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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: You Took My Ice Cream!
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
A topic that's been on my mind a lot lately is English adaptations. We've been comparing English and Japanese versions of stuff a lot lately, and one thing has been confirmed. See, we always knew that it was possible to take, for instance, the Japanese words out of a speech bubble in a manga and replace them with English words that don't even come close to what those words meant. For example, we liked watching Sailor Moon Musicals with one of our best friends when we were in high school (we still do, actually, but we have less time for it), but one of our little sister's classmates often came over to hang out while his mom worked. He didn't know any Japanese, so we would use the limited Japanese we knew and the summaries our friend had read online to interpret them for him. Once, after we'd done this a few times, Athena and our friend got bored with normal interpretation, and instead had Sailor Moon and Galaxia arguing about how Galaxia stole Sailor Moon's ice cream. Like that game “film dub” on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
I could go on forever with examples. Like how our fansubs of Fushigi Yuugi (we have the whole series on DVD now!) had Tamahome swearing when really all he said was, “That forest...!” And how the one manga we read in Japanese had a character saying, “We have to destroy it!” only to have him saying, “Let me see if I can talk to it!” in the English version. Or how the ADV dub of Saiyuki has completely different characters than the Japanese version.
Sometimes, putting different words in a character's mouth can actually be a good thing. We've been comparing the English and Japanese versions of the Ace Attorney games and some of the changes they made were simply genius. For example, the joke about the victim suffering from ill-conceived naming when you try to say her name was Cinder Block just isn't there in the Japanese. There was also a part in the case “Rise from the Ashes,” when Jake Marshall, a cowboy-type character, talks about taking the bull by the horns. I don't remember exactly, but I think the line where he first says that still had cowboy elements in the Japanese, but the English version uses that metaphor to keep the cowboy thing going even longer. And in that case, I think it was probably better for them to do that.
But sometimes, changing lines like that can change a character's personality. Now, I do have to admit that character personalities are open to interpretation, so it might just be my ultra-purist tendencies talking here and saying, “How dare they add lines!” So please keep that in mind as I give my next example. We watched the dub of the second episode of Kaleido Star the other day. I have to give some context, so if you're like me and hate every trace of spoilers but haven't seen Kaleido Star and want to, you might want to skip to the next paragraph. The main girl, Sora, had just spent two weeks practicing super super hard to do a super incredible move that only the star in the circus had ever been able to pull off. She has to go perform it now, or she'll be kicked out of the circus, but she hasn't been able to master it. So while she's walking down the hall with Ken, the guy who's been doing everything in his power to help her over the past two weeks, he says something along the lines of how she hasn't been able to master the technique, but she did work really hard. In our minds, this was kind of an, “But you did your best, and that's what counts!” sort of encouragement. She tells him that they won't know what happens until the end, but she hasn't given up yet. We took this to be her determination. The dub seemed to take it to be her anger at Ken, as they added, “Why have you given up, Ken?”
Now, like I said, this could just be a matter of different interpretations, but Sora never struck us as the angry type, and she'd certainly never take that anger out on anyone other than herself. Or maybe Fool. And it's so devastating to see our favorite characters behaving like that in dubs, because we know so many people who can't read subtitles. True, some of them just refuse because they're stubborn, but some of them are only like nine years old and others of them have dyslexia. And now we can't share these characters the way we know and love them, because, in a world where the people who can't read subtitles can understand them, those characters don't exist. And it's even worse with manga, because there is no “subtitled” version.
Of course, recently we learned that they do the same thing in Japan. We watched the Japanese dub of The Emperor's New Groove. In the English version, Kronk is a guy who can be smart when he tries, but he usually doesn't come off that way because his mind is living in another world. In the Japanese version, he's just dumb. It's very very sad.
And so we do the only thing we can do--keep translating manga the way we understand it. But you can't please everybody. We've been accused of making Kyo too mean with a line in volume one of Fruits Basket. We thought he was being pretty mean in the original too, but not everybody agrees. It just goes to show that translation is not an exact science.
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13 August 2008
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