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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Back From Comic-Con
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
I'm not entirely sure this week's column will be very coherent. We just got back from Comic Con and we haven't had much time to recover. But I am going to go ahead and brag about the autographs we got! We got an autograph from Bill Farmer, Eric Goldberg, and a voice actor whose name we could never catch, but he does the voice on Space Mountain. We're sorry we never caught your last name, sir! (And we can't make it out in the autograph, either. We should have asked him when we got the autograph, d'oh.) But it's still made of awesome.
Anyway. Today we wrote some cover copy, so I thought I'd talk about that a little tiny bit. “Cover copy” means the summary they put on the back of the manga that comes out. Maybe everybody but us already knew that, but I thought I'd explain just in case. We have the privilege of writing cover copy for a few of the titles we translate, and it's a really interesting experience. At first, we hated it, because we hate summarizing things. Unless we're, like, telling about our favorite episode of Hercules: The Animated Series or something, but somehow when you do it for work or school, it's never as fun. Maybe it's because we have to focus on the important bits as opposed to the fun bits. Yeah, that's probably it.
But then they imposed a rule that we had to write the summary in fifty words or less, and somehow that made it a lot of fun. It's kind of like a word puzzle. We have to pick the most important part and only summarize that. Actually, it would probably be better to pick the part that most people are going to be interested in, regardless of how important it is to the story, but... well, let's just say there's a reason we're not in marketing. That's probably also why whenever we see the back covers we supposedly wrote the copy for there's a different text on them. But that's okay; hopefully we at least gave the people who wrote the real version something to go off of. Anyway, after we summarize the part we chose to write about, we have to then take away all the extra words and figure out how to rephrase things to make the whole thing fit within fifty words. We like to make it exactly fifty words, because it's somehow more fun for us that way.
Aaaand that's really all we have to say on cover copy, so I think it's time to change the subject. At Comic Con, there aren't that many panels that are really relevant to translating manga, but there is one that's extremely relevant, as the subject is translating manga. There was a panel of manga translators and a few other people involved in translating, and it was a question and answer session so the fans could ask them pretty much whatever. Ideally the question had to do with translating anime or manga, would be my guess. It was an interesting panel, and at first I thought we could use those questions as material for more columns... but then I realized I think I've talked about everything already. Of course, some of that was a long time ago, so maybe I could do it again. But there was one question we've only touched on lightly. It was basically this: why do light novel translations suck? It was worded much more politely, but that was the gist of it.
The answer given at the panel was basically that it's much harder to translate prose than it is to translate manga, and it would cost a lot more to find someone who has the right experience to translate a novel and get them to agree to do it and do a good job. Only one member of the panel even had any experience translating novels, because everyone else was smart enough not to try it. So let me tell you about a couple of people who weren't that smart. You guessed it--those people are us.
The offer came to us a while ago, and it was for a series we had translated the manga of, so we thought it was a good opportunity to read more of the series as well as develop a new skill. We weren't surprised to learn that translating novels is super super hard. Still, we thought we were doing pretty well. We do have our own opinions about what's readable and what's not, and we made sure to read our translation and tweak it before we turned it in. But maybe we weren't reading it carefully enough, because we found out later that, basically, our translation sucked. When we got this information, we were given the chance to revise a book later in the series (which we had already translated ourselves), and even though we had already gone through and revised it once, when we read it the third time, we realized that the translation did indeed need lots and lots of help. It was a big blow to our confidence, but it was also important to not let it get us down, and hopefully we're improving.
So in sum, you can be a fantastic translator of manga (that sounds egotistical, doesn't it? I like to think of it as standing behind our work) and still be a terrible, terrible translator of prose. But practice makes perfect, right? Anyway, that's probably a big reason why light novel translations tend to be of lower quality. The panelists also mentioned how the guys who translate, like, fine literature type novels will spend years on one book, and usually have like a master's degree or something. I don't remember (some reporter I am, right?). But anyway, it takes a lot to translate a novel, and it's easy to see where something as... unimportant (regardless of how fun or awesome) as a light novel wouldn't warrant that kind of work. And that's our own contribution to the answering of that question. Tadah!
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