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btw, for ppl interested in translation, here is a more technical version of Wyatt’s argument: (1/?)
2/ Translation is an art if you’re translating Proust or La Fontaine or something. When the whole value of a work is the beauty of the individual sentences, the meter, the rhymes, wordplay and insinuations, then a great translation requires genius
3/ Translation is technically demanding if you are translating philosophy or science. The first priority is to keep all terminological referents constant, and it may be hard to spot them all; harder still is making sure that the morphemes of words preserve implied maps b/w them
4/ (Questions like: do “mass” and “massive” preserve their conceptual relationship?)... this isn’t “art” exactly, it’s all algorithmic and tedious, but it does require intelligence to decide what you’re gonna do and execute well.
5/ Translating dialogue in drama/tv etc requires less art bc there is less to say and short, choppy sentences. Translating comic books requires very little vision at all bc so much info is conveyed by the panel art and so little by the words
6/ This isn’t to say that you don’t need to be fluent, smart, competent to do a successful translation. (If you’re dumb you will frequently misunderstand what phrases mean *even in your native language*, so ofc the translation is bad/dead/wrong)
7/ However, perhaps surprisingly, for about 20yrs anime & manga have attracted cliques of fanatics who have the necessary skills to get this done as a part-time hobby, and do quite a good job of it. It’s like a charitable army of experienced, perfectionist roof-layers
8/ And yes, the roofing analogy is apt. The error mode isn’t the shingles being the wrong color of an aesthetically unpleasing shape, it’s water leaking in and destroying the house
8/ For any 2 languages there are grammatical constructions that exist in one but not in the other. In theory this gives rise to multiple grammatically valid substitutes per sentence. In practice this isn’t what causes bad translations
10/ An example of something I’ve noticed is often flubbed: for humor or historical flavor, japanese authors have characters speak archaic japanese. The problem with translating this isn’t that English lacks archaic forms, it’s that *Anglo translators don’t know Middle English*
11/ ... so they can randomly grope for something they think sounds archaic, and it sounds as bad as a machine translation done by a foreigner. Or they just add the archaic Japanese morphological suffixes to English words, which is lol but a good compromise I guess
12/ What is far more common than actual linguistic asymmetries are *cultural* asymmetries where even a sentence that uniquely translates the original sounds too unusual (if the original was normal) or too normal (if the original was supposed to carry some unusual connotation)
13/ I won’t go much deeper into detail about those cases other than to say that *there also* the amateur translators who just want to be accurate seem to be much more qualified, careful, and successful than the ppl paid to make licensed translations
14/ I think the answer is pretty simple, in the end. When jap culture was v obscure in the US, the ppl who liked it liked it a *lot* and this great enjoyment stemmed partially from enjoying all of its aspects, incl. the slightly different cultural sensibility japanese media has
15/ As market for it grows larger and larger, a growing share of audience like it “just enough” and mainly for pretty simple (but justifiable) reasons: “the robots are big”, “those girls are cute”, etc. For them, that slightly different cultural sensibility is a stumbling block
16/ Partly to satisfy the newer, bigger audience, and (realistically) mostly with the pipe dream of expanding it even more to ppl who are even less interested, there is a strong incentive to rewrite the words to make it totally colloquial as tho the story were set in the USA
17/ For part of the current audience and all of the imaginary future audience, the dialogue is meaningless: they only notice it when the foreignness is too much and distracts them from the big robot
18/ Any explanation of bad official translations that revolves around 2021 culture wars can’t be complete bc even in the ‘90s the officially licensed english dubs were worse than literal subtitles subsequently produced as a hobby. Viz wanted to make anime less weird, too!
19/ I’m just observing the phenomenon, not criticizing anyone who prefers colloquial translations of chank cartoons. However I think anyone who still has dvd’s of dubbed anime from ‘80s or ‘90s will agree that in the process of trying to make it colloquial and broaden its appeal,
20/... those companies wrote some bizarrely stilted scenes. Like a Tommy Wiseau movie: sometimes totally flat, other times awkwardly overdramatic. Why? Well, maybe bc if they had the talent to write a whole new script they wouldn’t be working as a translator...?
21/ To summarize: Everything interesting to be said about translation is about highly literary novels, poetry, and theoretical science. As such it’s boring to talk about cases where translation doesn’t pose any intellectually fascinating challenges, but this is such a case.
22/ The puns in Asterix are frequently not just verbal puns (which you have to be both lucky and smart to translate at all...) but extended parodies of french politicians and celebrities. You either want to be exposed to a different culture, or you don’t https://twitter.com/JoeClibbens/status/1386730216400330753?s=20
23/Absolutely true! But generally speaking paid ppl produce better results than volunteers. To test this hypothesis, has anyone produced translations both for respect and as a licensed translator? https://twitter.com/00lshr/status/1386726432022405123?s=20
24/ I’ll take your “aesthetically complex sentences” and raise you “what if it was a story about a bunch of emigre Russian linguists” https://twitter.com/CaveatSpecter/status/1386732779027714050?s=20
25/ Investigation into why certain anime franchises attract undesirable deviants is ongoing https://twitter.com/ruintal/status/1386720905590681603?s=20
26/ This is two separate q’s: i) Why to paraphiliacs write faster than ppl who have no sexual interest in the same topics? ii) Why is a large symbolic interdiction of false + obscene material better than fines and marginalization? https://twitter.com/MetricReject/status/1386718127933825025?s=20
27/ illustrates point that what is “untranslatable” is cultural /theor’l, not lexical. Poshlost ~ vulgarity or meanness; poshlyj = vulgar, indeed is a synonym for vulgarnyj (isn’t it?); what’s untranslatable is semantic tradition word has in Russian lit https://twitter.com/ElectronNightm1/status/1386719073384509440?s=20
28/ (in the same way “founding fathers” is eminently translatable into other languages, except those nations don’t *have* founding fathers bc the aftermath of the American Revolution was unique, so it can’t mean the same thing to them, can it?)
