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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Choose Your Words
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
I mentioned in the last column that we were marathoning some anime a couple of weeks ago. It's definitely good to watch a lot of anime for several reasons, including the fact that anime is awesome, but, more importantly for the purposes of this column, it gets us thinking about the translation process. In the course of our anime marathon, a character used a word like “maladroit” or something (in the subtitle), and that got us thinking a lot.
It's kind of tricky, translating dialogue. We definitely think it's a good idea to encourage viewers, or readers, to increase their vocabulary, and the character in question definitely would know what “maladroit” means. But this time I realized something that we definitely need to start keeping in mind ourselves: just because the character using the word knows what it means doesn't mean the character he's talking to does. In this case, he was talking to someone who probably wouldn't. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everybody who's fluent in another language knows what every word in that language means. But just like with English, I'd be willing to bet that every other language in the world has terms that even some native speakers don't know. You can probably find a lot of examples of this in a series like Lagoon Engine, where the main character is a really smart kid, and his little brother is constantly asking him what the big words he's using mean.
That all being the case, I realized that, when choosing words for a character to say, we have to start thinking about the characters they're talking to. There have been several times when we chose a word we didn't think was very common, and justified it by saying, “S/he would use that word--they're very smart, they like to talk big, etc. etc.” But if it's a so-called SAT word, and they're talking to someone who's not known for their studying skills, and that someone doesn't say (for example), “Mail a droid?” then chances are it was a poor wording choice. (In cases such as Ayame Sohma, this rule can be ignored, because he doesn't care if people understand him so much.)
Another thing to consider is, of course, how people normally talk. We saw some other subtitles that were translating “shokudou” to “refectory.” We only happened to have just recently discovered what a refectory was because we were doing research on monasteries for something we were working on, and we were looking up all the different rooms and places in a monastery. Like I said before, it's good to encourage people to use dictionaries and expand their vocabularies, but at the same time, most high school students are going to call their refectory a cafeteria. Of course, this was a fancy school, so maybe they wanted a fancier term. We think “dining hall” is sufficiently fancy, but that could just be a personal preference thing.
I guess it would be important here to remind everyone that there's very rarely a “set term” to translate each Japanese word to. Okay, so that's actually not really true. If you're translating patents or something, there's lingo for stuff and you need to use the exact term so everybody knows what you're talking about. But when it comes to manga and anime, there's a lot less precision. So “shokudou,” which literally means “meal hall,” could be translated to just that, or it could be any of the terms we talked about in the last paragraph, or even something else, like “mess hall.” Why? Because “refectory,” “cafeteria,” “dining hall,” and “mess hall” all refer to a big room where a lot of people go to eat. Then you just pick which one works best and/or sounds the most natural or the nicest based on the context.
Of course, people tend to disagree on what works the best. We have a friend who is very annoyed that we chose “like” instead of “love” as a translation of “suki” in a certain volume of Fruits Basket. But we recently revisited that scene and now that we remember the context, we stand behind our decision even more firmly. Although it's also true that sometimes we'll revisit old translations and be like, “What on earth were we thinking!?” Don't worry--those times are very rare.
Anyway, problems like the “like” versus “love” thing only show up when both words are common and have different connotations. I think. And it's usually pretty easy to know what word not to use. I don't remember if I mentioned this example before, but if I did it was probably long enough ago that it's okay to mention it again. One time, our Japanese literature professor was translating a story, and he came across the word “kakuu,” which he looked up in a dictionary which gave him the translation of “volplane.” He's a pretty smart guy, and even he hadn't heard of that word, so he decided not to confuse his audience and interrupt the flow of the story by using it. But it would have been a correct translation.
And so we learn once again that the thesaurus is our friend.
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