Thoughts on translation: subtitles and fic practices

[nnozomi]

I’ve been meaning to put up something about translation, and lately I was talking with china_shop about titles in Guardian fic (titles for people, that is, not fics) and with nineveh_uk and azdak about weird subtitle translations, so I figure now is the time. Come and talk to me about problems (or solutions) with subtitles in C- or K- or J-dramas, and how you deal with, or prefer writers to deal with, similar issues in fic. (Not necessarily limited to Chinese/Korean/Japanese etc.! Anything goes.)
I think what I do in fic, and would prefer in other people’s fic and in subtitles, is to translate when I feel like it can be done without losing anything, and otherwise to romanize—Momokan to Coach Momo, Hei Pao Shi to the Black-Cloaked Envoy and so on, versus Chu-ge, Chiaki-sempai, Abe-kun, Xiao Bai (also known as Si-mei, but that’s harder, see below). (I turned on the English subtitles for the Lost Tomb thing to check a particular line, and was somewhat horrified to find “Xiao San-ye” translated as “Mr. Third Junior.” Which is…not actually wrong, but irredeemably clunky, and it’s a shame because that particular nickname/title is an amazing shorthand for Wu Xie’s local prestige/authority, his…to-be-protectedness?, and his connection to Sanshu.)

The sibling words are a headache all their own, especially in Chinese, somewhat in Korean, slightly in Japanese. Even though period/fantasy gives you some leeway, Wei Wuxian might tease Lan Wangji with “Lan-er-gege” but no one will take him seriously if he starts saying “Second Big Brother Lan”; Lan Wangji’s own register is so formal that he could probably get away with calling Lan Xichen “Brother” or “Older Brother” in English, but it still sounds a lot more natural to me for him to say “Xiongzhang.” And that’s before you get into “didi” and “da-ge” and “a-jie” and so on and so forth, and those are people who are related, more or less. Guo Changcheng is characterized in part by his tendency to call his coworkers “ge” and “jie,” but if there’s a way to do that in English, I sure don’t know it. (Even in Japanese, he would quite possibly use “sempai” but he wouldn’t use “oniisan” or “aneki” or whatever in the workplace; not a pan-Northeast-Asian thing.)

Honorific language, pronoun use, dialects. The classic thing in Guardian is in the bomb episode when Zhao Yunlan, annoyed with Shen Wei (for absolutely justifiable reasons, granted), nastily calls him the honorific 您 instead of the usual 你 second person, making Shen Wei protest “Don’t be that way.” There must be a lot of other incidences of this, probably even more in Korean and Japanese, but I can't think of any just now, ideas?

Translation into Japanese etc.—I always like seeing what people do with the pronouns. (My go-to explanation for non-Japanese speakers about the difference between the two male first-person pronouns “boku” and “ore” is “Luke Skywalker versus Han Solo,” and it usually gets through.) For readers of The Westing Game, in the scene where 17-year-old Theo is giving a semi-formal speech, he says “I’d like to explain why my partner and me…my partner and I…called this meeting,” and the Japanese translation has him say 俺、じゃなくて僕… switching from “ore,” teenage casual speech, to “boku,” more formal and polite. Brilliant. Years and years ago I read a Japanese translation of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonquest in which F’lar uses 私 in a formal meeting, 僕 to Lessa and 俺 to his dragon; hat off to translator.

(Almost completely unrelated: I saw an Untamed fic summary recently about how Nie Huaisang basically invents the fantasy-ancient-China makeup industry, and I am so regretful that the author didn’t choose to call it “The Rouge Cultivator.”)
Tell me how you think about all this! Any languages, any context.

Comments

[azdak]

Thinking about it, this particular issue perfectly encapsulates the difference between the "find the closest equivalent in the target language" and the "bend the target language to fit the mould of the original language" schools of translation theory. There is obviously a huge amount of cultural and emotional information conveyed by the use of honorifics and, equally obviously, English simply can't do that, so the translator is faced with a choice: do I just lose all this information for the sake of a translation that flows seamlessly, or am I willing to interrupt the flow in order to keep at least some of the information? Indeed, do I regard throwing the reader slightly off keel as a positive advantage because it opens their mind to linguistic and cultural possibilities outside the scope of the target language? I must admit that in my own fic (Nirvana in Fire fandom) I tend to come down on the side of finding the closest equivalent in English - in one, I opted for "cousin Jingyan" as the term used by close-ish relatives because (a) I don't think we ever hear anyone in canon call him any thing but Jingyan, so there isn't a pre-existing association with, say Jingyan-gege, and (b) I didn't feel up to navigating the minefield of who would have called him dage, gege, whatever the Chinese term for little brother is, and so on. It gets a bit harder where in canon a particular honorific is part of the characterisation (eg Nihuang's use of Lin Shu-gege and Fei Liu's of Su-gege), and here I would stick with not translating at all, because that particular form of address is already in the reader's ear and feels almost like a name. But what I absolutely don't want to do is scatter a sheen of minimal knowledge of Chinese honorifics over a fic in a way that makes them distract from the actual story (and would probably end being not quite right anyway. Many years ago I used to be in The Man from UNCLE fandom, and I've lost count of the number of fics I've read where "Illya Nickovetch" would be used as an affectionate mode of address, whereas in fact first name + patronymic is the equivalent of "Mr Kuryakin" in Russian. It would be so embarrassing to commit a similar error with Chinese and I simply don't know enough to be able to tell if I've got it wrong).

[nnozomi]

so the translator is faced with a choice: do I just lose all this information for the sake of a translation that flows seamlessly, or am I willing to interrupt the flow in order to keep at least some of the information?
Excellent way to put it. It's also probably even harder in subtitling, where everything is time-dependent, like a midway point between translation and interpretation...at least in a fic you can say the hell with it and put footnotes/endnotes in if needed.

do I regard throwing the reader slightly off keel as a positive advantage because it opens their mind to linguistic and cultural possibilities outside the scope of the target language?
In a way I have a hard time being objective about this, because my reaction is usually "ooh! language stuff I can learn about!", so I'm not sure how more use of source-language words in fic would come off to someone who is more inclined to feel "stop throwing me out of the story with words I don't know."

I am saving Nirvana in Fire for a rainy day (it's high on my list of C-dramas to watch one day, but I'm a very slow and hesitant watcher of visual canons), so I don't know the details, but your logic makes sense to me, especially distinguishing between familiar titles used in canon and making them up out of the blue.

Many years ago I used to be in The Man from UNCLE fandom, and I've lost count of the number of fics I've read where "Illya Nickovetch" would be used as an affectionate mode of address, whereas in fact first name + patronymic is the equivalent of "Mr Kuryakin" in Russian
Oh dear! I know just enough to pick that one up. I've occasionally just been too tempted to play with Chinese etc. to resist, and stuck in an author's note saying "please let me know if I've got it wrong..."