Tokyo Babel Translation Discussion

[Darklord Rooke]

3 minutes ago, Kirashi said:

the translation really suck

Er ... no.

[sanahtlig]

4 minutes ago, Kirashi said:

I understand your point and I agree, but I am just talking about THIS translation. Even though the story is good, the translation really suck and is REALLY far from the japanese meaning. English speakers seems happy with this translation though.

I know you are fluent in japanese, you should give a try (I played the trial). You will understand within your 30 first minutes. I already spotted like 2-3 mistakes within 10 minutes.

I'd take a look if someone were to hand me a short section of script in Japanese and English.  I'm reluctant to take someone else's word on "mistranslations", regardless of their level of proficiency.  Many people don't distinguish rephrasings from clear misunderstandings of the original script.

I'm not fluent in Japanese, or I wouldn't need to text hook.  Hardly anyone around here is actually "fluent".  With the right combination of tools and background knowledge, you don't need to be fluent to understand what you're reading.

A Japanese TLC pass should catch the most flagrant of misinterpretations, at least.  I DO take your word that the English and Japanese phrasings are likely quite different, which will make TLC somewhat of a challenge.

[Scorp]

22 minutes ago, Kirashi said:

I understand your point and I agree, but I am just talking about THIS translation. Even though the story is good, the translation really suck and is REALLY far from the japanese meaning. English speakers seems happy with this translation though.

I know you are fluent in japanese, you should give a try (I played the trial). You will understand within your 30 first minutes. I already spotted like 2-3 mistakes within 10 minutes.

I believe if translation really suck, you can give real examples of this - like, you know, japanese line - english line - your comment. As I cannot imagine that @garejei and @Conjueror were not able to properly translate that, so examples would be really helpful.

Conjueror is learning japanese for 13 years as he told and passed japanese university entrance exams 7 years ago, so... I am at a loss here.

[Yuuko]

17 minutes ago, Kirashi said:

the translation really suck and is REALLY far from the japanese meaning. English speakers seems happy with this translation though.

Yeah I guess changing the jokes a little to make them make sense in English is really awful and makes the TL suck hard.

Please, you are not even fluent in Japanese or English either so what do you know.

[sanahtlig]

To take this in a less divisive direction...

If a project has to translate from an intermediary language (English) rather than the source (Japanese), what type of intermediary translation would serve as the best foundation?  A (likely stilted) literal translation, or a well-flowing rewrite that takes many liberties to convey a similar effect?

[Kirashi]

20 minutes ago, Scorp said:

I believe if translation really suck, you can give real examples of this - like, you know, japanese line - english line - your comment. As I do not think that @garejei and @Conjueror we not able to properly translate that, so examples would be really helpful.

Conjueror is learning japanese for 13 years as he told and passed japanese university entrance exams 7 years ago, so... You really think he is not fluent enough?

Already did there:

http://blog.fuwanovel.net/2016/04/vnts-april-02/

19 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

Yeah I guess changing the jokes a little to make them make sense in English is really awful and makes the TL suck hard.

Please, you are not even fluent in Japanese or English either so what do you know.

Seems like you are just trying to add salt... 

Sadly, it was not only the joke and "a little" either. This translation is good for native speaker (main target audience I guess). 

By the way, when did I say that I am fluent in english or japanese? 

[Yuuko]

7 minutes ago, Kirashi said:

Seems like you are just trying to add salt... 

Sadly, it was not only the joke and "a little" either. This translation is good for native speaker, but that's all. 

By the way, when did I say that I am fluent in english or japanese? 

Nah it's all okay now that you showed what's wrong.

It's just that when someone who's not fluent in either of the languages comes telling that the TL sucks without providing anything to prove it is just going to get attacked.

+ I didn't have really good impression of you after something you said in the chat some weeks ago

[Darklord Rooke]

21 minutes ago, Kirashi said:

Already did there:

It's not a very solid argument. Basically it boils down to you not liking localisations.

Quote

There is several problem about the tokyo babel’s translation.

1- Some sentences were totally different from japanese. And more than one or two. I could make a list if you want (for exemple in japanese “一緒に帰りましょう” meaning “let’s go home together” translated in english by “let’s sleep in the same bed”).

2- I am not a native english speaker, but I read a lot of VN and Light Novel (like haganai, oreigaru) and I am learning japanese since 5-6 years, but gosh… Reading this trial make me feel like my english really sucks. That’s the first time I see a translation this weird. The translation was too hard to understand from time to time, and I don’t think that’s the VN fault since the voices are really easy to understand. The problem is: why they choose to make such a difficult translation for something easy in japanese?

3- Here I will speak for myself but maybe you saw while playing that that the translation was not literal at all. I prefer literal translation for the sake of improving my japanese (and maybe other people do). Furthermore the translator had too much freedom. Now you have somes mistakes here and there, and hard sentences for thoses like me who aren’t native english speaker.

Well I complain about the translation, but tokyo babel is really worth to read.

1) Your point about lines being completely different doesn’t mean anything by itself. Because of the differences between the two languages, and the differences in implications and use of context between the two languages, to create a flowing translation liberties will usually have to be taken. You will have to ask Conjueror why he chose to be more specific there, but off the top of my head it could very well be due more to the direct nature of English vs Japanese.

I will say that Conjueror is VERY fluent in the Japanese language, as in you'll probably won't find many people in this community who understand Japanese better than he. So the idea that he makes a lot of mistakes isn’t likely. What’s more likely is you don’t approve of his localisation philosophy, and he does lean to the localisation side of things.

2) I'm gonna be mean here, sorry, but your English does suck ... just a little. VNs and LNs typically use shitty language in English, especially if they are fan-translated. I’m not being mean, but think school level English, if that. Sometimes worse. Little character in the voices, generic basic words. Sorry to be mean here, but you aren’t really fluent in English which is probably why you have problems. I see the same sort of stuff raised every time someone uses language that’s a little bit difficult, it has little to do with the 'difficulty' of the language used. 

I'll further add the point that Conjueror (and Gare) are old fogies, and they love to read a lot of old English literature and writing. The writing in these books are usually FAR more difficult than the language you encounter in VNs. There's also a lot of Biblical references, and other stuff. Whether something is 'easy to understand' is relative. I can tell your English is not good, so something that's 'hard' for you, will be 'easy' for a native English speaker. 

I'd rather translators not use language usually found in fan translated LNs, though. Because they flat out suck.

3) Literal translations are rare for stories designed to entertain, because the purpose of a ‘story’ isn’t to help someone ‘understand a language’, but rather to entertain the reader. When you combine a ‘literal’ translation with the sort of basic, generic language fan-translations often use, you get something which is borderline ‘Globish’, not ‘English.’ The idea that you want a piece of entertainment translated in a way which prioritises ‘learning’ is farcical. No, there’s no rationalisation for this, your philosophy is wrong.

*Sigh* @Conjueror your presence is required.

[Scorp]

Actually this could explain why english is "hard" in this translation: https://ask.fm/Conjueror/answers/135685030619

That was intentional and it was used in good way.

[sanahtlig]

26 minutes ago, Rooke said:

I see the same sort of stuff raised every time someone uses language that’s a little bit difficult, it has little to do with the 'difficulty' of the language used. 

I contest this.  There's a writing philosophy that says, "Write in a way that's accessible to the widest audience".  Adding unnecessary flourishes may tickle some readers, but it will puzzle others--even among native speakers.  This is a criticism I brought up with that Dies Irae translation sample.  Your counter-argument was valid, but I think that point still stands.  My English reading comprehension is probably up in the 90th percentile, and if the diction is enough to throw me off then I think it's fair to say the accessibility bar has been set quite high.

That said, I have no idea if the level of diction in Tokyo Babel is anywhere near that level of complexity.

[Decay]

Tokyo Babel is pretty much on par with a YA novel, as Conjueror says in that ask.fm. It's not exactly Finnegans Wake.

[Kirashi]

8 minutes ago, Rooke said:

It's not a very solid argument. Basically it boils down to you not liking localisations.

1) Your point about lines being completely different doesn’t mean anything by itself. Because of the differences between the two languages, and the differences in implications and use of context between the two languages, to create a flowing translation liberties will usually have to be taken. You will have to ask Conjueror why he chose to be more specific there, but off the top of my head it could very well be due more to the direct nature of English vs Japanese.

I will say that Conjueror is VERY fluent in the Japanese language, as in you'll probably won't find many people in this community who understand Japanese better than he. So the idea that he makes a lot of mistakes isn’t likely. What’s more likely is you don’t approve of his localisation philosophy, and he does lean to the localisation side of things.

2) I'm gonna be mean here, sorry, but your English does suck ... just a little. VNs and LNs typically use shitty language in English, especially if they are fan-translated. I’m not being mean, but think school level English, if that. Sometimes worse. Little character in the voices, generic basic words. Sorry to be mean here, but you aren’t really fluent in English which is probably why you have problems. I see the same sort of stuff raised every time someone uses language that’s a little bit difficult, it has little to do with the 'difficulty' of the language used. 

I'll further add the point that Conjueror (and Gare) are old fogies, and they love to read a lot of old English literature and writing. The writing in these books are usually FAR more difficult than the language you encounter in VNs. There's also a lot of Biblical references, and other stuff. Whether something is 'easy to understand' is relative. I can tell your English is not good, so something that's 'hard' for you, will be 'easy' for a native English speaker. 

I'd rather translators not use language usually found in fan translated LNs, though. Because they flat out suck.

3) Literal translations are rare for stories designed to entertain, because the purpose of a ‘story’ isn’t to help someone ‘understand a language’, but rather to entertain the reader. When you combine a ‘literal’ translation with the sort of basic, generic language fan-translations often use, you get something which is borderline ‘Globish’, not ‘English.’ The idea that you want a piece of entertainment translated in a way which prioritises ‘learning’ is farcical. No, there’s no rationalisation for this, your philosophy is wrong.

*Sigh* @Conjueror your presence is required.

I am not gonna fight with you (don't forget this topic is about spanish translation) but...

I showed one example, accept it or not, but there are others like that. You're right, when you don't undestand the voices, it might works, but when you do, you can understand that something is wrong... I always talked about how the translation is, not how fluent the translator is/are.

I always had enough knowledge in english to read VN and books (not only light novel). Of course I am not fluent in english, you see, I am in a medical school and I learn english and japanese with the little free time I have. As I said, a dictionnary didn't help for most part of the sentence I didn't understand. I just wanted to tell there how I felt about this way of translation. If you don't like how the others VN are translated because "they flat out suck" so be it. I won't jump at you because of that. Please don't forget  then you are as free to like/dislike a translation than me.

My main point in this topic was to explain the difficulty to translate this in english (and so far I don't think I was wrong), if you want to complain about something, just pm me... 

[Deep Blue]

I've read the example of the mistranslation that kirashi gave “一緒に帰りましょう” translated as "let's sleep in the same bed", and no you cannot confuse it with 寝, both of them are level 5 kanji it's almost impossible for a person that knows japanese to mistake something so basic also it should be "let's sleep together" not in the same bed, so I'm sure he did it on purpose or he was really sleepy  either way I can't talk about the translation since I haven't read the novel yet so this is assuming that sentence was there in the first place...

I do know that conjueror and garejei love to add words (what I call flowery translations) and to "Americanize" the translations (always abiding to the original text) I don't think this is a good idea but this is just my opinion, everyone here loves that specially english speakers from USA, they don't like literal translations in fact pretty much they hate them.

[Fred the Barber]

So, first of all, I think the distinction between "localization" and "translation" is bullshit. Rather, there's more like a continuum of how thoroughly translated a text is.

Native English speakers are going to prefer something farther along the thoroughness spectrum for an English translation, and it should be obvious why: you want to read something that is maximally natural to you, because it's easier on your brain. Reading something in your native language that sounds completely bizarre is confusing and upsetting. It takes you out of the story.

Probably my only real contribution to this discussion: it creates vastly more cognitive dissonance for us native English speakers to read stilted, unnatural English than it would for somebody who doesn't speak English at a native level. You're already reading something that's a little weird to you, so you notice less of the additional weirdness of a poor translation. We're reading something that should be second nature, but it keeps tripping us up because it's not sufficiently translated.

[Clephas]

9 hours ago, Rooke said:

Er ... no.

More or less this... what I saw of the screenshots and other people playing it was decently accurate... though not literal (of course not, purists).  Yes, there were points that I thought could have been done differently, but that was just a matter of style and not a matter of translation. 

Edit: I'll repeat this again, "Japanese translation is an oxymoron."

Edit2: Just to clarify, I thought the word choices were a lot less awkward than in most of the translated VNs I've played from what I saw, and they weren't that far off in even the worst cases, at a glance.  It isn't like the Valkyria Chronicles localization by Sega, where the characters were often clearly saying something completely and utterly different from what was written, for instance. 

[littleshogun]

Well, I didn't know how should I contribute here other than this thread remind me again why translation will always matter of debate forever, either with localization or literal translation. If you ask me whether the translation is understandable or not, then I would said yes I understand, but it's more likely because I didn't understand Japanese spoken voice though and it's more like a necessary skill to play VN that you must understand English first (Since understandable language to me was English compared to Japan).

I think I couldn't said anything in regard of kirashi other than I think just said your learning English and Japanese right now and complained Tokyo Babel translation was bad or suck will not help your case here, but I understand that learning English might be too difficult for you here though. And one more advice, instead depend on dictionary, I think you should using Google to search hard to understand word and from there you hopefully could decipher it using dictionary.

[Kirashi]

Hi, I come back here after (partially) reading TB one more time.

This time, I took the time to focus and (try) to understand each sentences. I read somewhere that the translators wanted to talk about Miley Cyrus (Who the hell is this? What is the point anyway??). For me, having japanese teens in modern Tokyo casually talking about Miley Cyrus brings me out of the experience. I already explained why I dislike the translation, but now that I think about it, the translation was not especially bad or something, it's just that sometime, the translation is so weird that it gives me a headache, and  it's hard to trust the translation when you compare what the character are saying and what I read, and it gets me kinda paranoid. The closer I look at the translation, the farther it brings me of the original meaning. I already gave some example of "mistake" (even though I think those was on purpose), but still, there is one thing I don't understand: 

When Setsuna is talking with sorami, Lilith later adds "Grinnity, grin grin". I was "okay, what the hell is that..." I remember some random dude here telling me "if you can't find the answer in a dictionnary then use google translation" (I really hope it was a joke, otherwise maybe we could handle this translation to nekohen -_-'). Anyway I still searched on google and I still didn't find anything, so I closed TB and gave up. This morning I tried to understand one more time, but this time with the voice, and I heard something like "似合 似合" (nia) wich is a well known word meaning "getting along" (sadly I don't have the japanese script). My question is, why? Would it really cost that much to translate this with something that make sense??! Why adding something fancy when there is not in the original context??! Each time I have a problem with this translation that's always for something like that, and I always have the impression that the whole game tries to confuse me. Even now I don't have an idea of what Grinnity means. I think Yummer means something like having bad taste or something... I don't know anymore....

If the translators one day come around, I have 2 questions: Even though this kind of translation might please some native speaker, do you really thinks it was the best way? And did you use this kind of translation for all the other games you translated?

[Conjueror]

What she says is にやにや which is a Japanese onomatopoeia for grinning (that she actually says aloud).
English doesn't have that, obviously, so we went for smth like *grin grin*; grinnity is just something phonetical to make it read better (we're not the only ppl in the planet who figured that out).

The Miley Cyrus reference had a Japanese idol that was infamous for revealing clothes that no English speaker would've ever known, so I just tled her name to something familiar to English speakers that should conjure the same image. Besides, I think it's either Raziel or Lilith who says that, and neither are Japanese, or teens for that matter.

Yummers is something you say after tasting something tasty.

----

I think people recommended you searching the English words you didn't understand in google (not using google translate), since slang is not usually recorded in normal dictionaries. Tokyo Babel is full of Japanese slang, pop culture references, and memes — we only tried to convey them as best as possible in English. We didn't add anything that wasn't already there. If the game we're tling doesn't contain such things, then our translation doesn't contain them either. An English speaker should have an almost exact same experience with our version of TB as a Japanese speaker would have with the original (in a few instances I'd go as far as to say the English version reads better as Higashide is not exactly known as a master of prose himself). Anyway, it's not a watered down version like most fan-translations unfortunately are.

I've been speaking Japanese for thirteen years now, and lived in Japan for almost seven of them, during which I got bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from one of the most demanding universities in the country studying everything exclusively in Japanese. If I could pass quantum mechanics class in Japanese, I'm sure I could handle Tokyo Babel. xD

[Kirashi]

Usually, onomatopoeia are translated by something like *stare* *munch* *yawn* etc. I may be wrong but you still translated a japanese onomatopoeia with a weird english/american slang... Same for Yummers. I can understand what "yummy" means (even though I saw this word only once in midle school, I still remember it) but that was the first time I see Yummers.

As for Grinnity, here is what I got: https://www.google.fr/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=Grinnity+traduction and as you can see, it was mostly about TB. Sounded like this word only existed in TB.

And that's not only a matter about grinnity and such, because so far, most of the slang I heard in japanese were understandable for a foreigner, while those translated tend to be not. I can look at the game one more time if you really want examples.

And lastly, It seems that you didn't understand what I meant, I was not talking about your experience in life, but your way of translating. So far I thought that when MG released a game, the target audience was all around the world. TB tends to be too much americanized, with too much hard slang than the game seems to require. While reading TB, I can't help but think that the main target audience was only the native speaker, that's why I'm disappointed, that's all.

 

[Decay]

"Grinnity" isn't an american slang word. You just don't seem to be thinking flexibly enough about the English language. It's surprisingly modular and you can't let yourself get stuck thinking about the rigid definitions of things. You can do stuff like "Grinnity grin grin" and it just works, even if literally no one else has done it before. "Yummers" falls into that same category, where it's an almost obnoxiously cheerful way to say "yum." Again, I don't think this is specific to America, it's just the flexible nature of the English language.

I'll also just add that I've seen plenty of people all over the world who have read, understood, and enjoyed the translation perfectly fine. And the number of people who haven't understood it were very, very few. I'm not ready to say the thing has been over-americanized or cannot be understood by foreigners just on your testimony alone.

[Kirashi]

That doesn't change my question: what would it cost to give those words a proper sense? What was the purpose? What is the point adding a word that doesn't even exist in a professionnal translation? If I could at least understand that, maybe I could think more "flexibly" about the english language, because I'm lost here. 

That's not like I don't understand TB at all, but the fact that some people aren't able to understand it is already a problem, and I just hate being stuck regularly because of some unknow words. Even that problem aside, some sentence are too much english/american, that brings you out of context and it seems unnatural. Now that I think about it, I remember a native speaker in this forum (a propeller fan if I am right) saying the exact thing than me about the "americanization" and I remember how it ended... I don't really think this is my "testimony alone", my google search about "Grinnity traduction" was mainly about people talking about TB, trust me or not but I saw that I am not the only one in the world stuck over those words...

[Conjueror]

Fun fact: the guy who opted to use "grinnity" and "yummers" in those lines was a Hungarian. I personally thought those were pretty neat because they added flavor to the text and made it more pleasant to read. It never even occurred to me they could be confusing (neither did any of our testers note anything akin to the fact). I mean, games in Japanese are written with Japanese speakers in mind, so obviously, translations to English are written with English speakers in mind. Given the multinational fandom of VNs, perhaps MG should offer some sort of special "simplified English edition for foreign speakers" that uses only basic words of their games if there's a demand, but the idea of dumbing down the original work because people who can't speak English that well might not understand it makes no sense to me, especially when it's chuuni genre that's KNOWN for its kinda flowery writing. If we did that, then people who actually appreciate English writing will find our text boring and only call us hacks instead. It's a lose-lose situation.
Besides, I saw Grisaia use way weirder lingo than anything we have in our TB translation.

Tokyo Babel is harder to read than an average VN both in Japanese and English, and I really don't think we increased the difficulty of the original in any way.

[BookwormOtaku]

You know this discussion about Japanese lingo and translating to english does have me wonder how a translation of RuiTomo would go.

[Eclipsed]

What's all this discussion about? Is it about how far to the right Tokyo Babel's translation went?

[Conjueror]

Our approach was probably more similar to the one on the left, except that Tokyo Babel's Japanese script uses stuff like "it's like sex in my mouth" and what some people seem to want is for us to turn it into "That was delicious." in English script instead.