(I'm focusing entirely on things like honorifics/titles here; in terms of regular nouns and whatnot, I'm generally in favor of translating them whenever reasonably possible, but even that's very much a spectrum. Like, I would say "hot spring" instead of "onsen", sure, but do we then use "raw fish" instead of "sashimi"? Clearly not. But there's a lot of gray area between those things where we don't necessarily have a tidy corresponding word and also haven't adopted the loanword.)
So first off, I think of translation choices and fic practices (when writing fic for a canon where I don't speak the source language) as distinct things, although obviously they're very closely related and overlap heavily. One is "how can I convey what the writer wanted to say?" and the other is "how can I convey what I want to say as a writer?" To me, the former is far more complex because there's a whole extra layer of responsibility in there (to both the writer and the audience) and because there's going to be so much nuance and potential for playfulness the language use that there just won't be in anything I write myself in English.
Like, as a fic writer I make similar choices to the ones I would in working on a subtitle script, because I personally believe that a lot of honorifics just don't translate well/smoothly, but I'm also not going to be trying to do anything especially subtle with the Chinese or Japanese nuances in my own fic.
(I hope this all makes sense--I have time to write a comment now, but am not quite awake yet!)
In terms of translation, this is all something I wrestle with professionally as a manga rewriter. (Emphasis on NOT A TRANSLATOR; I don't speak Japanese, which on the one hand sucks, but on the other hand means I'm very much approaching my own work with an eye to how it'll read to an English-speaking audience, while doing all I can to retain nuance [I ask the translators a lot of questions].) Since I've worked for multiple publishers and their various house style guides are very different, I have a lot of hands-on experience with both approaches to honorifics--some publishers always retain them (in series that are actually set in Japan) and others only keep them if they're "necessary" (which is a call made by the editorial department).
And coming from that perspective, my personal feeling both on the creative side and the audience side is that I generally have an extremely strong preference for retaining things like honorifics from the source language. Often the basic everyday honorifics/titles can be approximated in English, or dropped entirely (as in stories set in high schools, where it reads much more naturally in English to drop the students' use of "-san" or "-kun" etc. entirely rather than try to turn it into them addressing each other as "Miss [x]"...but as soon as you get into any kind of playfulness or characters changing how they address each other, which happens ALL THE TIME in manga, at least, your nuance is out the window, because English rarely happens to conveniently have anything natural-sounding that corresponds to the specific change.
Without going into specific examples, I can say that, when house style dictates not generally retaining honorifics, I've dealt with situations where:
a) characters switch how they address each other late in the story in ways that can't just be reflected by tweaking the form of address in the English version, resulting in a fairly significant change from the literal meaning of their original dialogue (in just a couple of scenes, fortunately) in order to convey the emotional shift and what the change actually reflects about their relationships
and/or b) characters use cutesy or clever variations on everyday honorifics to indicate playfulness or subtle roleplay or any manner of things and we wind up retaining those specific honorifics and footnoting them even though the overall dialogue doesn't have the everyday ones at all, because there HAS to be something there in the English.
(IMO, manga is a pretty extreme example for this sort of discussion, but for reasons that are relevant to any episodic source material. If someone's translating a standalone novel, they can read the entire thing first and see where potential pitfalls or tricky bits are and do the work with that in mind all along; if you know that characters are going to make significant changes to how they address each other, you can make all your decisions in advance. But that's frequently impossible in episodic stories, and retaining at least a reasonable set of honorifics/titles/etc. makes it much less likely that you'll have to do damage control partway through when it's too late to go back and change what you did in the first half.)
(And then there're other similar challenges, like when a character refers to themselves in third person in Japanese, which happens a lot in manga. Is it going to "mean something" later? Is there a rhyme or reason to when they suddenly drop in and out of it and use first person? Is there, heaven forbid, a multi-page conversation in your final volume where a character is asked and then explains WHY they use third person, and God help you if you switched that character to speaking in first person all along? Because there's almost always going to be SOMETHING. But is there any way for a character to refer to themselves in third person that sounds at all natural in English? Nope.
For myself, I will absolutely keep the stilted feel of that third-person speech in English in order to hang onto the significance of it fluctuating and to avoid needing to massively tweak major emotional scenes to work around our own translation choices. But it's frustrating, because there's that constant reminder to the reader that they're ~reading a translation~, when my job is literally to make things read so naturally in English that you can almost forget it's not the original version.)
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timeasmymeasure
Long comment is long
Date: 2020-11-16 04:25 pm (UTC)(I'm focusing entirely on things like honorifics/titles here; in terms of regular nouns and whatnot, I'm generally in favor of translating them whenever reasonably possible, but even that's very much a spectrum. Like, I would say "hot spring" instead of "onsen", sure, but do we then use "raw fish" instead of "sashimi"? Clearly not. But there's a lot of gray area between those things where we don't necessarily have a tidy corresponding word and also haven't adopted the loanword.)
So first off, I think of translation choices and fic practices (when writing fic for a canon where I don't speak the source language) as distinct things, although obviously they're very closely related and overlap heavily. One is "how can I convey what the writer wanted to say?" and the other is "how can I convey what I want to say as a writer?" To me, the former is far more complex because there's a whole extra layer of responsibility in there (to both the writer and the audience) and because there's going to be so much nuance and potential for playfulness the language use that there just won't be in anything I write myself in English.
Like, as a fic writer I make similar choices to the ones I would in working on a subtitle script, because I personally believe that a lot of honorifics just don't translate well/smoothly, but I'm also not going to be trying to do anything especially subtle with the Chinese or Japanese nuances in my own fic.
(I hope this all makes sense--I have time to write a comment now, but am not quite awake yet!)
In terms of translation, this is all something I wrestle with professionally as a manga rewriter. (Emphasis on NOT A TRANSLATOR; I don't speak Japanese, which on the one hand sucks, but on the other hand means I'm very much approaching my own work with an eye to how it'll read to an English-speaking audience, while doing all I can to retain nuance [I ask the translators a lot of questions].) Since I've worked for multiple publishers and their various house style guides are very different, I have a lot of hands-on experience with both approaches to honorifics--some publishers always retain them (in series that are actually set in Japan) and others only keep them if they're "necessary" (which is a call made by the editorial department).
And coming from that perspective, my personal feeling both on the creative side and the audience side is that I generally have an extremely strong preference for retaining things like honorifics from the source language. Often the basic everyday honorifics/titles can be approximated in English, or dropped entirely (as in stories set in high schools, where it reads much more naturally in English to drop the students' use of "-san" or "-kun" etc. entirely rather than try to turn it into them addressing each other as "Miss [x]"...but as soon as you get into any kind of playfulness or characters changing how they address each other, which happens ALL THE TIME in manga, at least, your nuance is out the window, because English rarely happens to conveniently have anything natural-sounding that corresponds to the specific change.
Without going into specific examples, I can say that, when house style dictates not generally retaining honorifics, I've dealt with situations where:
a) characters switch how they address each other late in the story in ways that can't just be reflected by tweaking the form of address in the English version, resulting in a fairly significant change from the literal meaning of their original dialogue (in just a couple of scenes, fortunately) in order to convey the emotional shift and what the change actually reflects about their relationships
and/or b) characters use cutesy or clever variations on everyday honorifics to indicate playfulness or subtle roleplay or any manner of things and we wind up retaining those specific honorifics and footnoting them even though the overall dialogue doesn't have the everyday ones at all, because there HAS to be something there in the English.
(IMO, manga is a pretty extreme example for this sort of discussion, but for reasons that are relevant to any episodic source material. If someone's translating a standalone novel, they can read the entire thing first and see where potential pitfalls or tricky bits are and do the work with that in mind all along; if you know that characters are going to make significant changes to how they address each other, you can make all your decisions in advance. But that's frequently impossible in episodic stories, and retaining at least a reasonable set of honorifics/titles/etc. makes it much less likely that you'll have to do damage control partway through when it's too late to go back and change what you did in the first half.)
(And then there're other similar challenges, like when a character refers to themselves in third person in Japanese, which happens a lot in manga. Is it going to "mean something" later? Is there a rhyme or reason to when they suddenly drop in and out of it and use first person? Is there, heaven forbid, a multi-page conversation in your final volume where a character is asked and then explains WHY they use third person, and God help you if you switched that character to speaking in first person all along? Because there's almost always going to be SOMETHING. But is there any way for a character to refer to themselves in third person that sounds at all natural in English? Nope.
For myself, I will absolutely keep the stilted feel of that third-person speech in English in order to hang onto the significance of it fluctuating and to avoid needing to massively tweak major emotional scenes to work around our own translation choices. But it's frustrating, because there's that constant reminder to the reader that they're ~reading a translation~, when my job is literally to make things read so naturally in English that you can almost forget it's not the original version.)