Matt Treyvaud of No-sword regularly writes for Néojaponisme, where he has a new translation of Mori Ōgai’s 1914 essay Honyaku ni tsuite 「翻譯に就いて」 (“On translation”), a lively response to his detractors (“The sweets that Nora eats I translated makuron マクロン. Write rather amedama 飴玉, I was told. Advice like this simply boggles the mind”). The first comment in the thread links to the first in a series of five YouTube videos by Paul “Otaking” Johnson, a considerably livelier full-scale assault on the practices of the “fansubbers” who create their own amateur subtitles for anime films. He says the first such amateurs tried to imitate the self-effacing nature of professional subtitlers, but the newer crop is more and more intent on showing off their detailed knowledge of the language and customs (and their ability to produce eye-popping visual effects), placing distracting footnotes at the top of the screen and inserting obtrusive translations into the film itself, to the detriment of enjoying the movie they’re supposedly putting themselves at the service of. I, a certified old fossil, am entirely in agreement with him (and greatly enjoyed his reductio ad absurdum at the end of the fifth and final video), but many of the (presumably hip, young) commenters on Matt’s thread think he’s in the thrall of an elitist hegemony that contradicts the essentially postmodern and multitasking nature of today’s reality. Or something. Anyway, a couple of tidbits; his response to the subtitle “What is this fast thing?” is “Seriously, if that’s the best English you can come up with, you may as well go and drown in a pool of your own making.” And: “Because so many fansubbers believe that the Japanese must not be changed, you often see lines like ‘I… I… you!'” Enjoy. Or disdain, if you prefer. This is Liberty Hall, you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.
Addendum. Exactly the same debate is going on with respect to manga (comics). Thanks, David!
TRANSLATION TO AND FROM JAPANESE.
January 24, 2010 by 46 Comments
I haven’t watched much fansubbed anime, but it’s good to hear that I’m not the only one to find it unhelpful. Of course, I come from a tradition of subtitling, rather than dubbing, so I have expectations of the product. (Another issue is that Japanese voices seems to annoy me most of the time …)
I write this as a fansubber, and as one who enjoys anime, fansubbed or otherwise.
There are many groups out there fansubbing, and as many styles of, and attitudes towards, fansubbing as there are groups. Are some of them monstrously annoying? Of course there are. There are also, however, groups who do a job at least as good as professional subbers; sometiem*s better. One should also bear in mind that the number of series that are subbed by only one group is minimal; it’s usually possible to watch a series you like subbed by a group you like. There are, believe it or not, people who like those notes, and I’ve read many complaints that the karaoke for the opening and ending songs isn’t fancy enough.
I sub for a group that favours readability; you’d be surprised at the discussions that take place over one line, just so we’re sure that it reflects what is said, while simultaneously appearing in good, natural English. This may or may not be common, but it’s certainly far from unique.
If you’re going to pick a subbing group at random, I’d say that there’s a thirty per cent chance that you’ll pick one that considers good, readable English to be essential. Sure, that means that seven out of ten care more for other aspects – speed, style, literal translation, whatever – but if you’re going to watch fansubbed anime (and I think you should (obviously)), it’s worth looking for groups that share your belief in what constitutes a good translation.
I have watched the five part video series. I tend to agree in general with what OtaKing says. Obviously, not all fansubbers do this, but a good amount of them do. I particularly hate the side notes interfering with the picture. Put them either in a .txt file or at the beginning or end of the video.
There are, believe it or not, people who like those notes
Oh, I believe it; I love notes myself (and kept pausing the video so I could read them). But as aeug says, they should be in a txt file, not cluttering the screen.
Thanks to both of you for your informed responses!
Hat, do you know the origin of that Liberty Hall phrase? In particular, does it predate A. Bertram Chandler? (“Liberty-hall” is found in She Stoops To Conquer, but not the rest of it.)
Are you speaking against Woody Allen?
I watch and read a lot of fan-translated works. The quality really varies.
The worst are the groups that subtitle based on translates; for example, they have a manga that is originally Japanese, but since they speak Chinese, they make an English translation based on the Chinese version. It’s like a game of telephone.
But there are some really talented people out there. There is actually a lot of discussion about translation among fans: Should we leave honorifics in? Should we translate this word? Should we change this metaphor or include a footnote?
Even *good* fansubs violate some of the “rules” of translation. Footnotes are an example; good fansubs don’t have many of them, but if the choice is between changing a reference and putting in a footnote, in general, I think fansubbers will put in a footnote.
But I think that it’s important to remember that many these are being created for a niche audience that has different preferences and needs than a mainstream audience. (To start with, because we watch fansubs on the computer for the most part, it’s easy to pause to read a footnote if you need it to understand. The audience is also more familiar with Japanese/Korean/Chinese language and culture than the average English speaker, and more open to putting in some work to understand something that would have lost too much meaning if changed to English.) What’s more, fansubbers are themselves part of this niche audience, which means they closely interact with them. There are many discussions in fandom about the best way to handle translation, and a lot of it is intelligent and well-reasoned. Some of it, though, would probably seem very weird to a person who professionally translates novels.
/defense of fansubbers
Thanks, Kutsuwamushi, that makes a lot of sense, and I fully recognize that I’m not part of the relevant subculture, so I have no business judging how it does things. It’s just that as an old fossil, I think of movies, even anime, as experiences to be enjoyed continuously, as the creators presumably intended; sure, if it’s something you love you can go back and watch it again, pausing as often as necessary to pick up details or think about what you’ve just seen, but it should be possible to just watch the whole thing through with as few distractions as possible. Again, though, although I’ve seen and enjoyed a few anime in theaters, I’m not the target audience.
The same thing’s going on in manga, apparently: http://www.tcj.com/manga/and-the-puns-oh-the-untranslatable-puns
Going by your description of it, that russian translator couple is an example of the same phenomenon; stiff and poor translations that fool people into thinking their more genuine.
“they have a manga that is originally Japanese, but since they speak Chinese, they make an English translation based on the Chinese version. It’s like a game of –”
mmmpf. must avoid obvious jokes.
The same thing’s going on in manga, apparently
Thanks very much; I’ve added that to the post.
Reading Ōgai’s piece is interesting because all of his choices are now pretty much archaic. 前房 zenbō is now used mainly in a medical context (e.g., the anterior chamber of the eye). マクロン makuron is now normally written マカロン makaron. And 伝便 denbin is not used at all, except perhaps in Kokura…
Such is the fate of a translator at a time of rapid linguistic change. There was no doubt logic in Ōgai’s choices, but they were simply choices, nothing more, and they haven’t really stood the test of time.
In one sense, however, some of the thinking that he expresses may have had a major influence on the later development of Japanese. For example, he obviously felt that ame-dama was so quintessentially Japanese that it would have been ludicrous to have a European eating one. The use of the Sino-Japanese expression 前房 for what is presumably the antechamber is another. Ōgai is protesting against the use of a good Japanese word (玄関 genkan) for what is obviously a Western concept (and don’t be fooled by his erudite reference to the gate of a zen temple; this is just a red herring thrown in to try and bolster his case). And with denbin he has taken an (at-the-time) modern regionalism and used it in preference to a more established term.
These are all good examples of the split personality that is now a mark of the Japanese vocabulary, a split that Ōgai may have helped to foster: European names (or at least separate names) for European things, Japanese names for Japanese things. This habit is still deeply engrained in the Japanese psyche. For example, a Japanese acquaintance once told me he felt it quite ludicrous that a samurai helmet (kabuto) was called a ‘helmet’ in English, because a ヘルメット herumetto is quite clearly one of those rounded things that construction workers, motorcycle riders, and modern soldiers wear. Such is the power of particularism. It is a habit of mind that I regard in some fuzzy sense as having given rise to some of the most creative and at the same time some of the most reactionary aspects of Japanese culture.
Re the zenbo/genkan issue: the original word seems to be “forstuen” (“En dør til høyre i bakgrunnen fører ut til forstuen”), although I doubt Ogai was working from a Norwegian text. Whether his particularism here is justified by real differences in character and function between Japanese genkan and European “forstuen”, I do not know. I imagine that some LH comment thread regulars might know a thing or two about 19th-century European architecture, though.
The worst are the groups that subtitle based on translates; for example, they have a manga that is originally Japanese, but since they speak Chinese, they make an English translation based on the Chinese version. It’s like a game of telephone.
Do you mean “based on the Chinese-translated version”?
In the instance of manga, many of the official Chinese translations are very good (especially those coming out of Taiwan). (I’m a professional C->E translator who does J->E and F->E freelance, so I hope that I can be a judge of this.)
Additionally, it is unlikely that Ogai himself was working off of the original Norwegian text as my recollection is that he did not speak that language.
Spit on the welcome mat?
The “cat” is the cat-o-nine-tails (?), the scourge used to whip sailors in the British Navy (and other navies?). (You’re not beaten for thinking the cat is a “bastard” – weren’t the sailors emphatically encouraged to understand it in exactly that way?)
So: “Do whatever you want — but what you do do will expose (to the astute) what it is that you do want.”
Fansubbing sounds like a version of what rap/hippity-hop song producers have been doing for 30 years: taking something that’s, if not in the public domain legally, then in the public realm of manipulation technologically — and making it their ‘own’, making it new. There are now also a zillion mash-ups of video-and-song on youtube.
Borges’s Menard’s Quixote, The Waste Land, Duchamp’s Gioconda, Shakespeare’s North’s Amyot’s Plutarch — it’s a pretty well-rehearsed conversation! – and one that’s included translation as a medium of its own since, well, the primordial Syntactic Grunting of proto-world.
As I see things, the issue of whether fansubbing (fanslation?) is done at all should be separated from whether – and the questions of how – it’s done well.
Bathrobe: This sort of semantic narrowing is very common in borrowings. My favorite example (and most suitable for this blog) is Spanish sombrero ‘hat’ > English sombrero ‘traditional Mexican hat’.
Spanish sombrero ‘hat’ > English sombrero ‘traditional Mexican hat’
Is it also true that Russian borscht ‘soup’ > English borscht ‘traditional Russian beet soup’?
Or did I maybe invent or dream that?
Well, I don’t know about other people, but in my (English) family borscht is always beetroot.
it is unlikely that Ogai himself was working off of the original Norwegian text as my recollection is that he did not speak that language.
Although I do know some 15 year-old Norwegian twins who claim to be learning Japanese from reading comics. They are very smart kids.
Is it also true that Russian borscht ‘soup’ > English borscht ‘traditional Russian beet soup’?
No, the English word carries over the Russian meaning. The Russian word for ‘soup’ is (wait for it)… sup.
For me, it is good in using subtitling rather than dubbing in a movie…but I want to hear japanese voices particularly in anime because it sounds good to hear but the disadvantage is that, I don’t understand…so it is important to put subtitle so it is easy to understand the dialog of the characters.
generic to particular:
Spanish sombrero ‘hat’ > English sombrero ‘traditional Mexican hat’
Russian borscht ‘soup’ > English borscht ‘traditional Russian beet soup’
French gâteau ‘cake’ > French cake ‘traditional English fruitcake’ (now often replaced by “gâteau aux fruits”).
Russian borscht ‘soup’ > English borscht ‘traditional Russian beet soup’
This was Ø’s invention or dream.
DFo the French make invidious “cake” jokes? If they do, shame on them too. Fruitcake is wonderful, at least my mother’s was. Just be sure to use enough rum or brandy, don’t let it get dry, and leave out the Brazil nuts and maybe the citrons.
Granted, the Methodist prohibition fruitcake is to be avoided.
I don’t use gateau in English myself — it’s a BrE term — but I bet it is semantically narrowed with respect to French.
Forstue — it’s more like a hall, a room facing the door to the street where you put your coat and muddy shoes, so called even in very modest homes. In Nora’s case it might be a bit grander and have the maid greeting guests there, but ‘antechamber’ makes presentations that forstue will not honor. I cannot speak to the Japanese words that were chosen.
Ah, that’s what the Russians call сени [seni] — I never know how to render that in English.
The (American?) English for this is apparently mudroom, though it’s not a word I use myself, having lived in apartments all my adult life. There was such a room in the house I grew up in, but I don’t remember the word we used for it.
I think that’s a New England thing.
Is it same thing as prihozhaya?
My Oxford dictionary defines прихожая as ‘(entrance) hall, lobby; antechamber,’ which sounds far grander than forstue or сени (not to mention mudroom).
I find mudroom in real estate advertisements in many parts of the country, including the South at least.
I am pretty sure they had these things even in tiny two-room khruschevkas
I find mudroom in real estate advertisements in many parts of the country, including the South at least.
Huh. OK, my vague guess was, unsurprisingly, wrong.
Traditional Russian seni were not part of the house proper, but a form of a shelter or covered porch sharing one wall with the house. As SFReader mentioned, if it is an entry room it is called prihozhaya. (In my childhood, there was no separate entrance room in our apartment in a nine-story, but we still called a space right by the door prihozhaja)
So do modern Russian houses not have сени?
If it’s a porch were you leave muddy boots, skis, and occasional bicycle, and sit out there on a cool summer evening to enjoy the view, that’s essentially what it is. I doubt it is called that way though. Even in the villages.
Well, hell. I was taught that in a Russian house you went up the крыльцо and through the сени before entering the house proper. Now I discover it was all lies!
Just ran across this in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: “In the mudroom off the kitchen he’d seen an old wicker basket full of masonjars.” (If you search for “In the mudroom off the kitchen” on Google Books you get hundreds of hits, by the way.)
In my Norwegian, forstue is part of the discrete charm of the 19th century bourgeoisie. It’s a room that is for nothing except being halfway between the private chambers were you live and the public space outside where you risk bumping into all sorts of rabble. It’s where you’ll receive a policeman, a junior priest, the mother of one of your children’s less affluent classmates, or the neighbour’s children singing carols — letting them in (and away from the neigbours’ gaze) but not inviting them to take off their coats and stay for more than their errand.
More broadly, the room just inside the front door where you leave your shoes and jacket (and the occasional skis, backpack, bicycle etc,) is called gangen, whether or not it’s technically a separate room, a designated end of a corridor, or just a corner of a one-room bedsit. Gang(en) may also mean “corridor, passage”, so sometimes the entrance room is qualified as yttergangen “the outer corridor”, but it’s usually quite clear what is meant. Prepositionally speaking, the entrance gang is i gangen while a corridor in a school or a hotel or a hospital is på gangen (vente i gangen “waiting inside the front door”, vente på gangen “waiting in the corridor”).
What you call a ‘mudroom’ sounds more like what I would call a bislag, a separate room built off the main building, e.g. as a place to take off dirty boots in front of the kitchen entrance. Common on old farm buildings.
Of course, what these words meant historically and what they have come to mean through a century and half of rapid changes in living arrangements are quite separate things.
Re: seni
There could have been some variability, for sure. But you read here a there that someone built themselves new seni, which is hard to square with them being just a room in the house. Another thing, culturally important, is that because they were not inside the house, seni were not sanctified. As the result, they were being used for pagan rituals, most notably devinations.
I think 玄関 genkan would be a perfectly suitable Japanese term for the forstue. The genkan is traditionally a small ground-level entrance area where you take off your shoes. If you go inside you step up to the floor of the house itself (wood flooring not tatami.) That’s why 上がる agaru roughly ‘go up’ is the Japanese term for entering a person’s house.
The genkan is the place where people stand if they have short business to attend to, without the trouble of taking off their shoes. If they need to stay longer they will be invited to ‘come up’. If the genkan on an old Japanese-style house is unlocked you traditionally slide open the genkan door (without stepping inside) and call out ご免ください gomen kudasai to the resident, although I think that in modern cities this kind of arrangement is much rarer than it once was. You now have to use an intercom.
> I think 玄関 genkan would be a perfectly suitable Japanese term for the forstue
I agree. It’s true that genkan in the narrowest sense refers to just the small shoes-allowed below-floor-level area, but it’s quite common to use it in an extended sense about the part of the hallway close to it, or all of it if it’s small. That could be a recent development, though.
Ōgai says in the translation:
> There may be a door in the genkan, but surely not a door to the genkan.
That isn’t the case in my grandparents’ traditional Japanese house, whose genkan (in the narrow sense) is a room by itself with 2 sliding doors to other rooms. This is not the most common layout, but I wouldn’t consider it uncommon. See for example this
Sorry, I messed that link up, I meant to link to this:
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Foku-t.yon.to%2Fproducing%2Fs-mouri071.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Foku-t.yon.to%2Fmouritomosato.htm&docid=_Jupno6lj7JVEM&tbnid=odNT6Kiqht7dTM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwiasp27xNzdAhVHhrwKHWm6AwUQMwhkKCAwIA..i&w=800&h=599&bih=943&biw=1155&q=%E5%8F%A4%E3%81%84%E7%8E%84%E9%96%A2&ved=0ahUKEwiasp27xNzdAhVHhrwKHWm6AwUQMwhkKCAwIA&iact=mrc&uact=8