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ex_ayalesca554) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
forkedtongues2010-06-18 05:07 pm
ex_ayalesca554) wrote in forkedtongues2010-06-18 05:07 pm
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I haven't seen this on the comm, or a tag for it, so apologies if it has already come up.
What do you think of the eternal localization vs. translation debate? (I hope this isn't the translation community's equivalent of 'thoughts on yaoi' ...) I don't currently translate, but I would like to get back into it, so this has been on my mind.
I'm not talking about the infamous "This is White Snow, a town filled with snow. Enjoy the world of snow" type of purely bad translation. I mean: what do you do when your choices are losing your audience, losing some original flavor, or dumping 1 mb of footnotes.txt on the reader?
I used to be a part of a volunteer translation group; we translated Japanese computer games after obtaining explicit permission from the creators and we always gave credit, links to the source, etc etc. There were not-terribly-uncommon instances where a simple "translation", we felt, would miss the point for the reader. Sometimes you just had to go with the original and pray the player looks up the crazy words/person/whatever. But, sometimes, we caved in and substituted. For instance, a girl was singing a nonsensical song about dinner ingredients in the enka style, which was obvious from the script but would be utterly lost on most players. So instead we filked a very well-known English song and made it about food. For puns, which were very frequent, we would almost never use the original wordplay; we'd make a different set of puns around the same idea (we did occasionally get very lucky and were able to make a parallel set of jokes).
I was not responsible for most of those examples, but sometimes I wonder if that - and similar things that we changed - benefitted the players. It is on the one hand an attempt to preserve the "flavor" of the scene; on the other hand we lose what the author had in mind. I will say that we always sent the translations to the writer, with an explanation of the English (if we knew they did not speak it), and asked for their approval.
So, I'm asking those who engage in translating here, especially of modern pieces that can have tons of the original language's pop culture references that the English-only-speaking audience will never, ever get -- do you have guidelines? Do you have categories of things you will always preserve? Does it depend on whether it's for public reception or just your friends or your parents? Do you treat novels, poetry, BBS, etc differently?
And for a lighter story, a brief (mis)adventure I had in "translation".
I had a friend who was translating a movie script. She called me up and asked if I could think of a way to say 擋酒/挡酒 in English. It literally means "deflect alcohol". The term was explained to me (who wasn't up on boozing culture in the motherland) that it's basically when A is trying to get B drunk, and C ~heroically~ prevents B from getting drunk, usually by drinking B's booze for them. I suggested "cocktailblocking".
I don't know if she went on to use it. But I was proud of it, so I later told this joke to some incoming Chinese students ... only to find that some of them didn't know what pun I was making. And demanded an explanation. While onlookers laughed at me.
Later I was told that I explained cockblocking - in Mandarin - very poorly. >_>
What do you think of the eternal localization vs. translation debate? (I hope this isn't the translation community's equivalent of 'thoughts on yaoi' ...) I don't currently translate, but I would like to get back into it, so this has been on my mind.
I'm not talking about the infamous "This is White Snow, a town filled with snow. Enjoy the world of snow" type of purely bad translation. I mean: what do you do when your choices are losing your audience, losing some original flavor, or dumping 1 mb of footnotes.txt on the reader?
I used to be a part of a volunteer translation group; we translated Japanese computer games after obtaining explicit permission from the creators and we always gave credit, links to the source, etc etc. There were not-terribly-uncommon instances where a simple "translation", we felt, would miss the point for the reader. Sometimes you just had to go with the original and pray the player looks up the crazy words/person/whatever. But, sometimes, we caved in and substituted. For instance, a girl was singing a nonsensical song about dinner ingredients in the enka style, which was obvious from the script but would be utterly lost on most players. So instead we filked a very well-known English song and made it about food. For puns, which were very frequent, we would almost never use the original wordplay; we'd make a different set of puns around the same idea (we did occasionally get very lucky and were able to make a parallel set of jokes).
I was not responsible for most of those examples, but sometimes I wonder if that - and similar things that we changed - benefitted the players. It is on the one hand an attempt to preserve the "flavor" of the scene; on the other hand we lose what the author had in mind. I will say that we always sent the translations to the writer, with an explanation of the English (if we knew they did not speak it), and asked for their approval.
So, I'm asking those who engage in translating here, especially of modern pieces that can have tons of the original language's pop culture references that the English-only-speaking audience will never, ever get -- do you have guidelines? Do you have categories of things you will always preserve? Does it depend on whether it's for public reception or just your friends or your parents? Do you treat novels, poetry, BBS, etc differently?
And for a lighter story, a brief (mis)adventure I had in "translation".
I had a friend who was translating a movie script. She called me up and asked if I could think of a way to say 擋酒/挡酒 in English. It literally means "deflect alcohol". The term was explained to me (who wasn't up on boozing culture in the motherland) that it's basically when A is trying to get B drunk, and C ~heroically~ prevents B from getting drunk, usually by drinking B's booze for them. I suggested "cocktailblocking".
I don't know if she went on to use it. But I was proud of it, so I later told this joke to some incoming Chinese students ... only to find that some of them didn't know what pun I was making. And demanded an explanation. While onlookers laughed at me.
Later I was told that I explained cockblocking - in Mandarin - very poorly. >_>