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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Notes Revisited
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
I'm pretty sure that lots of people have different opinions on what makes a good translation. And, because twins are mischievous by nature, sometimes we like to amuse ourselves by taking those opinions to the extreme. This is why we've post once or twice about what a translation would look like if it was super-literal. Our opinion is that a good translation accurately conveys the meaning spirit of the Japanese text in clear, readable English.
It's understandable that a lot of manga reviewers wouldn't be able to judge the accuracy of a translation, but most of the time, when we see reviews that mention the translation at all it's probably because the reviewer doesn't like the way a dialect was rendered.
Never mind.
The point is one opinion that seems to stand out about what makes a good translation is logical spellings of the characters' names and copious translation notes. That seems to be the only criteria --apparently accuracy and readability don't matter as long as we get to learn some cool new Japanese terms. To be fair, we don't have anything against learning cool new Japanese terms, but as translators, we like to try exercising our creativity to find just the right English term.
And sometimes, failing that, we want to throw certain manga across the room.
Of course, the wanting to throw the book usually happens with terms we think would interrupt the readability if left un-translated. For example, the term “nayamu” tends to give us some trouble, and it came up a lot in a certain volume of The Portrait of M and N. It basically means “to brood or worry to the point of suffering.” I might be remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure that was one of the tricky spots that had us constantly saying “I quit” a few months back.
It might have been nice to leave the word in Japanese and provide a note, then let the adapter or editor deal with it, but we think that that would have been a major cop-out solution. Especially because, in the end, the reader probably still wouldn't have gotten to learn a fun new Japanese term. We did eventually come up with “agonize,” as in “to agonize over a problem,” and we think it fit very well.
Anyway, back to my original point. Since fans like us to leave the occasional word in Japanese, we started wondering what it would be like if we left as many words in Japanese as possible. Then we thought that was going too far, so we asked, “What if we leave all the nouns in Japanese?” And so... the plan WAS to present a translation with excessive Japanese terms. But we pulled out a volume of My Darling! Miss Bancho to translate, and the page we randomly opened up to was going to be chock full of notes anyway! It was all “yukata” this, and “bancho” that, and “matsuri” and “ryokan” and all kinds of things like that.
Let's try something else, shall we?
Alright, we're still in My Darling! Miss Bancho. (You might still be able to find volume one online somewhere!) This is volume three, where Souka has been kidnapped! Oh no! Here is a conversation she has with her captor.
Souka: At this mama, anata will get farther and farther away from minna!
Captor: ... Anata's data has kachi.
Souka: No, this isn't a hanashi about data. (I'm gonna break your megane.)
Captor: If I can kaiseki anata 100%... I might be able to install anata's sekai into watashi's sekai.
Notes:
Mama: A term used to described a state of affairs that continues through the next action described.
Anata: A second-person pronoun that indicates distance between the speaker and the addressee. Neither Souka nor her captor feels close enough to the other to use a more casual term.
Minna: All or everyone. In this case, everyone with whom Souka's captor may want to make friends.
Data: In Japan, they often use the English word data to refer to... well, data.
Kachi: Relative worth, merit or important. He's saying that Souka's data is valuable.
Hanashi: A word that refers to the subject being talked about. Comes from the Japanese word “hanasu,” which means “to speak.”
Megane: An item worn on the face to improve eyesight. Because some people find megane to be very attractive, in Japan, people might wear them even though they don't need optical assistance.
Kaiseki: To examine carefully and in detail so as to identify causes, key factors, possible results, etc.
Sekai: Any sphere, realm, or domain, with all pertaining to it.
Watashi: First-person pronoun. We can tell that Souka's captor is very proper, because he uses the more formal “watashi,” rather than the more casual “boku,” or the even more casual “ore.”
Okay, so we cheated and copied some notes directly from Dictionary.com (see if you can guess which!). Also, we learned some neat things about Souka and her captor that we might not otherwise have learned if anata and watashi had just been translated.
But on the other hand, I can't imagine that dialogue making much sense to anyone who doesn't know Japanese, and it would be an enormous hassle to have to check a glossary every two words. And so, we come to the inevitable conclusion when faced with a question such as this. Do we leave things in Japanese and add a ton of notes (fans' opinion), or do we just translate the darn thing (our opinion)? The best answer is, as usual, a little of both. We like to save everyone some effort and translate it, but we can still see about making notes about the kind of language the characters are using.
Of course, whether or not those notes get left in the book is entirely out of our hands.
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