Trigun Bookclub: pancake-breakfast: Differences in translation

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Original Tumblr Post: Differences in translation

Differences in translation

In reply to a post by feekins:

I love love love that you’re doing this! It’s always incredibly interesting to me to see how different groups decide to approach these things.

Allow me to speculate a bit on the nature of the differences.

So, way back in the day when the Trigun manga was releasing, we had the subs vs. dubs debate. Yes, yes, I realize it’s still a thing, but not NEARLY at the level it was in the ‘90s and the aughts. The combination of bad fandubs and questionable professional dubs led to immense hatred for dubs in general. Western distributers did at some point grasp this enough to start providing access to subbed versions, but since they were still trying to market anime primarily to children (especially in the’90s), they’d often gut the translation to make it more family friendly.

This is actually something we’re still dealing with the aftermath of to this day, which is why it’s surprising they’d allow a technically shonen title like Chainsaw Man to keep its “fucks” in both the sub and dub, which literally only happened earlier this year.

But going back to Trigun, at the time when Dark Horse started translating and distributing it, there was a HUGE emphasis in the weeb community on “literal” translations of the Japanese over “adaptive” translations of Japanese. Joke’s on them, since going from Japanese to English isn’t like going from, say, Spanish or German to English, so every translation from Japanese is adaptive. The whole grammar structure of Japanese is different, and the low number of sounds represented in Japanese (20 including vowels, compared to the 44 of English) means the language just doesn’t have room for as many potential word combinations as English.

Combine that with a culture of subtlety (I’m not gonna even try and chicken-or-the-egg whether it was culture shaping language or language shaping culture), and you have a language that is rife with subtle implications rather than spelling things out.

Now, this is me going more heavily into speculation since I don’t have a copy of the Japanese version of the manga, but I’d guess the Dark Horse translation falls more on the “literal” side of translating the Japanese while Overhaul falls more on the adaptive side. This isn’t to justify all the choices Dark Horse has made (some of them are weird indeed), but at the time, trying to fall more on the literal side would have been seen as being more in touch with the weeb community, since that’s what people demanded even when it made the translation harder to understand. And by that, I mean it was an explicitly stated preference held by a lot of anime/manga fans. It was expected that anyone who was serious about enjoying anime would just… sort of… figure out the language nuance.

But translation is the art of choosing how you want to fail to communicate what was in the original language, and the further apart two languages are (and Japanese and English are soooo very far apart), the broader the spectrum of translation you’re gonna get. So, like, for this panel…

…for the part where Wolfwood’s talking, in the Japanese, he probably said something that was literally a lot closer to the Dark Horse version, but the Overhaul translation 1) uses a more natural phrasing in English, 2) better captures Wolfwood’s tone (since, IIRC, all his Japanese is done in Kansai dialect), and 3) keeps in mind the context of the scene, in particular the dialog with Milly and the states of the characters. The Dark Horse version might be as close as you can get to word-for-word from the Japanese, but the Overhaul translation gets you closer to what that would feel like to a native Japanese speaker.

Again, keep in mind I don’t have access to the Japanese text, so I could be off here… but if this is the case, I think Overhaul’s translation really highlights the strengths of an adaptive translation. And adaptive translation is difficult to do well, since your team has to have a firm grasp of both cultures and both languages, and be able to communicate those subtleties between each side of the translation.

It’s hard enough to grasp the subtleties or our own culture enough to put them into our native language using the words we want. (I say this as a professional editor, so… take that as you will.) Trying to do so with a piece of literature in another language is… quite a feat, and requires a solid grasp of literature on top of everything else.

So… thank you to @trigun-manga-overhaul for all your hard work! And thank you to OP @feekins for making it easier for us to see some of the nuance and difference in translation (and for helping me, personally, better understand the potential intention behind the Japanese by highlighting these differences). And… thank you to Dark Horse for trying their best on the Western manga frontier decades ago (even if your translations are a bit wonky).

Reply by domfock:

Gonna respond to this with my personal account and not the Overhaul account since I’ll be speaking a lot more for myself rather than the team.

The translators and editors at Dark Horse comics have absolutely been doing the best they could do under the circumstances they were in, having to follow potential work protocols, tight schedules and an inability to get more deeply invested in the material they were translating. Having a loose document of lines of dialogue handed to you without ever seeing the page and the paneling, it’s not easy hitting the context on the head with something as context heavy as Japanese.

I have only respect for them and their teams, and it’s with respect as well that I objectively criticize some of the confusing choices they’ve made in their translation.

You are definitely correct when you describe Trigun Overhaul as an adaptive translation as that is exactly what it is. It is very much a product of the kind of language work I’ve done and my experience, as I’ve never fully worked within translation towards more concrete ideas, such as translations of manuals, factual info, or even signs. My professional translation career, and language work, have all been within the areas of humanitarianism and art. That leads to my preference and focus for translation to be intent, emotion and clarity. Of course, language is only part of my own education, but primarily my educational background lies in applied psychology and sociology.

On top of that, English isn’t actually my first language, it is my second. However, I consider that ingrained understanding of changing sentence structure as a strength, as it makes you a lot more hyperaware of the loops you can be going through. Also just makes you more keenly aware of the technicalities of changing emotional meaning of words and responses, the perspective you gain while learning of cultures so vastly different from your own.

I am the only translator on the team, so I’m the one conveying the information and research to the rest of the team who helps improve the raw translation. I have several contacts who are proficient in Japanese who have been instructing and educating me in the more complex aspects of the language, and have also been double checking some of the more brazen choices we’ve had to make for localization.

Don’t know if any of this info was actually relevant, but I wanted to confirm the part about adaptive translation and give on background on that.

This. Is. FASCINATING!!!

(Sorry to any non-language nerds reading this; I’m about to go full word nerd here.)

As one editor to another (for editing is absolutely part of translation), I 100% agree with your statement about translation being about intent, emotion, and clarity. I might professionally focus more on the technical stuff (it pays the bills… though I do occasional fiction editing for friends and have absolutely woven manga translation into my studies of Japanese), but even in the most technical of technical writing, the focus must always be on intent and clarity. Emotion gets replaced with tone in nonfiction, since everything needs to sound like it’s coming from one source instead of from 15 subject matter experts and 2-3 technical writers, but in order to do that, you have to be able to recognize the different tones of the different writers (and the company’s tone) to begin with.

I won’t pretend I’m fluent in any language aside from English, but I honestly don’t think I’d be as good an editor if I hadn’t studied foreign language. (Or… languages at this point, I guess.) I can absolutely see how having English as a second language would help with translation. It’s easy to overlook the innate techniques and tones in our mother tongue because it’s so ingrained; to really get perspective on it, we have to find ways to take a step back. That distance helps us untangle the language we grew up speaking so we can understand how each of the threads weaves together with the others, which in turn provides us with the opportunity to use language more effectively.

I’m sure your background in psychology and sociology help with capturing the verbal image of the characters and staying true to Nightow’s themes and the overall tone of the work. My educational background is in writing… but a big part of why I chose that is because in order to do it well, one must be willing to constantly learn whatever is necessary to effectively convey one’s message. More than that, one must be willing and able to understand what one learns in a way that allows them to communicate that understanding.

Sorry, I’m getting a little rambly here. Thank you for responding and giving us a bit of a glimpse behind the scenes, as it were. This absolutely made my night.

Reply by domfock:

Gonna fatten up this post because it’s hard to communicate on Tumblr and I wanna talk with people about nerdy stuff. (Maybe we should make a Trigun Bookclub Discord or something.)

Also, hey, I’m using Oxford comma… When I feel like it.

There is indeed an important aspect of language in psychology and sociology, yeah. There is so much personality, hidden emotions and perspective to be found in the words used by characters. It creates a glimpse into their psyche, be that something riddled with guilt or self-hatred, it can change the words chosen to represent others or themselves. Of course, this is all applied within the margin available, as we’re obviously following the intended meaning of the Trigun manga as close as possible.

Still, all this work with characters give us a chance to have a lot of interesting conversations about them, even applying it to our own personal writing.

My latest translator job was being the head of translation for an international theater anthropology organization and the various groups under this umbrella. This sounds more prestigious than it actually was, maybe I’m being humble, the organization was quite renowned and has existed since the 60s. But, the group doing the translation consisted of me, the actual translator, and two others doing editing. (Funnily enough the same set-up as the Overhaul team.)

Primarily I translated articles for various avantgarde plays and exhibitions, their marketing, as well as translating the very plays themselves and all dialogue within them. As you can imagine, things get very complicated, abstract but extremely feeling focused.

Anyway, feel free to just DM me if you wanna keep nerding and rambling about language stuff, I love talking about my interests. That goes for everyone!

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