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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Yokatta Ne
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
It's not very often that we get a little insecure about how well we translate stuff, but we happened to be in one of our rare(?) funks the other day when we came across something that made us Think. We were reading the subtitles to something where the Japanese had been translated from “yokatta ne” (or “na,” I can't quite remember which) to “Can I have your autograph?” The context was that a girl had just done a bunch of awesome stuff, proving herself to everyone, and her friend who had faith in her the whole time was basically congratulating her. “Yokatta ne” literally means “(that) was good, wasn't it?” and we probably would have translated it as “Good for you,” “That's great,” or, if we were really thinking outside the box, “I'm happy for you.” We probably would have added an exclamation point, because we like them. There might have been one already, but I couldn't say for sure.
We never would have been so original as to have the friend ask for the girl's autograph. Normally, we probably would have thought, “Whaaat? Why you gotta go and make it different like that?” But this is actually something we wondered about when we first started translating--would our translations be better if we had the creativity to come up with lines like that? And since we were feeling insecure that day, it became time to reflect on our career.
One time, Ysa was commenting on the differences between our translation of Fruits Basket and her friend's translation that she read a few years before the TokyoPop version was published. She pointed out that translating is like acting--different people interpret the same role different ways, and that comes out in their performance. We thought about it and decided that she's absolutely right. But the tricky thing is performing the role in a way that's still entertaining to the audience. And translating adds a new level of trickiness, because the translator has to ask herself what they want to do with each character.
There are a bunch of anime/manga/etc. about budding actresses who, at some point in the series, are given a role that someone else is famous for, and they have to learn to take the role and make it their own instead of just copying the previous actress. I think some translators and English adaptation writers use this philosophy in their work. On the other hand, we take what we call the Kingdom Hearts philosophy. We call it the Kingdom Hearts philosophy because that game has the best example of where the first philosophy doesn't always work.
See, one of our favoritest Disney characters is Hercules, for his cute, innocent farmboy personality. But in the first Kingdom Hearts game, instead of getting the original voice of Hercules, they got Sean Astin to play him. Now we've only seen Sean Astin in a few roles, but he seems to be a really good actor. I don't know if it was an effort to make the character his own or maybe bad directing? but at any rate, his portrayal of Disney's Hercules was a little more... New York boxer? It wasn't our Hercules, and we were sad. (Needless to say, we were very happy to hear Tate Donovan as Hercules in KH2.)
It's true that if you're doing a revival of a play or a remake of a movie, you probably want to make something new and therefore make the character your own. But if you're getting a replacement for the voice of Mickey Mouse, you're going to want to get someone who sounds as close as possible to the Mickey Mouse that we all know and love. You're not making a new character--you're expanding the first character's role. And that's our philosophy on translation. We're not making new characters--we're just making the same characters more available to an English-speaking audience. So we want to stay as true to the original author's intent as possible.
It's true that inevitably we'll be putting a lot of ourselves into our translations, but what makes translating a little bit more complicated than acting is that you're portraying all the characters at once. If we add too many of our own “Nibley-isms,” we run the risk of making all the characters sound exactly like us. And while we think that we are quite amusing and adorable, “amusing and adorable” does not match the description of every character we translate. We're not confident that we can add jokes without ending up giving all the characters the exact same personality. And so we think it's okay if in our own translating style, we don't change “yokatta ne” to “can I have your autograph?”
And thus we overcame our brief moment of insecurity. Yokatta ne?
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