ego.istic.org

The following is a guest post by a friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous. It's slightly away from the usual topics of my blog, but I found it interesting and I hope you will too.

Animé “fansubbing” - the practice of fans translating a newly released show themselves, creating subtitles for it, and distributing the result, before an officially translated version is available - is indisputably very different from how it was 20, 15, or even 10 years ago. Gone are the videotape decks and months spent hunting down obscure programs, and so to a large extent is the shady, “inner circle” nature of those who practice it¹. Certainly, any group of people who between them can muster enough Japanese to understand the show, enough English to edit this into a coherent script, and enough patience to do subtitle timing and video encoding, together with the small degree of internet-savvy needed to find the programs for doing these last and a source for the “raw”, untranslated episodes, can set themselves up as a fansub group, pick a show, and be on an equal footing to those who’ve been doing this for years.

Naturally, there are both good and bad aspects to this.

Singled out for a lot of criticism of late is the fact that far less of the show is actually translated than of old. The presence of Japanese honorifics (-san, -chan, et al.) in subtitles barely rates a mention in reviews; the viewer is expected to simply know the meaning of e.g. “Onee-san” or “Hai”. Sometimes I have been the first to criticise - the decision by many of the groups who subtitled Death Note to leave the term shinigami untranslated, for example, was unforgivable - there is a single, obvious, accurate, unambiguous translation as “death god”, and while the cultural connotations of “gami” may not be precisely those of “god”, neither are the gods of Egypt precisely the same as those of the Vikings. But, having seen things from the “other side”², the situation is often a lot less clear-cut.

For the “triple-A” shows of any year, there will often be intense competition among sub groups, and here there is no excuse for anything less than a full translation. But these are not the shows whose translation is being criticised; on the whole, the “community” rises to meet this standard; a present-day example would be gg’s superb translation of the second series of Code Geass, with not a stray honorific to be seen. The shows with lower quality translations are the “mid-tier” series which, we should not forget, simply did not get translated during the “good old days”. The explosion in fansubbing coincides with an explosion in the number of shows actually being produced - and inevitably, these lower end shows do not have the same standard of translator working on them. Quite often there will be only a single group or even a single person covering the show (indeed, many series over the years has been left partially complete, as fallings-out among groups, real-life problems or just dissatisfaction with the show has lead the one group working on the show to abandon it).

In this situation, as a translator unable to find a reasonable translation for a particular piece of Japanese idiom, what am I supposed to do? If I could leave the translation to someone more capable I would do so in a heartbeat, but the reason I’m doing the show at all is because if I don’t, no-one else will. The practice of leaving words untranslated is often slammed for being elitist and inaccessible for those new to animé, but surely far more elitist would be to leave these less popular shows the exclusive preserve of those fluent in Japanese. As I see it, there are three options:

1. Give a poor English translation which loses a substantial part of the meaning. I feel that this would be a betrayal³ of the original author - I make their work appear (to my English-speaking audience) more simplistic and less well-phrased than it actually is. It also makes it much harder for an interested viewer or future collaborator to improve on my present work, since I’ve destroyed some of the meaning.

2. Give a “literal” English translation of the phrase, possibly with a “TL note” explaining the alternate meaning. This is a defensible option, and probably what I would do were I working in isolation, but viewers as a whole seem to find such notes a lot more distracting than I do. (I’d love to hear any more views on this; if I can get support for this approach I’ll adopt it in my work.) And to leave an overly literal translation without a translation note is, I would argue, worse than leaving the Japanese phrase, because in the latter case an unfamiliar viewer at least knows there is something to look up, and has the original Japanese to ask their friends about.

3. Leave the phrase in Japanese, again with or without a TL note (more a question of taste than anything else, though personally I detest untranslated Japanese without a note - as a competent English speaker, if I cannot understand your subtitles without consulting an external reference, they hardly qualify as a translation); a far from ideal option, but, under the circumstances, the best of a bad job.

Perhaps the best solution would be to admit that the material is too difficult for me, and leave it for when I am a better Japanese-speaker. But the best way to learn something has always been by doing, and it would seem churlish to make my attempts at translation, flawed as they are, and sit on them rather than releasing them for the world as a whole. Should someone better come along I will gladly drop my series, and direct whatever viewers I may have managed to gain to them. But until then, I refuse to believe that my efforts are worse than no translation at all.

Every untranslated word in something I release is a point where I have failed as a translator. But that would be no less the case with any of the other solutions I can see, and concealing my faults by such means would only make them harder to deal with. I will happily take advice, and while I won’t follow every editorial suggestion I receive, I will always consider and respond to them. But unless you are willing to step in yourself, do not tell me to stop trying to translate, and if you object to my leaving a word in Japanese, tell me how I could have handled it better.

1. Those who wish to read this entire post as an allegory about the Assassins’ guild are more than welcome, and I would be interested to hear their conclusions ↩

2. By which I mean I have begun trying some fansubbing of my own. Those who know me will be able to obtain the finished product when and if it comes into existence ↩

3. Those who feel such phrasing is melodromatic should consider³ that, as a group who are doing something which is thoroughly illegal and yet convinced they are doing the right thing, fansubbers have a more highly conditioned sense of honour than many. ↩