Lipschultz talks translation

[Darklord Rooke]

Quote

“We start by asking ourselves, what is the tone of the game? Is it a silly game? A serious game? Somewhere in between? And how is that mood expressed in the Japanese? Is it overt? Subtle?” he explains.

“Based on the answers to these questions, we try to come up with the best possible English equivalent. My personal motto has always been, ‘Translate the meaning, not the words’ – so rather than focusing on expressing exactly the same sentence as the original Japanese, I’ll instead read the original Japanese, process what’s being said, and to whom, and with what degree of joy or anger or confusion, and so on, then write an English sentence from scratch that conveys that same basic information in that same tone.

“The end result of this tends to be something that differs from the Japanese to some extent, but – hopefully – fully captures the feel and intent of the Japanese line while still getting the same ideas or concepts across.”

However, he is keen to stress that this is only his process. “Every translator has his/her own style and technique, though, so this varies a lot from person to person,” he says. “The only real generalisation I can make is that here at XSEED Games, absolutely none of us are literalists.”

With a language like Japanese, which has such different roots and sentence structure to English, a direct translation would never be able to capture the nuance of the text, something that is very important to text-heavy, story-based games.

“When you’ve been around for a while, it becomes abundantly clear that Japanese isn’t a language which lends itself well to direct translations – try as you might, you can never capture the nuance of a Japanese line by translating it word-for-word, because Germanic and Asian languages are just far too fundamentally incompatible with one another,” says Lipschultz.

“Adaptation is the only way to really remain true to the intent of the original work, and while there’s a certain degree of interpretation inherent in that, it’s still better than giving a flat, confusing, rote translation and depending on the player to know enough Japanese to suss out its subtler nuances.”

http://factor-tech.com/feature/can-artificial-intelligence-automate-video-game-translation/

Now if only /a/ knew about this ...

[sanahtlig]

This is actually my favorite passage:

Quote

“There are certainly tools we use to make our lives easier, though. One of my personal favorites is a plug-in for Firefox called Rikaichan, or Rikaikun for Chrome, which allows me to mouse over any Japanese word or phrase I don’t immediately recognise and have a tooltip pop up at my mouse cursor with readings, definitions, and so on,” he says. “I can’t even begin to express just how incredibly useful this is, as a lot of the games we work on use some pretty obscure or archaic language.

Even professional translators essentially text hook and use computerized dictionaries, like the tools I use myself (ITH + Translation Aggregator). 

[Down]

Every translator in the world or even anyone who's read/thought a bit about translations and knows more than one language should already know that kind of stuff and somehow the VN community is still bogged down by retarded literal vs. liberal "debates".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

5 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

Even professional translators essentially text hook and use computerized dictionaries, like the tools I use myself (ITH + Translation Aggregator). 

Well, what did you expect, that they would copy the text by hand with quills before comparing it with dictionaries written on parchment scrolls?

[Nosebleed]

I can sense the elitism being triggered as I read through this post.

But yeah all of what this person said aligns with my personal views on translation as well. Imo it's always best to adapt the text for the audience you're reading, not try to stay super literal and possibly make the end product sound unnatural.

One who's familiar with Japanese might appreciate you being more literal, but if I wanted something to sound Japanese, I'd go ahead and read the original text in Japanese. When I read something in English I want it to sound nice in English.

In a way though, this mentality has also hurt my enjoyment of certain things, because now when I read translated manga or VNs I start noticing all the typical Japanese sentence structures still lingering in some of the translations and it always irks me somewhere deep in the back of my brain. However, I like to think that this makes me a better human being.

[Dergonu]

4 minutes ago, Nosebleed said:

I can sense the elitism being triggered as I read through this post.

But yeah all of what this person said aligns with my personal views on translation as well. Imo it's always best to adapt the text for the audience you're reading, not try to stay super literal and possibly make the end product sound unnatural.

One who's familiar with Japanese might appreciate you being more literal, but if I wanted something to sound Japanese, I'd go ahead and read the original text in Japanese. When I read something in English I want it to sound nice in English.

I totally agree with this. 

It´s just a lot more comfortable to read something that isn´t a literal "copy paste" of the original text. It usually becomes strange and awkward to read. People being really stuck up about one line not being translated to its absolute literal meaning is kind of annoying in my opinion. 

[ittaku]

What's unfortunate is that this shouldn't even be newsworthy. Most people who demand a more literal translation are those who only understand a little Japanese and think that the translation isn't conveying the original meaning because they get hung up on grammar and words and essentially aren't understanding what is being conveyed to native Japanese speakers. The most telling part is that when a translator's native language is English, the more Japanese they know, the more natural sounding English their translation is.

[Down]

Basically what it comes down to is this: people want source-oriented translations rather than target-oriented translations.

A source-oriented translation is when you translate assuming the reader makes the effort to immerse himself into the cultural context of the work being translated, that that's what he looks for. A target-oriented translation is when you translate assuming you need to bring the work into the cultural context of the reader.

I think it doesn't even need to be argued that people reading otaku subculture stuff want very source-oriented translations. The issue arises from the confusions between the source/target dichotomy (which is a real translation choice) and the literal/liberal dichotomy. The latter barely makes any sense in jp to english translations: a good source-oriented translation is not literal because a literal translation is not a good translation. The languages are not compatible that way for all the reasons evoked above and many more.

[Nosebleed]

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why you'll never be able to express Japanese, a logographic language, in English and carry all the cultural context behind it. Even the kanji itself is part of the cultural context and you'll lose that immediately as you translate the language into a different alphabet, even if you were to be as literal as one can be, so there's no real good reason to complain about something not being literal enough, because it's impossible to carry the exact structure, meaning and context that Japanese has into a different language. 

A while ago I had an internal debate on whether or not I should keep 3rd person speech for a particular character since she switches between the normal and 3rd person in the story, but I decided against it because ultimately it just doesn't come across well in English. A lot of people have this quirk with translations where they like when a character refers to themselves by their given name, but they don't like when you convert the WHOLE text into 3rd speech (like changing an "I" to a "She" later on in the sentence). If one is to change a text into 3rd speech, EVERYTHING has to change to fit it, no matter how awkward it sounds, and that's why I decided I'll never do it. My solution was to find ways to portray her personality change without affecting the integral English grammar. At the end of the day, I know I lost the 3rd person speech, but it's 10 times more pleasing to read a dialogue that sounds coherent than reading something that sounds like it was written by a primary schooler.

People need to learn to live with less literal translations and appreciate the English language a little bit more.

[KuroganeHomura]

5 hours ago, Down said:

Basically what it comes down to is this: people want source-oriented translations rather than target-oriented translations.

A source-oriented translation is when you translate assuming the reader makes the effort to immerse himself into the cultural context of the work being translated, that that's what he looks for. A target-oriented translation is when you translate assuming you need to bring the work into the cultural context of the reader.

I think it doesn't even need to be argued that people reading otaku subculture stuff want very source-oriented translations. The issue arises from the confusions between the source/target dichotomy (which is a real translation choice) and the literal/liberal dichotomy. The latter barely makes any sense in jp to english translations: a good source-oriented translation is not literal because a literal translation is not a good translation. The languages are not compatible that way for all the reasons evoked above and many more.

I think I'm just going to use this the next time someone asks for more literal translations.

[Chuee]

5 hours ago, Down said:

Basically what it comes down to is this: people want source-oriented translations rather than target-oriented translations.

A source-oriented translation is when you translate assuming the reader makes the effort to immerse himself into the cultural context of the work being translated, that that's what he looks for. A target-oriented translation is when you translate assuming you need to bring the work into the cultural context of the reader.

I think it doesn't even need to be argued that people reading otaku subculture stuff want very source-oriented translations. The issue arises from the confusions between the source/target dichotomy (which is a real translation choice) and the literal/liberal dichotomy. The latter barely makes any sense in jp to english translations: a good source-oriented translation is not literal because a literal translation is not a good translation. The languages are not compatible that way for all the reasons evoked above and many more.

The problem is that a lot of times this is entirely impossible. A great number of otaku-related material is made with a Japanese setting, and made by Japanese people for a Japanese audience. With simple language things, you can get around this easily for the most part, barring a few exceptions like "itadakimasu". However actual cultural events, you can't simply change, which is why otaku-related stuff will always have a Japanese feel to it no matter how good of a translation you produce. 

[Soulless Watcher]

3 minutes ago, Chuee said:

The problem is that a lot of times this is entirely impossible. A great number of otaku-related material is made with a Japanese setting, and made by Japanese people for a Japanese audience. With simple language things, you can get around this easily for the most part, barring a few exceptions like "itadakimasu". However actual cultural events, you can't simply change, which is why otaku-related stuff will always have a Japanese feel to it no matter how good of a translation you produce. 

I think, I could be wrong, they were not referring to cultural differences but from sentence content. From my brief understanding of the Japanese language (that I mostly learned from people who don't speak Japanese so this is probably all bullshit), the language is very context heavy. A single word or phrase can have multiple meanings depending where and when it is being used. English on the other hand has many more words that can mean the same thing, but are more "specialized" and tend to be used only in certain conditions.