge, the main places it shows up is politeness expressions, such as "otsukaresama", and for addressees of letters.) By translating it as "Lord", you drive home a point that Japanese readers don't need to be reminded of: that this is an almost jarringly respectful form of address that oftentimes doesn't seem to fit the characters that are saying it.
tl;dr The goal of translation isn't to produce a document that looks like it's been translated, it's to produce a target language version of a source language work. Major textual changes shouldn't be undertaken lightly, but neither should they be disallowed completely.
Edit: Just noticed that I cleverly avoided addressing the actual issue of surname-given name reversal, which is primarily because it's not really that big of a deal for Danbooru. Full names are rather rare in comics in the first place, and when they do occur, they express an appropriate gravity regardless of how they're written. Our policy of sticking with surname first brings us a (very) little bit closer to the source language at virtually no comprehensibility cost, so let's stick with that. You can consider this post an extension of the discussion we had regarding more substantiative standardization in the "howto:translate" thread.
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I do object to the shoes example, its really not the same thing. If you are reading a work which takes place in Japan, you should have to deal with the fact that there are some cultural differences, and the shoes inside a house is a major freaking difference, its the kind of thing that deserves a translation note, to be honest.
For the other stuff, it really depends. I think most of the time "Name-sensei" can be rendered, accurately, as "Teacher" or "Professor" or perhaps "Mr./Mrs./Miss/Ms. <name>", it would depend on the situation at hand, and all sorts of things. The main reason I generally prefer honorifics to be left in subs is that most fansub translators aren't good enough to convey the nuance properly, so I'd rather they not try.
glasnost said: there really are people out there, quite a few of them, who don't know that Japanese names are family name first, and will be confused to learn that fact.
This operates under the assumption that people are either incapable of learning or that learning is not desirable. No English speaker is born knowing that the Japanese use a different name ordering, and yet any 13 year old who watches a couple episodes of anime comes to understand this. It's a very simple concept, and one you only need to tell people once. Kiddies on a Naruto forum are no more inherently intelligent than anyone else. If they can get it, anyone can.
I can't agree with any position that puts so much emphasis on "initial confusion" as a problem that the idea of dispelling the confusion is ignored. And surely a viewer is at least as likely to be initially confused by hearing one thing and reading the opposite. Either way, an explanation is needed at some point, rendering the supposed benefit of flipping naught.
Note that while I hold this position for ALL translations in ALL contexts, it's only in the context of anime/manga/etc that I feel this strongly, because those are the things I pay attention to. I don't complain as much about the localization situation with gaming, but that's because it's one of the main things killing any interest I've ever had at trying to get back into it.
I would certainly expect a EN->JP translation to add honorifics, for instance.
I'd find this just as bad, personally, and I'm sure it happens.
Rubin basically does mad science on the things (reordering chapters, deleting paragraphs) in his attempts to preserve the meaning of the work while transferring it into a new language, and Murakami himself (who Rubin works in close concert with) approves, which is a pretty big endorsement, in my opinion.
I stated earlier that consent of the creator holds more or less no weight with me in these matters. And thanks, I know not to go anywhere near anything this Rubin person has even done now. His philosophy is utterly abhorrent, unacceptable, and destructive in my eyes.
glasnost said: Would it really be that awful if we replaced "He took off his shoes and entered the house" with "He wiped his feet on the mat and entered the house" (or perhaps just "He entered the house")? It's certainly an alteration of the work, yes, but assuming his lack of shoes doesn't turn out to be a plot point, would we really be harming the work?
This position is fundamentally indefensible to me. It's far more extreme than even what the particularly bad localizers tend to do and I could never read a translation that did such a thing.
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I agree with Fencedude, changing "he took his shoes off" to "he wiped his shoes on the mat" very much changes the meaning and unnecessarily westernizes things, so I'd say that's clearly bad. It's a short jump from that to translating "Harima Kenji" as "Harry McKenzie" and all sorts of other unnecessary culture wiping phenomenon.
The translating "-sama" as "lord" or "lady" is also bad, because it doesn't naturally translate the meaning from Japanese to English. In a Japanese exchange someone addressing their boss or the president of the US would append "-sama", but the needed respect would be better served by prepending "Mr." in the English. Saying "Mr. President" sounds a heck of a lot more natural than "Lord Obama".
That said, things like honorifics are probably left untranslated for many reasons as pointed out in previous discussions.
My fundamental position in all this is that if something was created within the framework of one culture and/or language, then someone in a different culture and/or language should not expect things to be immediately familiar. Expecting such is [x]-centic arrogance.
The most basic form of respect for a work (note, work, not creator) is a willingness to engage it and understand it on its own terms, and in translated work that includes acclimating yourself to initially unfamiliar linguistic practices. By putting in that little (usually very, very little) bit of work, you enrich every subsequent interaction you have with the material. It's win-win.
That enrichment process, taken to its final stages, would end at fluency, and an ability to discard translation entirely. Unfortunately, this stage is very far away, and unfeasible for the vast majority due to cost, time, and other interfering obligations, so the necessary evil of translation is not a handicap most can be overcome. I don't like translation. I hate it. But I absolutely need it.
Certainly, part of my frustration is being dependent on, and at the mercy of, others. If they believe in things I find abhorrent, there's little I can do. When I come across a fansub with flipped names, I can fire up Aegisub and correct it, or simply delete the file and go with another group, but it's not always that easy. Sometimes you don't have alternatives or options (say, on a commercial DVD where you can't easily edit the script, and don't get me started on BDs).
That's why this is not an issue on which "compromise" seems applicable to me. Well, not unless multiple subtitle tracks are offered, but that's exceptionally rare, sadly.
jxh2154 said:
This position is fundamentally indefensible to me. It's far more extreme than even what the particularly bad localizers tend to do and I could never read a translation that did such a thing.
That tells me that you disagree with something I said, but not with what. If I'm wrong, I'd like to change my opinion, but I can't do that unless you explain to me which specific piece of my logic is flawed here.
Shinjidude said:
In a Japanese exchange someone addressing their boss or the president of the US would append "-sama"
I'm almost positive this is false. In Japanese companies, superiors are addressed with their titles; i.e. 竹田社長 ("Takeda-shachou"). We do the same thing in English: "President Takeda". The same is true of the U.S. President: it's オバマ米大統領 ("Obama-Beidaitouryou") in Japanese and "President Obama" in English.
Also, note that I said "whenever feasible". Of course I'm not going to write "Lord Obama"; give me some credit. But in the context of a fantasy world, "Lord" and "Lady" are often appropriate, and in cases where they are appropriate, I think they serve to get a message across to English readers better than "-sama" does.
Edit: Okay, this I can work with.
jxh2154 said:
My fundamental position in all this is that if something was created within the framework of one culture and/or language, then someone in a different culture and/or language should not expect things to be immediately familiar. Expecting such is [x]-centic arrogance.
Whereas my position is that the purpose of translation is to produce something that is within the cultural framework of the target language. It is, in a large way, creating a new work. Personally, I love translation precisely because it allows these "[x]-centric" people to experience something that, due in part perhaps to their own closed-mindedness, they would not have been able to experience. Changing people to be more cognizant of other cultures would be lovely, but I think the way to accomplish that is through actual, large-scale multi-national communication, not "TL note: keikaku means plan". (Yes, that was hyperbole.)
jxh2154 said:
This operates under the assumption that people are either incapable of learning or that learning is not desirable.
I'll grant that my mind may be poisoned by the fact that I'm a coder, which is a culture with downright antipathy towards the consumers of its works. Still, it's not a matter of assuming people are stupid. I'd like to believe that by cutting irrelevant cultural aspects out of a work, you're leaving people's minds free to contemplate the deeper meaning that transcends culture.
And, for the record, the example that I gave was on the extreme end of my personal spectrum of allowable changes, and I can't imagine a situation where doing something like that while translating on Danbooru would be the best move, so rest easy.
jxh2154 said:
I stated earlier that consent of the creator holds more or less no weight with me in these matters. And thanks, I know not to go anywhere near anything this Rubin person has even done now. His philosophy is utterly abhorrent, unacceptable, and destructive in my eyes.
Careful, you skirted a Godwin there. And when I say Murakami's approval means something to me, it's because he's (in my opinion) a very good writer, not necessarily because he's the creator of the work. (Although the idea that not even the creator of a work can authorize changes to that work is a fascinating one that I sort of want to agree with, but can't quite bring myself to actually do it.)
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