Translating Sword World.

I love a good technical discussion of anything connected with language, so I enjoyed Timothy Linward’s Wargamer post Meet the mom and pop duo bringing Japan’s D&D killer, Sword World, to the West (I got the link from Nelson Goering’s Facebook post):

Though little known outside its native Japan, Sword World has had a colossal influence on gaming history and fantasy media. In the home market, it surpassed Dungeons and Dragons so completely that it all but erased D&D from Japanese pop culture, and its setting ‘Raxia’ laid the foundations for the Japanese take on Western fantasy you’ll find in modern manga, anime, and videogames. Yet the team producing the first English translation of this cultural behemoth is an unassuming couple from Kansas, Ai Namima-Davison and her husband Shawn – here’s their story. […]

Some history is necessary here. “One of the things that makes Sword World significant in terms of its role in RPGs in Japan, is that it actually started as a ‘replay’ of a D&D campaign”, Shawn explains. In 1986, Yasuda was approached by the publishers of Comptiq magazine to write a series of articles about the fancy new hobby of TTRPGs, and specifically D&D. He chose to frame his articles around ‘replays’ – written scripts not dissimilar to modern actual play shows, only in text format – which illustrated a game his friend Ryu Mizuno was running for his gaming group, ‘Syntax Error’.

The articles were incredibly popular, so much so that Mizuno rewrote the adventure from the replays into a series of fantasy novels, called ‘Record of Lodoss War’. Up to this point Western heroic fantasy hadn’t really landed in Japan, thanks in no small part to The Lord of the Rings having a very rough Japanese translation. While most Americans won’t know Record of Lodoss War at all, and those who do will most likely know it from the anime adaptation, it was more than just successful in Japan- it was ground zero for the Western-inspired fantasy.

Ai gives an example of the influence Record of Lodoss War held on her imagination. “When I was 21 years old, and traveling by myself to Turkey [through Greece] – I forget the name of the town – as I was walking around, somebody was calling the boat to Lodoss Island”. She recalls her sheer surprise: “It’s like, what? I can go there!?” In fact it was ‘Rhodes’ island, but as Ai says, “The sound is the same in Japanese”. A boat trip to Rhodes followed. […]

“What they want is for Sword World to exist in English”, he continues “It’s not a discussion of, ‘Hey, just translate these books'”. “Because there’s a level of support that that requires”, he adds, “What do players need to play? What is the next supplement going to look like? What regions of Raxia might players want to explore?”

But translation is a massive part of the job. The pair had been working on the manuscript during the morning before I called them, Ai leading on the translation, and Shawn assisting with localization. “It’s really challenging!” Ai says with a laugh. “It’s like the worst aspects of translating a novel and a technical manual just combined into one”, Shawn says, “Because you need all of the flavor and the lore and the things that make it interesting from translating a novel, but you also need the specificity that comes with a technical translation”.

“The interesting thing is that, yes, it’s written by Japanese creators, but they were doing Western fantasy”, Ai adds, “So they borrowed a lot of words from D&D and others”. Shawn continues: “Their vocabulary is actually larger than ours because they’ve borrowed words from English that they also have a word for in Japanese”. “There are so many words related to ‘skill'”, Ai laments – “Skill, or ability, or technique”, Shawn agrees.

Shawn adds that Group SNE has “Explicitly said – and rightfully so – that we shouldn’t be using Japanese words because it’s a Western fantasy setting”. But that means they can’t just loan words back to make up the difference. “You have all these different synonyms that aren’t really synonyms, but you have to parse their usage and meaning” – and sometimes the perfect word has already been assigned another job.

Japanese takes some liberties with the English words its borrowed, creating traps for unwary translators. “My favorite example of this is the term grappler”, Shawn says. “Japanese borrowed the word grappler from English”, but it’s used “As another term for someone who fights with their hands, not what we would consider a grappler who grapples people and wrestles”. The Japanese version of Sword World has a grappler class. “When you translate that back, your natural inclination would be like, grappler or wrestler – not accurate”, he emphasises. “When we talked to Group SNE, they’re like, ‘Well, it’s a martial artist'”.

Some idiosyncrasies come from Group SNE itself. Ai explains that Sword World has a kind of magic “Called shingo mahou, which, in literal translation, is ‘true speech magic'”. Searching for an English synonym for the mysterious term stumped them her and her husband for a while, so they checked in with Group SNE. “They said, why are you not just using the word sorcery?” Apparently, shingo mahou was an original Sword World coinage, but it’s used consistently to stand for the English word ‘sorcery’. Update your dictionaries, fan dubbers.

One thing I like about such pieces is that, being written for specialized audiences, they throw in unexplained words that expand my horizons; here, for instance, there’s a reference to “the amateur doujin zone of the con” that taught me the term doujin (from Japanese 同人 dōjin ‘colleague, people with similar interests’) ‘1. A product produced and sold independently of corporations (in Japan); an indie work; 2. Clipping of doujinshi (“a Japanese amateur comic book; a self-published manga”).’ How long I will remember it is, of course, another question.