i’m sure you know i’m long now inactive here, in fact i only logged in to find something archived. but if any mutuals here are on twitter or someother platform pls let me know? @Iter_Impius on twitter
I was planning to make a paper for my intercultural study about this, but I decided to go with other topics ww. However, I think this is an important issue, so I want to talk about it. You can ignore me since I’m just having my usual stressed ramblings.
For someone like me who has been in translating for both my carreer(part-time) and my hobby. I’ve encountered the most common mistakes in Japanese-English translation works, either they are texts, books, games, etc.
The issue of “Too Literal” is the most common thing I’ve seen in localizing and translating works, and some of them are just…. bad.
1. What do I think is the difference between a good and a bad translations/localizations?
Grammar? Typos? Punctuations?
Nah, those things are trivial for me. You can fix them by hiring professional proofreaders and quality checkers.
The essence of translation is delivering messages(meanings) from the source language to the target language. Hence, it is easy for me to tell the difference. A bad translation/localization would have misplaced meanings, and most of times, I cannot understand what this work is telling me. Instead, a good or decent translation would have messages clearly delivered, even there are times the wordings are totally different(paraphrased.)
2. Why being too literal is that much of an issue for me?
Hahaaa, I actually discussed this with my senior translator in work. She said that Japanese is a multi-layered language, and she doesn’t want to deal with it as much as possible. I actually kind of understand what she was getting at since this was the common issue when I first studying Japanese by textbook. Okay, it was a failure for me. I am not capable of learning language by textbook, thus I just forced myself with frequent exposure in Japanese, in which I tried to converse in Japanese as much as possible, thus right now, I can understand Japanese most of times without having to translate anything to my mother tongue or English inside my head.
Back to the topic, there are actually various answers, but the problem essentially lies in the differences of languages’ respective natures.
We know that Japanese and English are different, but what makes it so different? I am not talking about grammar or structure this time. Of course they’re different.
It is something I learned in inter-cultural communication class, but languages and cultures can be categorized to two categories, thus “high-context” and “low-context.”
English as language is considered as a language of a “low-context” culture, which means that English-speaking cultures expect communications to be explicitly stated so that there’s no risk of confusion, and if a message is not clear enough, it will slow down the process of communication.In the most extreme cases, leaving any sort of rooms for misinterpretation can be disastrous. Meanwhile, Japanese as a language is a considered as language of a “high-context” culture, in which that most Japanese communications relies on underlying context, meaning, and tone in the message, and not just the words themselves.
Since this is not my formal paper, I’ll just give a simple example to make it a bit easier to understand..
Example:
X 「もし、良ければ繋がっていただきたいです。」
Let’s see how many interpretations you can get from the line above. (If you understand what it means, it’s really ambiguous, but I did it on purpose. ww)
Literal Translation(Google Translate) (I don’t hate machine translations like GT, but I cannot find them helpful since they’re too literal, and it’s not helpful in translating sentences.)
Can you make sense the English translation without context? It doesn’t make sense to me, sorry. Even you can make sense out of it, it’s because you have a prior knowledge or context to understand what/why/when/where X said that sentence.
As I infered above, Japanese relies on underlying context, meaning, and tone in the message, and not just the words themselves.
We can get multiple interpretations based on the situations(contexts) where/when X says this.
X is introducing himself for the first time;
X“If it’s alright, let’s talk again next time.“ or… X "If you don’t mind, I want to get acquainted with you.”
X is asking permission to contact you for next meeting or arrangement;
X “If possible, I would like to contact you next time.”
X is planning to have a phone-call with some higher-ups, but somehow, his call is directed to the secretary’s desk instead;
X “Please connect me to ______(possibly the superior or the person in charge).”
X wants to reconcile with someone;
X “I want us to reconcile, if that’s okay with you.”
or etc. (It’s possible for me to write down some… *coughs* situations, but my blog is a safe blog. You have your brain to imagine.)
You can see how many interpretations can be made from one sentence depending on its situation. Thus, translating Japanese-English needs CONTEXT, CONTEXT, and CONTEXT.
Most likely that bad translations are resulted by translators overgeneralizing that Japanese is also low-context culture’s language like English, or the translators have no idea about the differences at all.
Today is April 1st! While it is April Fool’s Day, it is also our favorite pudding lover, Yotsuba Tamaki’s birthday! ♪ Enjoy the full version of his sweet solo song “Four Leaf Ring”.
If you haven’t yet, don’t forget to scout for his 12 SONGS GIFT SR in his birthday audition! :)
Anonymous whispered:[same anon] i just realized i wrote meta instead of theory aaaaa but meta works too. do you have anything about nagi in particular? hes the least i hear about, spoilers are fine! im pretty much caught up o3ob
This episode had quite a lot of scrolling comments in their live web program (An ID♥LiSH Night With You!), so I thought it would be fun to translate them all! Translations under the cut~
