|
|
 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Dealing With Stumpers
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
We've been watching subtitled anime again, and you know what that means: complaining about the quality of subtitles these days! Okay, so actually there's not so much complaining, but there was something we noticed. Sometimes it becomes apparent that a translator is stumped on a line of dialogue. We can tell because they obviously either ignored it entirely or made something up. Not that we can blame the translators for not wanting to translate certain things. There are some words in Japanese that are nearly impossible to convey in a concise manner in English (unless you happen to be lucky enough to get really good context for it). But it is a little unfair to the viewers, who have no hope of ever knowing what the character really said.
I mean, things always get lost in translation, and everybody's bound to miss some nuance or other. Even if the translator did their best to get it across, everyone interprets things differently, so each member of the audience might understand it differently anyway. It almost makes me wonder what the point in having a common language is sometimes, but that's a different rant.
Anyway. We were thinking we would discuss how we deal with the stumpers. Now, in most cases, it's easy to look words up in a dictionary, but sometimes there's a brand-new slang term. For example, we only just recently found out that cosplay, already an abbreviation in and of itself, is abbreviated to just cos. Of course, that one was easy to figure out based on context, and we were able to quickly confirm with a native Japanese speaker that we were right. Which brings us to the first, and usually best, way to deal with stumpers: ask a native speaker for help. (It's only “usually” best because not every native speaker is familiar with all the slang. I'm sure there are tons of English slang terms that we have no clue about.)
Then again, we tend to get wrapped up in our work and for some reason we're reluctant to e-mail our Japanese friends and ask for help. (Part of it is from time constraints--we're not sure how quickly we'll get a response, and we want to turn this thing in, darn it!) So we've discovered some more difficult ways to deal with the problem. First, there's always the Japanese language dictionaries. They won't give you an English term to translate the word into, but they will tell you what it means so you can figure something out. It's actually a very easy method, but sometimes is hard in that it requires the actual reading of kanji. We can be very lazy sometimes. But it can be a big help in looking up verb endings that we're not so familiar with. It's also good for looking up contractions. For example, “nantatte” isn't in our J-E dictionaries. But if we look it up in a Japanese language dictionary, we find out it's actually an abbreviation of “nan to itte mo,” which we can easily find in our J-E dictionary as “after all is said and done, to say the least.”
Now back to those slang terms. For those, it helps to find a Japanese slang dictionary. These are easily found by using Google, especially if you know the Japanese word for slang (zokugo, 俗語). But because language is always evolving, you won't necessarily find what you're looking for in the slang dictionary. This is where things can get really hard. First, you have to do a Google search. If you're lucky, you'll find a page like the Japanese version of Yahoo! answers, where somebody asks what something is and somebody else comes and explains it all away. If not, you have to go through all the links, looking for enough context to piece together what this new thing means. And of course, it's all in Japanese, so you'd better be good with kanji.
Slang and new words aren't the only stumpers, though. Sometimes manga likes to deal with Science, or History, or Technology. In those cases, Wikipedia is our best friend. (Except in the cases when there's no article on what we're looking for, in which case we swear never to speak to Wikipedia again. Only not, because we know we'll always come back.) It's pretty simple, though. First we go to Japanese Wikipedia and find the article we need. Then we just click on the “English” link on the left and voila!, translation found! We used this method when translating the Ace Attorney manga, and Phoenix Wright's hair was compared to shape memory alloy. Even if we'd heard the term in English first, we wouldn't have had any idea what it was. (And that's why we also added a translator's note, even though many of you may already have known what shape memory alloy is.)
Well, we think that about covers it. Oh, wait! One other thing we use is an English thesaurus, to help us figure out how to word things when we know exactly what something means, but we have no idea how to fit it into an English sentence so that it sounds normal. It doesn't always help, but it tries. Usually.
There. Now THAT probably covers it.
: :
|
30 August 2010
MangaLife: On Culture
Share 25 August 2010
Words of Truth and Wisdom: I Put A Spell On You
Share 11 August 2010
Words of Truth and Wisdom: Filters
Share 6 August 2010
Maybe You're Not Using It Right :On Japanese Load Words
Share
|
