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 Words Of Truth And Wisdom: As You Like It
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
In our last column, we talked about... what did we talk about again? Right. The Anime Detour panel about making anime/manga a profession as opposed to keeping it as just a hobby. We mentioned to a friend of ours that there was one point I forgot to mention last time (it just didn't go with the flow of the rest of it), and she said she'd like to hear our thoughts on it, so we said we'd try writing them up and see if they filled up a whole column. And the point was this: As a translator going into anime and manga translation, you WILL have to translate something you don't like.
That was the statement the panelist made. While we do think it's very likely, and you really ought to be prepared for that eventuality if you are considering translating manga (we can really only speak for manga, since we have yet to branch out into anime (though of course we would like to, should the opportunity arise)), we don't think it's necessarily true. Of course, this opinion could come from the fact that we're pretty eclectic in our anime/manga tastes, so we're not turned off by, for example, mecha. And so in six years of translating manga, we haven't had to translate anything we don't like. ...Okay, so there have been some scenes that we didn't like, but never an entire series. And of course, there are some titles we like better than others. But we enjoy all of them.
Anyway. All the manga companies we work for will ask us if we'll do a title before making us the official translators on it. In other words, if they offer us something we don't like, we have the option of saying no. I'm pretty sure most people would agree that saying no can often be a very very bad idea, especially when you're just starting out. If you want to get your foot in the door to manga translation, you have to agree to do something. We actually have been known to turn down titles, but only very rarely, and usually because of content that we don't feel comfortable translating. We don't like translating “adult” titles, for example.
And that brings me to my next point. When you're looking for companies to offer your services to, check out the kind of stuff they do to see how likely you are to have to translate something you really would hate. For example, there are some companies that specialize in hentai and the like that we would obviously not want to work for. If you hate mecha with a mad, unbridled passion, you probably don't want to apply to work at Bandai.
But more than anything, we like to have an attitude of loving what we work on simply by virtue of the fact that we work on it. For example, when TokyoPop offered us Ai Yori Aoshi, they said, “What do you know about Ai Yori Aoshi?” And Athena said, “It's a lot like Love Hina, only more boring.” (We sincerely apologize to all the Ai Yori Aoshi fans out there; we had only seen a little of the anime at the time.) And they said, “Well you can translate it anyway and get money. So there.” (That was actually almost literally how it happened; it was when we were working as interns, so there may have been some formalities dropped.) And now we like it a lot (though there are some scenes that make us blush; such is the problem with titles like Ai Yori Aoshi).
We recently discovered that there's some sort of wiring in our brains that causes us to fall asleep during long action sequences in movies, but even those aren't a problem when we're translating manga! In fact, they actually mean less work, because in manga, action scenes mean big pictures without a lot of text. There have been times when we'd be translating an action manga on a hot day (it's always hard to work when it's hot), and they'd be all over the place with tons of exposition, and we'd be like, “Will you just start killing each other already!?” Good times.
So anyway, I guess it all comes to there being two surefire ways to completely and thoroughly get out the possibility of translating something you don't like. First, be so super awesome at translating that people are falling over themselves to get translations from you. That one's going to be really hard (we're still working on it ourselves), and we'd imagine it's pretty difficult to prove that you're that good without having actually translated a bunch of stuff first, so it's much safer to go with method number two: just like everything.
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