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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Less Than Perfect
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
This week's column I think is going to be a warning, mostly to ourselves. Thanks to our current project, we've had the opportunity to go back and reread some of our older translations. It's kind of like... you know how after a manga artist has been around for a while and gotten really popular, they'll release special editions of their work, and then the artist will write an afterword or a chat column or something talking about how interesting or painful it was to look back at her older works? Or I guess they might not release those in English so much. Oh wait, no, I'm pretty sure a bunch of Hana to Yume artists put older one-shots at the end of graphic novels of their popular titles. So maybe you do know what I'm talking about.
Anyway. It's kind of like that. We'll go back and find certain pieces of dialogue that we translated and think either, “Wow, what a funny line!” or, “Seriously, we translated it to THAT!? We obviously were not paying very much attention, or there were some harmful fumes around or something.” (As a side note, we do usually give the credit for the good lines to the manga artist, but there are times when, as translators, we can tell that the wording choice was our own and we are egotistical enough to call ourselves geniuses for those.)
The worst is when we find a translation that not only sounds kind of strange but is also pretty much the exact opposite of what the character said. In those cases, our first instinct is to shift the blame to the adaptation writer, but we can't just throw away the possibility that it was our fault to begin with. Everyone makes mistakes, after all. I seem to remember mentioning this before, but sometimes, I'll be looking back and forth from the book to the computer screen, and we'll be changing stuff around, and Athena will be distracted with some other part of the job, and important parts of the sentence, like the main verb or the word “not,” will somehow not get typed.
Of course, some of the problems actually come from lack of experience/knowledge. We remember being horrified when we realized, after turning in the script, that a certain numerical term that we had trouble with in volume six of Fruits Basket meant “three days a week.” That wasn't what we had translated it to. So we checked the final version just now, and fortunately it looks like someone down the line caught the mistake and was able to fix it. But that's kind of... the Japanese word is “kuyashii,” which is often translated to “frustrating,” which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Anyway, we still feel bad (or “kuyashii”) that we weren't the ones to do the job right. (Just remember, it's all for the good of the series!)
Come to think of it, we recently made a mistake in volume... one of those volumes of Negima! (23, Athena reminds me)... when they're talking about aegis cruisers. Did I mention this before? They were talking about aegis cruisers, but we didn't realize they were a common thing, since aegis is a Greek mythology term, and they use those as proper nouns all the time in Negima!. So we thought it was a specific ship called the Aegis. Wrong. Fortunately, a fan pointed it out (we also found out around the same time from a clue on Jeopardy!, which just goes to show you can learn stuff from all kinds of places) and we're told the reprints will have it fixed. Yay!
Wow, this column is kind of starting to be depressing. How many other mistakes are out there, confusing all the fans!? Oh yeah, there's the one about the matching scars in Saiyuki. (Somewhere in volume two, Hakkai's supposed to say something to Sanzo like, “I don't want to have matching scars,” but that's not what we had him say.) That one pains us to think about. We got it wrong for two reasons. First, lack of experience. We still didn't have a firm grasp on “soroi (matching).” And second, we had seen a different translation of Saiyuki, which also had it wrong, and we got ourselves stuck on a mistake.
Fortunately, I think there's hope. We have a lot more experience in Japanese now, for one thing (forget about the Negima! one for a second--that was a military term and not (I hope) common knowledge; we can't be expected to know everything! (Yeah, yeah, excuses, excuses.)). For another thing, we have more experience searching for things we don't know (I said FORGET about the Negima! thing!). For a third thing, we've learned we need to be more aware of what might need searching out (now you can remember the Negima! thing). And also, we've learned the value of proofreading. Plus we have this column to help us remember that we're not perfect, which means we need to work harder.
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