fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2775 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2775 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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04. [SPOILERS for Saints Row 4]

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05. [SPOILERS for Hemlock Grove]

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06. [SPOILERS for The Walking Dead Game Episode 4: Amid the Ruins]

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07. [SPOILERS for Once Upon a Time]

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08. [SPOILERS for Graceland]

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09. [WARNING for rape]

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10. [WARNING for anxiety/depression]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #396.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I watched Tiger and Bunny on Hulu, and found most of the episodes in acceptable condition. One had borked subtitles, so I looked for alternatives and found a piracy site with fansubs. It's been a while, so I may be misremembering, but it felt like the fansubs were significantly better-written than the official subs and conveyed a lot more character.

Then the site tried to download a trojan onto my computer, and I went back to the borked subtitles on Hulu.

You're probably remembering right, fansubs and scanlations by decent established groups tend to strive for more accuracy (and better explanations for puns and cultural terms) than the official stuff. If I have to read "Mr" instead of "-san" one more friggin' time...

Mr. instead of -san is often totally correct, though.

Yeah, it can be overused, but it's not wrong. You really have to judge whether it's right or not to drop it on a case-by-case basis. I'm a professional translator... I'm translating a manga where one of the characters is super-polite, always throwing around the keigo sort of refined moe chick. I have her say "Mr." and "Miss" because it suits her hyper-polite speech patterns. For another character who is less polite, I drop the -san suffix and translate the names as is.

Also consider if it's a show set in a business situation like a salaryman drama... it's totally appropriate to use "Mr" or Miss" then.

I only use Japanese suffixes when clients require it. Generally speaking, I consider it bad translation to leave in suffixes... speech gets so damn awkward. I recently translated something where a character was using -nee as a suffix, and do most weeaboos even know what that means? How about -cchi? You can't stick in this huge variety of suffixes and expect all readers to understand the nuances of their Japanese meanings.

//rant

not to mention that most anime fans do not even get the nuances of things like "chan" and "san" do begin with. I didn't get them even after a couple years of Japanese. I didn't get them until I lived in Japan and saw how they were really used.

For example, "chan". In reality, if you are a woman under 30 (and sometimes older if you're particularly young-looking or cute), most people are going to give you a "chan" if you're anything past acquaintances. It doesn't even mean anything beyond the fact that you are female and you are friendly with the person calling you that. It adds no special deep meaning, basically, and nothing is lost in an English translation if you just drop it.

Use of "san" is on the rise towards women because, I'd wager, many see "chan" usage as being sexist and/or condescending. So if a man calls uses "san" with a woman (especially if he's a teacher, for example) it's not because he has a special respect for her... it's because he doesn't want to be seen as sexist. It has way less to do with personal relationships and character dynamics and way more to do with general societal trends. What I'm saying is that in the context of anime, most times you can just drop them and write nothing in an English translation and nothing is lost.

//my two cents

And I consider it an INCORRECT translation when you use Mr/Ms/Mrs or something, because you're not getting across the exact meaning of the word.

/professional translator who knows that you have to teach your audience sometimes instead of spoonfeeding them everything.

The point of translations is giving the readers the same experience than the readers of the original text had. If a text doesn't sound natural (and no, honorifics aren't natural in English), you're doing it wrong. For god's sake, this is one of the first things they teach you in school.

If you use suffix because 'you can't get across the exact meaning of the word' with the rest of your translation, I consider you a really bad translator, professional or not.

/professional translator who knows that going that extra mile in adaptation by using OTHER words in the new language to make up for the lack of suffixes is what you're supposed to do.

Ah, an honorifics-hater.

And what do you do when two people are in bed together and you've had one of them calling the other "Mr/Ms" the whole time?

Because suddenly you're either going to have to use that suffix, make that bed scene a LOT more awkward or inappropriate, or give them a relationship they don't yet have if you decide to suddenly switch to given names.

Good luck.

I worked on editing a translation that ran into a situation like this, in which the main translator had been given specific instructions by the original writers not to keep the suffixes in the translation. The translator ended up having to think a but more (the horror) and take more liberties with the dialogue, but she came up with a solution that was clever and worked well. This should come as part of the job if you're a translator. It's not just about being a human version of Google Translate.

Yeah, that's true that different cases have different requirements, especially in an anime/manga like, say, Hellsing - a non-Japanese setting with English-speaking characters using honorifics in sub or dub makes no sense at all. But in Japanese settings with Japanese-speaking characters, staying as true to the language as possible while maintaining clarity adds to the viewing, for me, whereas doing the opposite messes with my sense of immersion.

I didn't figure out honorfics from a book, but from the context and notations of translations that kept them around, and I appreciated learning them, not for weeaboo cred, but for the story. There's no straight parallel in English for the differences between a character referring to friends as "-kun", "-senpai", and "-chan", and while just stripping it all out and leaving the names spares the audience having to learn the nuances of the suffixes, it also deprives us of some of the nuances of the relationships, and that little stuff matters to me. But then, I went from growing up in the 4Kids era of obsessive Westernization of anime to the translations of today that aren't terrified to just keep a few Japanese words that don't translate well, so I do have a bias about what counts as bad translation.

(NA)

The thing about bad translations is that it can be very subjective, because them being bad or good depends on the translation being correct (that's objective, so that's the easy part) and fit for the intended audience (and that's the whole issue).

Is the intended audience familiar with honorifics or at least willing to learn about that (a few publishing houses are willing to include some extra pages with cultural explanations about honorifics and such) or they want to reach to an audience that doesn't want to bother with that?

Publishing houses have to make a choice, because sadly it's impossible to do something everyone will be happy with the result and people who aren't part of the intended audience tend to be too harsh about those translations, which isn't fair to the translators and everyone else involved with it IMO

Yeah, it's a pretty delicate balancing act, and no matter what the final result, translating anything into something legible is hard fucking work.

People who want honorifics are full of bullshit and are probably weeaboos.

Boku think that the aka-chan is so kawaiiii。

Anyone who thinks that this is an acceptable translation needs to kill themselves.

[ SECRET POST #2775 ]

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