W Translation Error (Split from W 30 released thread)

[Magenta]

I dunno, the entire thing just gave the entire impression he was translating for himself rather than anyone else.

When it comes down to it, you have to consider, is the audience going to want to be troubled by this? Are they going to go into your fansub, be happy to have to mentally slot together pieces of a jigsaw to understand a sentence, and then walk out of it going "I'm glad that translator made this decision, as it both enriched the experience of watching it and taught me something that's going to give me greater insight in future."

If you're a translator, it's fairly taken as given that you're going to know more about the language than the vast majority of your audience. You can understand nuance, you can appreciate it, and you're going to know that there's not a perfect way of doing things. You might look at an English sentence and say "Well, that's not quite it." But it's the best you can do. Yeah, okay. Certain words have linguistic nuance that's lost in translation. But that's just the nature of the game. Languages are different beasts, and there's always times I think "Why isn't there a good way of capturing this in English?"

But you can't not TRY. There are adjectives, you can use multiple words to cover one in Japanese if one isn't going to do the job, there's so many ways one can try and the times where one really has to go "Okay, the best thing for this is to leave it untranslated" are few and far between.

Part of what's great about this place is the sheer breadth and size of our staff. If I need help wording things, or how to capture nuance, I have about 5 people I can go to and go "So, how do you think I should handle (this)?" And we find a way. We always find a way.

In the end, the trick is to be sensible. A show like Onmyou Taisenki, yes, lay that fucking untranslation on me hard and fast. I'm watching a show tied in to ancient Japanese tradition and I want to be informed, I want to learn, and I want to get all that nuance that's rooted into the very core of the show itself.

But Transformers and fucking Gundam, two shows set in a future where Japan for all intents and purposes may as well not exist, and I'm being told that I should goddamn know the intrcacies behind 'yatsu'?

My motto is that a good translation is one where you can't tell it's been translated at all. I know that's impractical for a fansub where there's Japanese audio blaring out over subtitles, but the intent is still pure.

[takenoko]

Well no, when translating something it's always for someone else. From my understanding of what was said at the time, Buster chose to keep the Japanese to preserve different levels of relations between people and meaning nuances that he didn't work with the English translations. So he asked people to learn a few Japanese words for what he felt would enhance the experience. That's really not that big a deal