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. Yes, that makes sense to me as a translator (although most of my professional work is a lot more boring ;)). I've only once or twice written fic in English for Japanese canons, where theoretically I could know what they would be saying in Japanese, if that makes sense, and it's kind of a balancing act between "what flows naturally in English" and "what would not be outside the bounds of possibility in Japanese."
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 "-san" "-kun" are so simple and such a nightmare for the translator :) I never thought about dealing with changes over a long-running manga etc., but yeah, that does suggest that sticking relatively close to the original forms would be safer whenever possible, oh dear.
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.) I suppose one way to think of it is kind of as a dialect of English, so that the English of the translated manga is not necessarily exactly the same as that of something originally written in English for English-language readers, but is still readable and engaging English with its own slightly different conventions...
We could probably swap examples of this for ever, and they're all interesting. For a long time I've been messing around with a translation of some diaries and letters from the 1920s, for which I would really need to read a lot more actual original-English texts from that era so that I can get the voice right in English as well as translating the content accurately, for instance. So much going on.
Re: Long comment is long
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.
Yes, that makes sense to me as a translator (although most of my professional work is a lot more boring ;)). I've only once or twice written fic in English for Japanese canons, where theoretically I could know what they would be saying in Japanese, if that makes sense, and it's kind of a balancing act between "what flows naturally in English" and "what would not be outside the bounds of possibility in Japanese."
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
"-san" "-kun" are so simple and such a nightmare for the translator :) I never thought about dealing with changes over a long-running manga etc., but yeah, that does suggest that sticking relatively close to the original forms would be safer whenever possible, oh dear.
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.)
I suppose one way to think of it is kind of as a dialect of English, so that the English of the translated manga is not necessarily exactly the same as that of something originally written in English for English-language readers, but is still readable and engaging English with its own slightly different conventions...
We could probably swap examples of this for ever, and they're all interesting. For a long time I've been messing around with a translation of some diaries and letters from the 1920s, for which I would really need to read a lot more actual original-English texts from that era so that I can get the voice right in English as well as translating the content accurately, for instance. So much going on.