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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Howdy, Y'all!
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
Let's talk about dialects! I'm sure most of our readers know that sometimes different Japanese dialects show up in manga. As far as we've seen, the most common (other than Tokyo dialect, of course) is Kansai, or Osaka, dialect. Also as far as we've seen, there are two common ways of dealing with it in translation. The first, as seen in anime dubbing, is to give all characters who speak Kansai dialect a southern accent. This seems to cause a lot of sub-fans to cringe, I think mostly because they never thought of the characters as having any particular accent and it clashes with their mental image. That's the problem we usually have with it, but it's easily overcome by watching the Japanese version instead.
The second way of dealing with Kansai (or any dialect) is what I think is more common in manga, and that's to just ignore it and translate like normal. It's certainly the easiest way to deal with it, and we've done it ourselves (though usually with a note to the editor saying the that character uses a dialect). So of course we don't think there's anything wrong with it. Although it did make for an interesting experience when we switched from reading the English version of Negima to reading the Japanese. Suddenly someone's using Kansai dialect and I'm like, “Wait, that's not Konoka... Kotaro uses Kansai dialect!?” Duh he uses Kansai dialect--he's from the Kansai region.
This is where we take a short break for an even shorter geography lesson. The Kansai region is in the west of Japan. The end.
Incidentally, that's most likely why Hazel (Saiyuki Reload) uses Kansai dialect. He's from the west, and in Japan, west equals Kansai. Also incidentally, we always knew Konoka used Kansai dialect, because we'd seen her in the anime, but we never got far enough to see Kotaro. Also, I apologize to any non-Negima readers who are confused by what I'm talking about.
Aaanyway. Right, so like I said, we don't see anything wrong with not bothering to treat Kansai dialect any differently than Tokyo dialect--or at least not much differently (it does tend to come across in their attitude, after all). But in our ongoing Quest to become super translators, we sometimes like to try to be a little more creative. Two things have brought this about. First, when Hazel shows up in Saiyuki Reload, Goku is a little confused by the way he talks. And if Hazel talks like normal, there's no reason for Goku to be confused. So then the readers are confused as to why Goku is confused, and it's just all kinds of confusing. And second, we were watching the interviews on the extras disc for Final Fantasy XII (collectors edition), and one of the translators talked about having the characters from different regions use different English dialects, and we thought “How cool is that!?” Also, come to think of it, we were influenced before that by the dwarves in Final Fantasy IX (Condie Petie, now those are some crazy accents) and Cait Sith in Advent Children.
Actually, there's a third reason that came first, and that's the thought that if the Japanese-speaking character talks differently than the other Japanese-speaking characters, why shouldn't the English-speaking character do the same?
So the first thing we do when dealing with the character is to think about what kind of image the character is supposed to have. For example, back to Hazel. He's a Christian (sort of) priest from the west, and he has a very Native American-looking servant who's kind of like his slave. So, to us at least, he has kind of the image of a southern plantation owner. So our intention was to give him a southern accent. Whether or not we succeeded is another matter entirely.
Confession time! We spend all our time reading manga and stuff instead of studying different dialects. Hopefully we watch enough movies and TV that we can at least pretend, but if not, we sincerely apologize.
Speaking of dialects and character image, another good example is Daisuke, the owner of that inn in the mountains in volume 5 of My Heavenly Hockey Club. He has a reeeeally thick accent. But he lives in the north of Japan, so of course we can't give him a southern accent. So again, we look at the character's image. He's kind of a country bumpkin, in a snowy area, so at first we thought Canada (using Brother Bear for reference), but that didn't work as well as we'd hoped. It so happened that while we were translating that chapter, our little sister was watching Hannah Montana. In that particular episode, Miley's brother encountered someone who was from... Wisconsin or Minnesota or somewhere like that, and we thought, “It's perfect!” So we tried to remember Bobby's mother from Bobby's World (does anybody remember that cartoon way back when with Howie Mandell?). Again, whether or not we succeeded is another story entirely.
In the spirit of matching character images, I decided one day to ask our Japanese pen pal what images he associates with different dialects. He explained that the Osaka variation of Kansai dialect has kind of a carefree, “not thinking too hard about things” image, so in our minds, a southern accent seems to be a pretty good match, especially if you think about the Blue Collar Comedy guys. He also mentioned that the Kyoto variation of Kansai dialect sounds a little more refined. I think of it as the difference between a guy using a southern accent (Osaka) and a girl using a southern accent (Kyoto). (We had an English teacher (male) once from the Florida Panhandle who used to have an accent, but went to voice training to get rid of it, because, as he said himself, southern accents sound dumb on guys. I apologize to any southern-accented men who disagree!)
Unfortunately, we don't know the difference between Osaka and Kyoto dialects. Looks like we really have a long way to go before we're Super Translators.
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