vnts 2022-12-18
Entry posted by Zakamutt in vnts commentary
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It's partly my fault this time, but hata said today was the deadline and I handed in at 20:49 so really it's his fault COPIUM.
Contains my extended opinion on the F/SN re-tl (not particularly positive, regrettably).
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「Greetings, fuwans! I hope you're enjoying the influx of new posts we are at last achieving. Not so much of an influx of translation progress this week, regrettably, but we do have one notable release: Aokana Extra2. While this is nominally labeled a "fandisc" focused on Misaki, my understanding is it's fairly long and worth reading for fans of the original. Though Misaki's rabid fanbase may just take any excuse to spend more time with her. One day I will play Aokana and see if she's all she's hyped up to be. Maybe.
Other than that, the Gin'iro project continues to provide good progress and successive partial releases, with Mizuha coming up on the 26th. As with any good capitalist, Bee is neglecting his company to do what brings him self-actualization: translating moege for clout. Let none of this be construed as a detriment to the VN fanbase: he'd be working on some cringe light novels or whatever otherwise. Personally I am currently fulfilling the role of a good _student_ by neglecting my assignments. Very good at that one. Neglected this one until today too, so now Hata gets to meme on me instead. Thank god I put all those caveats in about my own performance when memeing on him earlier.
Now to something more interesting than moege: Fate/Stay Night. When I saw [the post about the retranslation][https://forums.fuwanovel.net/topic/25889-fatestay-night-a-new-translation], I mentally went "wait, is this the translation me and my JOP elitist friends were memeing on like a year ago?" — yes, yes it was. Oh dear. Here's one of the pictures we posted in our session of totally-not-toxic disadulation:
[Image: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/569475300413669376/888691063341060116/E_gQJ1yXoAge1Xg.png?width=776&height=582 (please to god reupload it rather than use Discord as a CDN)]
The problem I've got with the retranslation is clearly visible here: keeping way too much of the original Japanese sentence structure for comfort. Now, there are _some_ places where this may be justified as making it easy to use the direction of the original. Though the translator admitting this is basically [due to it being more work to change it][https://medium.com/@batesfredt/editorial-decision-making-or-translation-is-tricky-and-also-interpretative-97d269c2cf39] sure is an... admission. Then again, F/SN is 3.82 MB, sacrifices will have to be made to ship this decade. But there's way too much of it, and it really can't all be motivated by reasonable choices. Lest this be seen as a perhaps outdated, cherry-picked example, in the very text [the translator chose][https://medium.com/@batesfredt/re-translating-fate-stay-night-98b9cadff967] to exemplify the changes between the (often bad) TakaJun translation and his new translation, there are definite and difficult-to-motivate inelegancies. Consider these two:
俺には見慣れた店、見飽きた景色を、イリヤは目を輝かせて駆けていく。
1: Ilya runs through the familiar scenery with lit up eyes.
2: The stores that were familiar to me, the view that I’d grown tired of, Illya ran through them with sparkling eyes.
We can see that translation 1 has cut out the explicit contrast between how the MC feels about the scenery and how Ilya is treating it. That said we know it's the shopping district from an earlier sentence, so it didn't really lose much from using "scenery". it also uses "lit up eyes", which I have to admit is a bit weird to me. Meanwhile, translation 2 finds a very wordy and unnatural way to near exactly copy the original structure. I have to say, this kind of translation takes little literary effort, bar the pain of your soul escaping your body writing such terrible prose (maybe that last part is just me). There is no bold dedication to preserving the poetry of the original: all I can see is a slavish avoidance of actually writing in the English language. Honestly, translation 1 is better. Which is that one? Mirror Moon's, of course. And unfortunately given what I see in the examples provided, I can't see this translation being anything but a sidegrade. Perhaps the best comparison is Hoshimemo by Insem versus Hoshimemo by Sekai, though TakaJun actually knew Japanese quite well as a native. In the end, they're both bad. The new translation may sometimes achieve higher accuracy, but it loses itself in unmotivated verbiage with depressing frequency.
Now, how would I do this? Let's try to keep the contrast found in the original while using more natural phrasing:
俺には見慣れた店、見飽きた景色を、イリヤは目を輝かせて駆けていく。
The district is nothing new to me, but Illya dashes through the familiar scenery with sparkling eyes.
I'm not entirely thrilled with how long it went, but I guess it's within 3 characters of the new translation KEKW. Meanwhile, we're using a more natural sentence structure, conveying the meaning in different words, and using a fun verb (dash) versus a normie one (run). I actually had a different idea first, but I had to scrap it for context reasons:
Illya dashes through the familiar scenery with sparkling eyes, finding delight in a place I've seen a million times.
...Because the overall passage is about Illya actually faking it, and MC-kun noticing. Life is hard sometimes. I could maybe even have used this one with other changes in the text, but I'd rather not put something so sus as my example translation. Ah well.
Anyway, idk shrug just learn Japanese 4head. Either that or hope the translator hires some talented editor boy to sort out this mess.
Oh, and H2O has reached 69.3% progress. Nice.」
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Since it's not really a serious translation comparison without the Japanese, have these segments that I wrested out of a script collection I found. All commands are removed, so for some of them I'm not quite sure if they were actually contiguous ingame:
Ilya scene
イリヤの願いは、本当に些細なコトだった。
“買い物に連れて行って”
特別な願いなんかじゃない。
望めば幾らでも叶う、ただの日常をこそイリヤは望んだ。
……それにどれほどの意味が込められていたのか、俺には分からない。
ただイリヤがそう望んだ通り、敵も味方もなく、マスターとしてでもなく、兄妹のように商店街を歩いた。
俺には見慣れた店、見飽きた景色を、イリヤは目を輝かせて駆けていく。
イリヤのはしゃぎようは、見ているこっちまで楽しくなるほどだ。
屈託のない笑顔のまま商店街を歩くイリヤ。
あんまりにも楽しそうなその姿は、いつまでもこの時間が続けばいいのにと思わせる。
―――なのに、気付いてしまった。
一瞬たりとも笑顔を崩さず、踊るように駆けていく後ろ姿。
そこに幸福などない。
少女は悲しいから―――ユメから覚めたくないから、ただ必死に笑顔でいるだけなのだと。
Remembering Saber - Translation post header image + probable context afterward
僅かに振り向く横顔。
どこまでも穏やかな聖緑の瞳。
時間はこの瞬間のみ永遠となり、
彼女を象徴する青い衣が風に揺れる。
/context?
――――差し込むのは僅かな蒼光。
金砂のような髪が、月の光に濡れていた。
それは、今から十年前の話。
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