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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Prose Weakness
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
As I sit here, planning to write yet another column about our translation weaknesses, I wonder if I do that a little too frequently. But on the other hand, this week is turning out to be crazy busy and I can't think of anything else. So.
I mentioned before that we were removed from a light novel translation project because our prose translation was not up to snuff. Well, we wanted to find out exactly how bad it was so we decided to participate in the Kurodahan Press Translation Prize contest. We weren't expecting to win and we didn't, but it was a good way to gauge our prose translation skills and it was also a really neat experience.
The judging for the contest was divided into three categories: translation accuracy, representation of the original (capturing the author's style), and English flow. Each participant could get up to 10 points for each category (30 max) from each of the five judges (for a total of 150 maximum points). We don't know the breakdown of our scores, but we placed sixth with a total of 108 points, and because we have math geek tendencies, we calculated that to be 72%. That gave us a C, maybe a C-, depending on the curve. Then again, depending on the curve, maybe we got a B!
Anyway, it's obvious we need to work on prose translation to get that score up. I'm afraid that admitting this might cause people to wonder about our work as translators in general, but I'm hoping that they'll read our manga translations and see the quality for themselves, whether it's good or bad. There's a distinct difference between writing and translating dialogue (which is really just about all manga is), and writing and translating prose. While one phrasing might work really well for a descriptive passage, it might not work so well for a line spoken by a high school student. Just like different writers can be better at one than the other, translators can be, too.
I just deleted a couple of paragraphs where we were musing on the differences between prose and dialogue, and we realized they're not really all that different--at least not technically. In either one, you want to use the right words to get your message across, you want the words to sound nice, and it's good to have clever metaphors, etc. Although not all of us are quick enough to come up with clever metaphors off the tops of our heads in everyday conversation. So I guess the difference is between narrator voice and character voice?
I was going to steal a line from a story our cousin wrote to illustrate my point, but then I decided that stealing is wrong even if he would probably forgive us, and he didn't answer his cell phone so I couldn't ask for permission. So instead, I'll use a short phrase we came across one day, which I still don't have permission for, but is publicly available if you know where to look, and would be difficult to spot even so. The phrase is this: “thought it to be pretty.” Reading it as a line of prose, describing a character's reaction to something, it works really well. But if that character were to say that reaction out loud, in exactly that same way (e.g. “I thought it to be pretty.”), it would probably sound a little off.
Of course, it all depends on the character, and there could be a bunch of exceptions. Ayame Sohma, for example, might talk that way, or a very proper noblewoman or someone. But Kyo would never say it that way. He would just say, “I thought it was pretty.” This all goes back to what we're always saying about character voice.
Going back to our thoughts on prose, I suppose the difference could be in descriptive power. An aspiring writer friend of ours recently blogged about how her weakness in writing is that she loves descriptions too much, and come to think of it, I remember always hating having to write them. Anyway, she talked about how most modern readers aren't going to want to read five different descriptions of the same place, and if you think about it, people don't tend to spend a lot of time describing things in dialogue. Usually they just say what's going on once, and maybe how they feel about it, too.
And now that we spent a whole column wondering (and not necessarily very coherently) why we're not good at writing/translating prose, I want to vouch for our dialogue translations! We think they're very good! But since people aren't always the most accurate judges of themselves, we'll just turn this into a shameless plug and say, “Go check out some Ace Attorney manga!”
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