Anime Discussion

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skaianDestiny
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by skaianDestiny »

The new Gundam series Ironblooded Orphans looks pretty promising. Go check it out.

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hack
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by hack »

... after One-Punch Man, of course.

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dragoongfa
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by dragoongfa »

Changing the subject a little bit, I have recently started indulging myself in some Japanese light novels of some manga and anime I am currently following. Overlord and Rise of the shield hero to name the two latest ones.

I can't read Japanese so I have to read the fan translations, so I have to ask anyone who has read both variants is if the writing on the original Jap text is as egregious as the translations?

It's bad, bordering on the 'I wouldn't pay one dollar for this' variety. What's perplexing me is that the fan subs and translations on the various anime and manga adaptations are of excellent quality while the overall text of the light novel translations I have read is horrible (and those are often from the same people who translate anime and manga).

What is worse, I have read plenty of reviews of official translations in which readers openly complain that the translation doesn't hold water when compared with the fan translations. And those are texts that I consider badly written at best, WTF is supposed to be happening at worse.

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Razor One
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Razor One »

Mr Bojangles wrote:Why is that guy saying "multi-track drifting!!" like it's a thing? I mean, I know manga can get flat-out ridiculous... but, yeah, "multi-track drifting!!"
The image is a cap from a doujinshi (Fan comic) called "Densha de D" which parodies Initial D, but instead of cars they use trains. Drifting is a major thing in Initial D because it involves street racing or something (never looked into it), so you can only really replicate that with trains by using multiple tracks, hence Multitrack Drifting.
dragoongfa wrote:Changing the subject a little bit, I have recently started indulging myself in some Japanese light novels of some manga and anime I am currently following. Overlord and Rise of the shield hero to name the two latest ones.

I can't read Japanese so I have to read the fan translations, so I have to ask anyone who has read both variants is if the writing on the original Jap text is as egregious as the translations?

It's bad, bordering on the 'I wouldn't pay one dollar for this' variety. What's perplexing me is that the fan subs and translations on the various anime and manga adaptations are of excellent quality while the overall text of the light novel translations I have read is horrible (and those are often from the same people who translate anime and manga).

What is worse, I have read plenty of reviews of official translations in which readers openly complain that the translation doesn't hold water when compared with the fan translations. And those are texts that I consider badly written at best, WTF is supposed to be happening at worse.
From what I understand, that's got a lot to do with how Japanese is written versus how it gets spoken. Kanji is a bitch to translate, the syntax and grammar are different, and some stuff just will not translate well across the languages even with a professional at the helm. Spoken Japanese is relatively easier to get translated, since speaking it strips it of some of the ambiguity.

Let's do an example.

Consider the word "I", as in the reference to ones self. The Romaji for this in Japanese would be "Watashi". The hiragana would be わたし

Now, let's list out some other Watashi's.

わたし - Watashi - I
私 - Watashi - I
渡し - Watashi - Pass
綿し - Wata Shi - Cotton To
渡司 - Watashi - WatariTsukasa (I think this one broke google)

So, the same phonetic sound has five different potential meanings, only two of which seem to refer to one's self.

The real skullduggery really comes out though when you launch into the Kanji. Let's go for the simplest rendition of I with Kanji, 私.

A quick check on Wiktionary shows that it has one Onyomi Reading, Shi, and three Kunyomi readings, Watashi, Watakushi, and Hisoka.

Watashi we know. Watakushi means the same thing as Watashi, but is incredibly formal, the kind of thing you'd only use around an emperor or someone of similar rank and respect.

Hisoka means secret, which seems out of left field, until you recognise that the Kanji has two meanings; I/Me, and private/secret/personal. The Kanji can be read in any one of those ways, and could be used as a pun so as to mean both at the same time, or be a veiled cultural reference.

Thus when translating, you need to be aware of all possible permutations of the Kanji, how it fits into the sentence, whether there's a cultural reference or pun going on, and that it may form part of a compound word with multiple Kanji strung together as a lengthier pun. When it comes to fansubbing, all you really need to do is listen to what they're saying, keep track of the context, and write accordingly.

Of course, that assumes the group you're paying attention to is even fansubbing the first place. If they're just ripping stuff, then they're not even translating; most legitimate streaming sites like Crunchyroll tend to get the script sent to them directly from the writers, so professional translators have already gone over it and there's not much work for anyone to do except for encoding and uploading. The quality of the professional translators can vary a bit too though, as Nobunagun's infamous "Heinrich Himmler" (it was apparently meant to be Heinrich Hipoi) translation goof attests to.

In short, translating the Kanji is a bitch. What gets used in novels is different from what gets used in Manga, which can muddy the waters a little, as Manga tend to use somewhat simpler Kanji compared to novels (Compare: Foundation novel vs. Superman comics). Most translations of novels are either labours of love or quick and dirty machine translations with the odd layperson trying to kludge it into something that's barely legible. Another factor is that light novels and novels often get officially licensed more often than manga (at least from what I've seen), which means the lawyers can and will come out in force to stamp down on your project as it starts to get running which tends to disperse talent, whereas a lot of manga never makes it to the west, so there's no money lost of a few foreigners translate it into English for free.

It's like putting together a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. Except half of the pieces don't fit unless you rotate them through as few as four to as many as nineteen dimensions, a number of pieces fit together nicely but don't actually form a sensible image, and you have to do it blindfolded with boxing gloves on while a rabid honey badger feasts on your spleen.

{Edit}

If you want an example of what I consider a well translated light novel, look into Risou no himo seikatsu. From what I understand the person who translates that one did college level Japanese. It's a fairly good read and the story is good, but you still get odd cultural artifacts such as strange repetitions or obscure sentence structure.
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Arioch
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Arioch »

Translating prose is always going to be more difficult than translating manga, as the visuals carry a lot of the story and literal translations will usually do for dialogue. This is often not so for descriptive prose.

In addition to the problems Razor One mentioned above, Japanese prose uses a lot of idiom and metaphor, and so a literal translation often seems completely nonsensical. There are also a lot of truncations and omissions. And that's before getting into the differences between formal and casual speech, and slang.

I took three years of college Japanese, and I'm nowhere near being able to read a novel or a newspaper.

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dragoongfa
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by dragoongfa »

@Razor One
@Arioch

So in essence it comes down to their totally alien way of writing things. Oh well, I will just try to shut down certain parts of my brain when reading translated light novels.
Razor One wrote:
Mr Bojangles wrote:Why is that guy saying "multi-track drifting!!" like it's a thing? I mean, I know manga can get flat-out ridiculous... but, yeah, "multi-track drifting!!"
The image is a cap from a doujinshi (Fan comic) called "Densha de D" which parodies Initial D, but instead of cars they use trains. Drifting is a major thing in Initial D because it involves street racing or something (never looked into it), so you can only really replicate that with trains by using multiple tracks, hence Multitrack Drifting.
Most of Japanese street racing happens in barely used but paved with high quality tarmac mountain roads. Initial D covers the subculture of Japanese mountain racing in which drifting plays a pivotal role in winning a race.

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Mr Bojangles
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Re: Anime Discussion

Post by Mr Bojangles »

Razor One wrote:
Mr Bojangles wrote:Why is that guy saying "multi-track drifting!!" like it's a thing? I mean, I know manga can get flat-out ridiculous... but, yeah, "multi-track drifting!!"
The image is a cap from a doujinshi (Fan comic) called "Densha de D" which parodies Initial D, but instead of cars they use trains. Drifting is a major thing in Initial D because it involves street racing or something (never looked into it), so you can only really replicate that with trains by using multiple tracks, hence Multitrack Drifting.
Thanks much for the response; I've been going a bit nuts trying to wrap my brain around multi-track drifting. I'm especially glad to know it's a doujinshi parody of Initial D (of which I am familiar). I don't know if my brain could have handled it if you said "This is a totally serious, serialized manga. How can you not see that?" :P

As for what you said about Japanese, I can't help but agree. I once tried to build a contextual machine translator for written (kanji) Japanese; it did not work. My Japanese-speaking friends called me a masochist. It did work really well for Chinese, though.

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