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Thoughts on translation: subtitles and fic practices
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.
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.
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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
Yes, totally agreed! Not a clear line at all, alas - when do you start losing something? how much loss is acceptable? Hell if I know. Like, I'm totally for "Black-Cloaked Envoy", except when I'm not, and I still don't know when exactly I use Hei Pao Shi instead. Or when I go for something like "Lord Envoy" as a form of address, which doesn't even have a full equivalent in canon, but just works so well in English! Ugh.
and was somewhat horrified to find “Xiao San-ye” translated as “Mr. Third Junior.” Which is…not actually wrong, but irredeemably clunky
Right???? Also, the many times the subtitles just entirely gloss over what the characters call each other, like ever time someone says "Xiaoge" and it's subtitled as "Kylin". (Which in turn is already a transcription of his name - 起灵, Qiling, not Qilin - that I'm not sure I'm on board with ...)
Totally agreed on the sibling words, and when you get to things like "shijie" it becomes totally hopeless. "Older martial sister"? No, thanks. But it matters that that's what Wei Wuxian calls her, and shows his position in that family. (And is part of the reason, no doubt, why people don't take Jiang Yanli seriously when she claims him as her didi.)
I'm not sure even about completely (non-clunkily) translatable titles/forms of address either. I mean, in German translations we often use "Mr" etc. when something is set in the US/UK, and English texts use "Monsieur/Madame" sometimes, etc., and I don't know where to draw the line. So I go by what feels right, which may change from one day or text to the next. *g*
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
That is such a great detail in a great scene! And so difficult to translate.
Like, German has formal and informal "you", but you couldn't map those onto the Chinese pronouns, and my first instinct would be to go for something more archaic in this case (Ihr rather than Sie, maybe a mocking "Euer Gnaden"), but then you introduce another element that's not present in the original.
and I am so regretful that the author didn’t choose to call it “The Rouge Cultivator.”
OMG!!!!! :D :D :D
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Now that you mention it, this is true. I was a little bit used to that from short forays into manga-based fic writing, but in Japanese I'm confident enough to pick and choose my own translation conventions, not so in Chinese, God knows.
Also, the many times the subtitles just entirely gloss over what the characters call each other, like ever time someone says "Xiaoge" and it's subtitled as "Kylin"
I chattered at marycrawford above a LOT about nicknames in the Lost Tomb thing, but basically everyone has one, don't they? Sometimes three (six! nine!). Definitely a subtitler's headache, although that said they could have done so much better, especially because the wealth of nicknames is part of the fun and a lot of the characterization of the relationships. (Bai Haotian = Xiao Bai, Bai-jingli, si-mei and so on depending on who's talking to her, just for one, plus once when Wu Xie gets annoyed and says "Haotian-tongzhi!").
and when you get to things like "shijie" it becomes totally hopeless.
As you say--it looks like most fics just say "shijie" and people know what it means, and I can't imagine a translation that would be both effective and natural; I feel like that applies to a lot of the xianxia stuff.
my first instinct would be to go for something more archaic in this case (Ihr rather than Sie, maybe a mocking "Euer Gnaden"), but then you introduce another element that's not present in the original.
still, it would be closer than you can get in English, I think--translating the spirit of the thing. That one is particularly tough because he has to be saying something specific there for Shen Wei to react to in his next line. I might do something like "After you, honored Professor," which is not great either... Interesting to hear how German and other languages might cope.
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(also I have no idea what the deal with various subtitle versions is, hopefully at some point everybody can have nice things? no clue. I'm sticking to the Chinese ones for the moment myself.)
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And I so envy you the ability to read the Chinese subs! (Are there Chinese softsubs around somewhere, do you know?)
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The author didn't bother giving her one. :( Afaik, her canon name is "mute girl" - which is at least in line with "Glasses" and "Sleeveless Jacket" as character names.
hopefully at some point everybody can have nice things?
This! Made me laugh! :D
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