Translation

[Kegfarms]

Didn't know this was on steam. How's the translation? Is it overly liberal?

[ATKOtter]

The point of a translation is so that it's accessible to an audience without having to use translation notes.

Take this one for example.

Way back in the day Natsume Soseki was translating a novel from English to Japanese. The thing is, back then Japanese people didn't really have a perfectly equivalent phrase that fit the English usage of "I love you" like they do now so he translated it as 月がきれいですね (The moon is beautiful, isn't it?)

Japanese readers would understand the more intimate implications behind the phrase and how the character was saying they love someone in an indirect way.

Soseki wouldn't have been able to just "literally translate" the novel with rewording things because Japanese and English ARE NOT SIMILAR. If he had just left it as "I love you" with a translation note, he would have been a laughing stock.

We need to hold translations to a higher standard and it's people like you that let companies get away with horrendous translations. You ignore that translation is an art that combines language and writing in favor of thinking all languages are somehow equivalent when they are never equivalent. It takes skill and writing ability to make something that was great in one language to something great in another.

"Literal" translations are inherently subpar and this isn't an opinion. It's objectively fact. You just think it's an opinion because you'd rather see translation as a series of "this = that" instead of the art that it actually is.

[DwarvenHydra]

Precisely. Basically, literal translation is only going so deep as translating pragmatics, how the language is used. Localisation is about translating semantics, the meaning behind the words, trying to make sure the subtext still carries.

Honestly, though, if you value literal translation so much, it's probably better to just put in the effort to learn the Japanese language and read/watch the original straight. Maybe you'll even walk away with more respect for translators and the extreme care they put into localising their work.

[Kegfarms]

Originally posted by AlexHusky:

The point of a translation is so that it's accessible to an audience without having to use translation notes.

Take this one for example.

Way back in the day Natsume Soseki was translating a novel from English to Japanese. The thing is, back then Japanese people didn't really have a perfectly equivalent phrase that fit the English usage of "I love you" like they do now so he translated it as 月がきれいですね (The moon is beautiful, isn't it?)

Japanese readers would understand the more intimate implications behind the phrase and how the character was saying they love someone in an indirect way.

Soseki wouldn't have been able to just "literally translate" the novel with rewording things because Japanese and English ARE NOT SIMILAR. If he had just left it as "I love you" with a translation note, he would have been a laughing stock.

We need to hold translations to a higher standard and it's people like you that let companies get away with horrendous translations. You ignore that translation is an art that combines language and writing in favor of thinking all languages are somehow equivalent when they are never equivalent. It takes skill and writing ability to make something that was great in one language to something great in another.

"Literal" translations are inherently subpar and this isn't an opinion. It's objectively fact. You just think it's an opinion because you'd rather see translation as a series of "this = that" instead of the art that it actually is.

That's a bad example considering anime and manga don't use proper formal Japanese like a novel would.

[DwarvenHydra]

That's not necessarily true. Neither novel nor manga is tied to a specific literary style, and often they span several, in order to account for the different styles of speech different characters have. And since the example given is one spoken by a character, and an intimate one at that, it's virtually inconceivable that it would be in "proper formal Japanese". True to that assumption, the quote is, at least grammatically, in a more or less neutral style.
And even if it wasn't, you're still ignoring my example from Black Butler earlier, though it goes in the other direction, and if you need further examples of things that won't translate nicely, I have a whole library of books in a variety of languages, in various levels of formality.
Of note is Tolkien's The Hobbit in a number of languages, though particularly interesting for the sake of this discussion is the German translation, because Tolkien took great care in giving the German and Dutch translators advice on how to localise it. In some cases, he even advised against the most obvious literal translations available, since it had different connotations in German.

[ATKOtter]

Originally posted by Kegfarms:

That's a bad example considering anime and manga don't use proper formal Japanese like a novel would.

The novel uses natural Japanese in its translation.
Manga and Anime use natural Japanese.
Translations to English should use natural English and literal translations are not going to give natural English that has the same effects and connotations.

Novels don't use "proper formal Japanese" they use Japanese in general. Formal Japanese is used to showcase politeness and deference to another party. Solely using formal Japanese to translate a novel would literally be ignoring the varying levels of politeness characters show to eachother.

You sound like you don't actually understand anything about the Japanese language when you're conflating the style of a translation with solely being "proper formal Japanese"

[Kegfarms]

Originally posted by AlexHusky:

Originally posted by Kegfarms:

That's a bad example considering anime and manga don't use proper formal Japanese like a novel would.

The novel uses natural Japanese in its translation.
Manga and Anime use natural Japanese.
Translations to English should use natural English and literal translations are not going to give natural English that has the same effects and connotations.

Novels don't use "proper formal Japanese" they use Japanese in general. Formal Japanese is used to showcase politeness and deference to another party. Solely using formal Japanese to translate a novel would literally be ignoring the varying levels of politeness characters show to eachother.

You sound like you don't actually understand anything about the Japanese language when you're conflating the style of a translation with solely being "proper formal Japanese"

There's a reason why people are told they are dumb when they try to learn Japanese from manga or anime.

[ATKOtter]

Originally posted by Kegfarms:

There's a reason why people are told they are dumb when they try to learn Japanese from manga or anime.

That's because Manga and Anime are unrealistic, not because they don't use natural Japanese.
It's also because Manga and Anime can't give you the formal breakdown of grammar that actual classes and textbooks do.
Like you seriously do not know anything about this subject if that's all you're going to say to "disprove" my argument.

[DwarvenHydra]

Originally posted by Kegfarms:

There's a reason why people are told they are dumb when they try to learn Japanese from manga or anime.

Truth be told, that's not really because they don't use proper Japanese, so much as it is they don't hold your hand at all. It is nuanced in ways much different from English that are hard to pick up on without them being called out like they would be in a textbook. It will have a lot of natural Japanese, extremely natural to the point of having several different modes of speech, accents, colloquialisms, all of which are too much to pick up on the fly for a beginner.
In anime, they likely won't speak slowly and clearly, rather speaking at a natural speed, with natural slurs: A Japanese person will say, for example, "shimashta" instead of "shimashita" (though this sounds slightly different from the "shimashta" you'd get if it was "shimashuta", it's a bit hard to explain without going into phonetics) the same way an American might say "doncha" instead of "don't you", or an Englishman might say "funda" instead of "thunder". It's not improper, or unnatural; quite the opposite, it's just how people talk. If anything, that makes it harder to translate it literally into English without looking incompetent.
At best, literal translation will get you something awkward like "Because of his bloody life, it's no accident that he was involved in the troubles." (This being an actual example from Samurai Shodown.) At worst, you get something almost nonsensical like "All your base are belongs to us."
Translations like this are sometimes unhelpful, and often laughable. There's an entire trope on TV Tropes ("Blind Idiot" Translation, if you wanna look it up) about translations which are bad because they're overly literal, grammatically incorrect, or miss what a word or phrase was supposed to mean.