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 Words Of Truth And Wisdom: Soul-Crushing
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
One of the questions we get asked a lot as twins is whether or not we fight a lot. In our case, the answer is no, not a lot, but we do sometimes, and almost every time it has something to do with translation. And to illustrate my point, Athena amends that it's about translation about 80% of the time. You might think that Athena's argument actually disproves my point, since I just said we mostly fight about translation related stuff, but it actually supports my theory (which was previously unstated and therefore it's unfair for me to expect the readers to have any clue what I'm talking about) that we fight about things that we very much want to get right. We'll see if this paragraph has any connection with the column I'm about to write.
I was thinking that this week, I would write about the translations we have the hardest time dealing with. This is a topic I've actually sort of avoided, because we really do love our job very very much, and we don't want to give anyone the impression that we might feel otherwise. And when we describe the more difficult translation jobs as “soul-crushing,” I think it would be pretty easy to jump to that conclusion. “Soul-crushing” is, however, our term of choice for translations that we feel, well, kill our souls. But we also firmly agree with the idea that “that which does not destroy us makes us stronger,” so we look back on the soul-crushing translations and smile. Especially when we reread some of our journal entries from when we were working on them--those can be pretty funny. For example, when we finished our very first soul-crushing translation, I wrote a journal entry that started like this: EAT IT!!!! HA! HA HA!!! We have finished!! Take that, insane rush translation! And it's only 12:30!!! Aaahh, life is good.
So anyway, it's true that sometimes we'll come across a line in manga that will be a little hard to convey in English, and Athena will toss the manga onto the desk while I drop my hands off the keyboard, and we'll both declare, “I quit!” And then, since the CD we were listening to while we worked isn't over yet, we'll pick up the manga and get back to the keyboard and get right back to translating. That can happen with anything. But fanbooks... oh, the fanbooks. Fanbooks are scary to translate. Like super crazy whoa scary.
See, fanbooks tend to have all the same content as manga, only much smaller and with paragraphs that like to summarize and/or analyze what's going on. So not only is it manga plus prose, but the kind of vocabulary you get in the prose is much different than what you get in the manga dialogue, and can have really long sentences. Long sentences are the hardest, because you have to hold so many words in your head while you try to arrange them into a comprehensible sentence. That's why finally, in a stroke of brilliance (or figuring out the obvious), we started working on them in parts.
Of course, we're very possessive of all our titles, and so if a fanbook of something we worked on, say Fruits Basket, gets licensed, we want to translate the fanbook, too! Besides, we're always up for a challenge.
Here's another big translating challenge. We saw a commercial for the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament registration last night, and one of the kids said, “It's like arm-wrestling, for your brain!” And we're like, “No. Translating a lexicon entry in Negima! is like arm-wrestling for your brain. Jeopardy! is more like an aerobic workout.” For those of you unfamiliar with the Negima! series, apparently the manga artist did a lot a lot a lot of research building the world of Negima, and there are a lot of references to magic and mythology and such, and each chapter has a lexicon explaining the magic spells or other things and how they relate and stuff. They're actually quite fascinating. But they also really do feel like arm-wresting with your brain, because they have a lot of new vocabulary about mythology or linguistics or history, and they have a lot of quotes from Important Historical Works. So as we read them, it feels like we're making a little progress maybe, but then we get hit with the Japanese term for something like “subjunctive mood,” and since we don't know what that is, we have to fight to figure it out (by looking it up in dictionaries and stuff). The quotes tend to be really hard though, because they're from such old material, and because they tend to use specialized terms (oh yeah, the lexicons have a lot on psychology, too!). We're just very grateful that we live in the age of the internet, where we can look everything up on our computer. If we had to do all that research in a library... I shudder to think.
Still, while we joke and say the translating crushes our souls, I think they really do help us to improve and all that good stuff they talk about in the cartoons. So I want to reiterate that we're really happy to work on everything we work on, regardless of its difficulty level. And I want to end this on a joke, but nothing's really coming. Um... cheese?
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