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 Words Of Truth And Wisdom: Foreshadowing
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
A few weeks ago, there was an interview here where Park was talking with another English adaptation writer about how one of the fears involved with manga translations is getting something wrong in such a way that will cause problems later on. For example, when we translated volume... seventeen? I think it was seventeen, but it might have been sixteen... of Fruits Basket, MangaLife's Ysa, who adapted the Fruits Basket fanbook, saw one of the lines and, since she had read further on in the series than we had, she pointed out that it needed to be changed because of something you find out later on. As a disclaimer, I agree that it was probably better off changed, but we had a very good reason for translating it the way we did, and we could have defended our choice if the need arised. She caught it before it went to print, though, so it wasn't an issue.
Anyway, the point is not to be defensive, it's to talk about how we avoid those problems. The simplest way to avoid them, of course, is to translate as accurately as possible. If the English version matches the Japanese version exactly, regardless of whether or not the translator or adapter knows what happens later, all the foreshadowing and everything will be in the right places. Problems mostly only come up when you change stuff. For example, I'll refer to my “So's your face” column from... however long ago that was. Brief recap: the robot in Gundam Seed has a line that literally translates to, “you, too!” and repeats it often. It could also be translated in many instances to “so's your face.” Translating Haro as saying “so's your face” may have worked in the first few places it showed up (and would have been hilarious), but later on, when Haro meant “you, too!” to be encouraging, “so's your face” wouldn't work so well. In that case, it's really good that it was never translated as “so's your face,” because that could have messed up the story.
Another good example is in the Ace Attorney games. In the Japanese version, Maya's favorite food is ramen, but in the American version, her favorite food is burgers, so when Apollo Justice has a case involving the ramen stand where Phoenix and Maya used to eat all the time, the American fans might not get the same sense of nostalgia that the Japanese fans would. But they can't change it to a burger stand, because all the visuals are full of noodles. Still, we love the Ace Attorney games and their translation/localization, so we forgive them.
We've never translated video games, so I can't say for sure, but I imagine the Ace Attorney example came about because video games need (or are thought to need) to be localized, so the American players can relate better. That makes sense to us, because our brother-in-law plays a bunch of video games but has no interest in anime or manga. Fortunately, in the world of manga, we can get away with leaving things that may not be so familiar to American fans, and writing up translation notes. And so we can get away with changing as little as possible.
Unfortunately, Japanese is not a language that corresponds well enough to English that there's only one possible translation for each line. (I actually doubt that any language is, except for English itself, of course.) For example, they don't always use pronouns in Japanese, which can cause problems when you don't know how many people are being talked about, or if only one person is being talked about, what gender they are. So when everyone's talking about a character who hasn't shown up yet, sometimes we have to guess what gender they are. You can avoid giving definite pronouns to an extent, but sometimes it really just doesn't work, and you have to pick one.
There are other examples where a Japanese word has more than one possible English meaning, or it would be better to phrase something differently depending on what exactly it is they're talking about. One of the things we learned in college is that Japanese is a language built around being as indiscreet as possible. Vagueness equals politeness. But vagueness also equals needing more information.
So for cases where you don't know how to be completely accurate, obviously the best thing to do would be to read ahead. We don't like to read ahead, because we have some weird sense of honor or something that depends on us reading it as we translate (though we don't do that with everything, because sometimes we were reading a series before it was assigned to us, or we have to turn in a summary or something), and sometimes it's impossible because we don't have next the book, or the next book's not even out in Japan. Fortunately, most of the contextual problems are solved within one volume. So what we do as we translate is this: When an issue like the ones I mentioned above comes up, we highlight it, so when we come back to it, we'll know that we wanted to check the context before finalizing it.
And that seemed like a lot of build up for a simple solution.
Of course, sometimes there are times when we don't get the information we need in the book we're working on. For that, we just try to match vague with vague.
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