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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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are you kidding? This is a post expressly for people who are interested in this kind of thing, like me! My translation work is almost exclusively into English, so I've rarely had cause to think about translating into a language with more rather than fewer levels of formality/familiarity etc. As china_shop says above, fascinating to think about, and if you have any specific examples of going from Chinese to German in Guardian etc. I'd love to hear about it.
On the other hand, the team documents for the German viki teams are full of lists like "this person addresses these persons as X" "this person addresses other persons as Y". Which is a pain.
I don't know, probably a pain but good for consistency? It sounds like the drama version of the glossaries I use for technical translation...
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I don't know, probably a pain but good for consistency?
Sure, that's why they have them. They're absolutely necessary. But they take up a good part of the document. Otoh, the other languages I know all distinguish between formal and informal address, only English doesn't, which makes it doubly frustrating that all the viki translation goes through English.
if you have any specific examples of going from Chinese to German in Guardian etc. I'd love to hear about it.
I don't think so. I never translate directly from Chinese to German. What annoys me on viki is that the brother/sister thing is kept a lot of the time, which sounds terrible in German. I guess it sounds terrible in English as well, but I think I've just gotten used to it?
The only thing that comes to mind now at all is "jia you!" which is always translated into "fighting!" in English, which is already bad enough and i hate it so much. The German teams often just leave it as "jia you", which is sad, because there is a German idiom "Gib Gas!" which *literally* means "add fuel". There are lots and lots of fitting idioms in German that one could use. But so far I haven't had much luck convincing team leaders to get a little more free with that. Again, this has nothing to do with forms of address. :) It's just one of my pet peeves when working on viki.
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I am always interested in translation issues! One thing I like about these discussions is the way they spread out in all directions.
which makes it doubly frustrating that all the viki translation goes through English.
Ah, yeah, I can see that. (Technical translation between Japanese and other languages often uses English as a go-between (translating from Japanese to English and then to German or Vietnamese or whatever), so if the English text isn't well done, it screws up the final target language too. Same in this context, I suppose...)
there is a German idiom "Gib Gas!" which *literally* means "add fuel"
oh my god, why don't they use it, that would be perfect! Translating it to "fighting" in English sounds as if somebody's been watching too many K-dramas, because I think of that entirely as a Korean-ism. (I don't think there is a single decent English translation for 加油, it has to be context-dependent, "go for it" or "good luck" or "give it your all" or "you can do it" or whatever, like 頑張って in Japanese.)
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Oh, is that where it comes from?! As someone who knows zero Korean or kdramas, that has always been totally baffling to me. And if I didn't know what 加油 means I sure as hell wouldn't be able to guess it from that ...
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Yes. Viki has structures in place to minimize that, with extra editors for English, and making absolutely sure the English translation is fine before allowing the other language teams to start. It's still not always perfect, and the problem remains that English is too simple for a lot of the nuances, and the more steps you add the more potential for error.
Ah, well. I tell myself that nobody needs those other languages anyway - certainly not German - so I don't bother getting annoyed over it. ;)
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Too true, sigh. you are fighting (as it were) the good fight, though! the more languages the better.