Is anyone interested in translating manga? This would be a good chance for you to practice reading kanji and translating, as well as brushing up your English through the help of proofreaders who read over your translation script.

Scanlating manga has been a fun hobby for me, and thanks to it now I had started studying Japanese as well. I wonder if there're many people who also wanted to study a language just to read comics.

I initially started learning Japanese so that I could read Manga because they weren't being translated fast enough. By the time I had learned enough to read basic manga (I'm slow) fan translators had kicked into high gear and almost everything is translated before I know it's out.

I still hang on for a few books that are well above my level, and because I enjoy it, but my initial reason was just manga.

I don't have any inclination to get caught up in fansubbing or translating, though.

I must say when I was at university the manga and anime "crowd" dropped out first.

wccrawford Wrote:I initially started learning Japanese so that I could read Manga because they weren't being translated fast enough. By the time I had learned enough to read basic manga (I'm slow) fan translators had kicked into high gear and almost everything is translated before I know it's out.

I still hang on for a few books that are well above my level, and because I enjoy it, but my initial reason was just manga.

I don't have any inclination to get caught up in fansubbing or translating, though.

Almost every fansub/scanlation (and most pro jobs) I've ever seen/read was extremely horrible, so you still get to enjoy the benefit of reading the original Japanese.

-Translation is too literal
-Translation is too liberal
-Translation is not literary enough (translator doesn't have good English writing skill)
-Translation is flat out wrong or contains frequent omissions
-Translation contains constant weaboo-isms like keeping name suffixes (san etc) and words in Japanese for no reason

Jarvik7 Wrote:Almost every fansub/scanlation (and most pro jobs) I've ever seen/read was extremely horrible, so you still get to enjoy the benefit of reading the original Japanese.

-Translation is too literal
-Translation is too liberal
-Translation is not literary enough (translator doesn't have good English writing skill)
-Translation is flat out wrong or contains frequent omissions
-Translation contains constant weaboo-isms like keeping name suffixes (san etc) and words in Japanese for no reason

Your words might have had a little weight if you can prove YOUR translation is better than the majority, or giving a more definitive fact than a general "almost every fansub/scanlation". How many anime/manga have you watched/read? How many group did you follow? Assuming by oneself that one had seen it all is not a pretty sight, and makes one look arrogant.

I agree that books would best to be enjoyed in their original language, but not everyone has the means or ability to learn another language. And we as fans translate something to spread our love of a series to other fans. Translation is both an aid and an art.

Japanese has things that can't be mapped into another language, and honorific is one of those things. Let's say, two students who just met for the first time will call each other "-san", after they became friends the "-san" was naturally dropped and they call each other by name. As such, skipping honorific in translation is nothing more than being stupid, because the transition in people's relationship would be lost.

Saluki Wrote:Your words might have had a little weight if you can prove YOUR translation is better than the majority, or giving a more definitive fact than a general "almost every fansub/scanlation". How many anime/manga have you watched/read? How many group did you follow? Assuming by oneself that one had seen it all is not a pretty sight, and makes one look arrogant.

I agree that books would best to be enjoyed in their original language, but not everyone has the means or ability to learn another language. And we as fans translate something to spread our love of a series to other fans. Translation is both an aid and an art.

Japanese has things that can't be mapped into another language, and honorific is one of those things. Let's say, two students who just met for the first time will call each other "-san", after they became friends the "-san" was naturally dropped and they call each other by name. As such, skipping honorific in translation is nothing more than being stupid, because the transition in people's relationship would be lost.

I don't know why you are taking this personally as I have no idea who you are and thus was not targeting anything you translated specifically. If you read my post for comprehension you would see that I wrote "almost every fansub/scanslation I've seen/read", not every one that has ever existed anywhere in any language.

I am stating my informed opinion based on my experiences watching subtitled media as someone fluent in Japanese and as a trained professional translator. I am under no obligation to prove my skill to you or anyone else in order to defend my opinion.

Again, if you bothered reading my post for comprehension, you would see that I was responding to someone who DOES have the ability to consume the original media as he is learning Japanese.

Using -san to convey meaning is the sign of an unskilled/lazy translator or someone who just wants to inject "Japaneseness" (which may be justified depending on the story, such as an East meets West scenario). There are ways to convey that nuance textually using only English (such as by making the dialogue as a whole more familiar - this is what I meant by not being literary enough). Yes sometimes there are words which would be more unnatural shoehorned into English than just giving the Japanese and a footnote (ex: 'kotatsu'), but -san is not one of those.

Saluki Wrote:Japanese has things that can't be mapped into another language, and honorific is one of those things. Let's say, two students who just met for the first time will call each other "-san", after they became friends the "-san" was naturally dropped and they call each other by name. As such, skipping honorific in translation is nothing more than being stupid, because the transition in people's relationship would be lost.

Some things can be mapped by being omitted. Weaboos may know -chan, -kun etc, but you'd have to assume the average reader wouldn't appreciate the nuance of such things. Even weaboos add them after their own names, so clearly they don't quite get it either. There are other ways to portray the distance between characters, and finding them is part of the skill of translating and hardly something I'd call stupid. I guess it comes down to how you judge your audience, but, personally, I think it sounds awful and it made me cringe even before I started learning Japanese.

@Javizy: Indeed. Intentional omission of unimportant awkward content is a powerful in making good translations.

For my earlier kotatsu example, while translating it as "heated table" or something similarly silly is right out, it can simply be called "table" if the fact that it's a kotatsu (as opposed to a chabudai or coffee table) is not important.

Weaboo-isms essentially mean the translator is lazy and expects the consumer to already have working knowledge of certain aspects of Japanese language. -san is actually the least offensive example. I've seen stuff like KAWAII, CHIKARA, KAMI etc etc left in for no apparent reason. There is a good blog rant about the scene somewhere.

One reason I used to prefer (some) fan translations to professional ones is that they left in things like -san. A professional translation has to take in to account that most people won't know or care what these words mean, but it's fine for a fan translation to be written specifically for manga fans. Most translators that leave them in also include a brief explanation and that's enough to make it accessible to new readers.

And Jarvik7, the reason the OP took your post personally is quite obvious if you read your post "for comprehension" (as opposed to?). You just insulted him, me and every translator/ reader who likes to keep some of the original Japanese.

P.s. Apologies can be made through paypal...?

Splatted Wrote:Most translators that leave them in also include a brief explanation and that's enough to make it accessible to new readers.

I don't think even the most clueless person needs an explanation for what -san is. The question is - why do people think that the translation needs extra Japanese flavor by adding these things? The shows are already about Japanese people in Japanese settings talking about Japanese things. Isn't that enough?

Ok, I'm sorry that I offended translators who give up whenever they run into slightly difficult to translate text. If you like random Japanese vocab needlessly sprinkled in your translations go ahead, but its still a bad translation and represents fetishization of Japan (aka weaboo).

In all seriousness though I was insulting the product not the translator. Fan translators are volunteers (who generally seem to be young and still learning Japanese) doing it for fun so whatever. Weaboo-isms were just one item on my list and not one of the most important ones. I actually prefer fan subs to most pro subs since pro subs tend to be too liberal and kill the story, at least for more mainstream works. I also liked footnotes when there was a historical/cultural reference in the dialogue.

ps: reading for comprehension as opposed to skimming the post and then counter-arguing stuff that doesn't exist.

Jarvik7 Wrote:weaboo

Since you like this word, I thought I'd correct your typo: It is correctly spelled "weeaboo".

Actually this thread I think represents the first time I ever used it, hence the misspelling.

I don't use 4chan or hang out in any anime-scene places and I don't know anyone with that kind of Japan fetish even if they are anime otaku and do cosplay etc.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Weaboo-isms essentially mean the translator is lazy and expects the consumer to already have working knowledge of certain aspects of Japanese language. -san is actually the least offensive example. I've seen stuff like KAWAII, CHIKARA, KAMI etc etc left in for no apparent reason. There is a good blog rant about the scene somewhere.

http://d37nnnqwv9amwr.cloudfront.net/ent...eikaku.jpg

Exactly.

...Right. Now the picture is really stupid, but I think leaving words like kotatsu or kami may be beneficial, people may learn new things about culture that way they might not come across otherwise. Adding -sama, -dono etc. is ok as well I believe (though I prefer proper English translation here).... It is not a professional translation... In that respect - keeping in mind your specific target audience - it does not seem that inappropriate to me.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:Weaboo-isms essentially mean the translator is lazy and expects the consumer to already have working knowledge of certain aspects of Japanese language. -san is actually the least offensive example. I've seen stuff like KAWAII, CHIKARA, KAMI etc etc left in for no apparent reason. There is a good blog rant about the scene somewhere.

http://d37nnnqwv9amwr.cloudfront.net/ent...eikaku.jpg

Choked on my soda when I saw this.

Get another soda and watch this:

http://i.imgur.com/4GQW8.jpg

I guess I'm weird because I appreciate leaving in the "san" etc, as well as other things that are tough to translate. I suppose you could say "Ms., Mrs., Mr. lord, senior", etc., but it isn't quite the same. I think lots of things like that are lost in translation.

In my mind it's actually the viewer's laziness and ignorance that prevents most translators from including those terms. Some Americans would be instantly confused and wouldn't want to watch more :-). God forbid they have to read subtitles in general and also figure out what honorifics mean!

jishera Wrote:I guess I'm weird because I appreciate leaving in the "san" etc, as well as other things that are tough to translate. I suppose you could say "Ms., Mrs., Mr. lord, senior", etc., but it isn't quite the same. I think lots of things like that are lost in translation.

In my mind it's actually the viewer's laziness and ignorance that prevents most translators from including those terms. Some Americans would be instantly confused and wouldn't want to watch more :-). God forbid they have to read subtitles in general and also figure out what honorifics mean!

Are you serious? You think the viewer is lazy for not knowing something about a different language when they are watching something in English? Try taking yourself out of the mindset of someone familiar with the language and imagine what it would be like.

Imagine you're watching a movie translated from Hindi(or some other language if you happen to speak Hindi). Everything seems to be going fine until, BAM, you're smacked with some random Hindi term which you haven't the slightest idea about. How would it feel? You probably won't be completely lost just because you didn't know that one word, but it would be jarring and completely take you out of the movie. You'd probably be kind of pissed that the translator was arrogant enough to expect you to know this thing you have absolutely no reason to know, right? Sure you can go and look it up in a matter of seconds, but you're doing the translator's job for them.

Also, translating Japanese honorifics directly into Mr., Mrs., etc. is both lazy and incorrect. I'm pretty sure that's not what Jarvik was talking about in regards to alternatives to leaving the honorifics in.

Another problem is that most anime fans don't actually know what "honorifics" mean. They have some general, flawed idea of the differences between -san, -chan, etc. but they basically don't have a clue. With their half-knowledge, they get just as much out of the suffixes being there than not being there.

In my experience, the main reason american otaku like the suffixes left in is that it allows them to pretend that they "know some Japanese" and acts as a further shibboleth separating the real fans from not real fans.

Onelove_yo Wrote:Imagine you're watching a movie translated from Hindi(or some other language if you happen to speak Hindi). Everything seems to be going fine until, BAM, you're smacked with some random Hindi term which you haven't the slightest idea about.

actually, i'd think it was quite cool. i like learning a few bits of languages from watching foreign films. if they could leave a few words in and have those cultural notes on top, it'd be quite nice.

i don't know if doing that in translation is actually fetishisation itself, it probably just seems like that because of the way weeaboo culture fetishises japan and how they use the terms they've learned.

I don't know about English, but in Russian translations of foreign literature, classic and modern alike, it is pretty much standard practice to leave honorifics, like Mister, Herr, Monsieur or Pan, untranslated. It's less common with honorifics from less well-known cultures that the Russian reader can't be expected to know, but "-san" is definitely not one of those, so this never seemed like something weeaboo-ish to me. I've just skimmed through some books translated by Grigory Chkhartishvili (better known as a mystery writer by the pen name of Boris Akunin), the most renowned Japanese-to-Russian literary translator, who even got awarded with the Order of the Rising Sun, and it looks like he leaves most honorifics untranslated and gives an explanatory footnote whenever he introduces "-chan" or "-sama". Again, this might be culture-specific, but Russian translations of classics do tend to have many footnotes (not so much in modern books like Harry Potter), so this doesn't strike anyone as particularly unprofessional.

It's a little less common to pair up foreign honorifics with Russian common nouns, so seeing things like "enemy-san" or "Successor-sama" in fan translations does make me cringe quite a bit.

Standards differ between cultures. It is not acceptable in English.

It IS acceptable in Japanese, or rather, direct literal translations are the norm for translating into Japanese. This is why Japanese translations/dubs of western content seem so corny, and why Japanese translators do such a bad job of J-E (they are used to doing E-J).

IceCream: learning stuff is great, but if the movie translation is serving as a textbook it is a distraction from the story and ruins immersion.

Leaving such things in is sometimes the right choice, like leaving in "herr" of "fuhrer" in a WW2 movie to give a flavor of ZE GERMANZ, but leaving in similar words in a contemporary drama is bad form as the fact that these people are Germans has nothing to do with the story. In the case of something like an sf/fantasy anime, there is a very good chance that none of the characters are even Japanese.

Like I said before, honorifics are the most innocent example. Stuff like "just according to keikaku" is indefensible.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Like I said before, honorifics are the most innocent example. Stuff like "just according to keikaku" is indefensible.

I'm pretty sure that that picture was just a spoof.