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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: You Say Potato, I Say Spud
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
While I was writing our column for two weeks ago, I realized that I had written a few things that, if I didn't know us any better, would have me a little bit worried about our translation style. The part in question is the one about how normal people don't say “It is disagreeable!” in English. That's a true enough statement, but hearing anyone involved with translating/adapting talking about how normal people talk makes us very wary.
It started at Anime Expo several years ago. We've always had an interest in voice acting, so we like to go to the voice acting panels, especially when there are Japanese voice actors present. This one particular year had a panel with several American voice actors (and the Japanese voice actress Maria Kawamura [Naga in Slayers, among many others]). One of the actresses there (who will remain nameless to protect the innocent... or something) was also involved in script adaptation, and she started talking about making sure the characters talk like normal Americans. She brought up one specific example in which the script translation had a character say, “As far as I'm concerned, they're both my bitter enemies!” She pointed out that no normal high school kid would talk like that, so she changed it to, “As far as I'm concerned, they can both...” do something I'd really rather not repeat.
We thought her reasoning was fair enough, so we didn't think much other than, “But she didn't have to be so vulgar...” until a couple of years later when we read the English version of one of our favorite manga series (which will again remain nameless to protect the innocent). The characterizations were all wrong. All wrong. Like all the characters' personalities had been switched around. And we got a sense that the English adaptation writer read the translation and though, “No normal fourteen-year-old talks like this!” Ever since, the phrase, “No normal (fill in the blank) talks like this!” has made us wary, even though we made up the part where that's what the English adaptation writer was thinking.
So let's go back to our first example, with the bitter enemies. It's true that probably no normal high school kid would say that, but it's possible that that particular high school kid might have. (I don't remember the anime in question, and I know we haven't seen it, so we couldn't say for sure.) He might have been like a vengeful Ayame for all we know. Or maybe he played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. But my point is, anime and manga have weird characters--that's part of what makes them awesome. And lumping all the characters' speech patterns into what the translator or adapter thinks is “normal” is usually a very good way to take all the spice out of a series.
Even before our bad experience, our approach to translating and adapting has been to ask ourselves “How would this specific person say this if they had grown up speaking English?” Usually the Japanese text and context help a lot with this. In fact, sometimes I'm jealous of Japanese, because it seems so much easier to give people different speech patterns. I mean, just stick a “wa” at the end of everything and have someone use “atashi” for “I,” and bam! Automatic girliness. Okay, there's a little more to it than that, but you get the idea.
As for context, let me use an example from Lagoon Engine. At one point, one of the main characters, Yen, uses the term “billet-doux” (French for “love letter”). Now a lot of people might think that there's no way that Yen, a boy of but twelve years, would know such a term, and would therefore think that was a poor choice of words. But that's where the context comes in. Yen does usually talk like a normal kid, but this situation called for a term that was more old-fashioned-sounding than the normal “love letter.” And Yen is like a genius, and has read every book in his family's extensive library, and one of his “things” is being good with languages. It would be a gross underestimation of his abilities to think that he would not know a term like “billet-doux,” even though the translators themselves would never have come up with it. In fact, we didn't. We left a note for the editor instead. Eheh.
And that brings me right to my next point! Making sure we're translating the characters the way they would talk can be tricky, because it can be very difficult to stray from your own speech pattern. But I've still never been able to bring myself to use the word “ain't,” even though I'm sure there are some characters we translate who would use it. Athena adds that she wouldn't say never, but I'm sure you can count the times I've used it on one hand. I'm not sure why that is, but I think it's because I'm afraid of using it wrong, which is incredibly ironic.
We work around that by referring to people and TV characters. For Pacifica in the Scrapped Princess manga, for example, we imagined how our little sister talks (she can be very Pacifica-like). We also started watching America's Next Top Model in the hopes that it would help with modeling terms for Nosatsu Junkie, and how girls talk differently from guys. And then we got hooked because the photo shoots are just so cosplay.
But the main inspiration must always come from the original Japanese, because our goal in translating is to help everyone understand and enjoy the manga the same way (or better than) we do when we read it in Japanese.
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