howto:translate

Ugh... I log into Danbooru while I'm on vacation and I get a thread telling me how to translate. I understand the need, but man, what a pain in the ass...

Honorifics: Please don't force me to leave them in. I honestly think these need to be handled on a case-by-case basis. My personal inclination is to leave them out wherever possible (though if I'm translating a comic someone else has already done half of, I tend to follow their example for the sake of consistency). Anyway, a few thoughts on this.

• In a purely "Japanese" situation, I could understand keeping them in, but as is mentioned in the link memento mori provided, non-Japanese people tend to read a lot more into these than is actually present.
• When a traditional maid refers to her master as "X-sama", isn't it better to translate this as "Lord X" or "Lady X"? I think it is. There are undoubtedly more cases like these.
• There are funny uses for these honorifics like in "anata-sama" and like "-san" stuck to the end of a company name. I'd say these obviously need to be eliminated – leaving them in is not translating the text.
• What about conventions used in official translations? I normally strive to keep the translation of doujinshi of a game, for instance, close to the style of the English release.
• Also, for me, this rule kinda contradicts the rule about translations being fully English as far as possible.

Explanatory notes: I'm with Shinjidude here. I think it's better to provide more information. Only when there's actually something to explain, of course.

Partial translations: If I'm positive that I understand one part of a comic/whatever, I'm not about to leave the whole thing blank just because I got bowled out at a later part. Also, I'm in a habit of translating long comics as I go. If you're gonna tell me to stop doing this, meh, I suppose I could, but you can expect to see a lot less contributing from me. :(

Apart from all that, I feel obliged to say that I like what you've got on the page so far.

Soljashy said:
Honorifics: Please don't force me to leave them in. I honestly think these need to be handled on a case-by-case basis. My personal inclination is to leave them out wherever possible (though if I'm translating a comic someone else has already done half of, I tend to follow their example for the sake of consistency).

This is how I feel honorifics should be handled.

Soljashy said:
Ugh... I log into Danbooru while I'm on vacation and I get a thread telling me how to translate. I understand the need, but man, what a pain in the ass...

Yeah, that's what this is, we're telling you how to translate, obviously. Then again, you might want to try not taking this personally. It's absolutely without any question that 1) all translations are very much appreciated and 2) we need to set some guides for translating. You can't honestly tell me you think there's any sort of consistency right now. I've seen comics go from perfectly translated to completely incomprehensible page by page. People (like you) who have established themselves as great translators obviously are able to guide themselves and in fact we are asking for feedback from translators such as yourself in establishing rules and guides that make sense and ensure that new people who don't know what to do have a nice guide to refer to.

(EDIT: this comes off more jerky than I intended it, leaving it for posterity and so people won't say I'm censoring myself... Just read it with a goofy voice!)

• Also, for me, this [honorifics] rule kinda contradicts the rule about translations being fully English as far as possible.

Me too.

Explanatory notes:

I think in 9 out of 10 cases that I've seen when writing this thing, I found that the note could've been integrated into the text OR left out with no problem. Of course, the great exception (to me) is jokes and cultural stuff that's straightforward to Japanese people but might be utterly baffling. I don't oppose translation notes as "icing on the cake", but I think it improves translation legibility greatly to not rely on them unless absolutely necessary. (Admittedly, obnoxious translation notes in anime that obscure the action is a major pet peeve of mine, and that doesn't really apply here.)

re: Partial translations:

I think that you should probably be fine when doing this. Unless people have complained about your translations lately (I don't think so?), I don't think you should take this comment to heart--it's more something for a new translator, and it is good advice in general.

Apart from all that, I feel obliged to say that I like what you've got on the page so far.

I got praised! I got praised! :D

Another thing, if some people can assemble helpful links or other stuff for translating that might be good to put into that page as well. I'll add
forum #22629 to the page now.

Shinjidude said: We're saying here (and it has long been at least some users' preference) to not use line-breaks before translation notes. Is this hard and fast?

I think a hard return before a note is a very good idea and as for a full blank line, doesn't matter to me. The separation does seem logical though.

Soljashy said: Ugh... I log into Danbooru while I'm on vacation and I get a thread telling me how to translate.

You'll live.

What about conventions used in official translations?

They should be disregarded. Danbooru has its own conventions (which are generally better anyway). Official translations generally try to pander to the lowest common denominator, which we don't need to do here.

Also, for me, this rule kinda contradicts the rule about translations being fully English as far as possible.

It doesn't contradict at all. It's called using common sense - you want to render the text comprehensible in English but let's not pretend the original isn't Japanese, a vastly different language coming from a different culture.

I firmly believe honorifics should be left as they are. The dub of Azumanga Daioh and it's "Miss Sakaki" left the whole thing feeling weird. However, in cases where the distinction makes no difference I feel they can safely be left off, but there really shouldn't be any hard rule for or against it.

Honorifics:

jxh2154 said:
Official translations generally try to pander to the lowest common denominator, which we don't need to do here.

This is it, really. The audience of Danbooru's translations understands and is not distracted by simple honorifics (e.g. "-san", "-sama", "-chan"), so there's no reason not to use them. On the other hand, I will point out that the audience of Danbooru's translation probably doesn't understand or would be distracted by some less common honorifics. I will probably keep translating レミリアお嬢様 as "Lady Remilia" and ベルンカステル卿 as "Lady Bernkastel" unless it really pisses someone off, simply because "-ojousama" and "-kyou" are not necessarily common knowledge and have a lot more potential to break the flow of a translation.

Explanatory notes:
To make sure I've got my own head on straight regarding this matter, here are three of Shinjidude's translations (not to pick on him or anything, it's just that he asked originally) and my opinion on the necessity of their attached notes; please say something if you disagree.

1.

On post #391614: ("耳にアマガミある日なんだって！私もビックリさ！"):
"...supposed to be ear play biting day, or something like that. I was surprised too! Amagami (アマガミ) means "to play bite", but is also the name of the game/series"

Yes. There's no real way to work this into the actual text that I can think of.

2.

On post #556595 ("はぁ、負けちゃった"):
"Darn it, we lost. The subject is omitted, it could just as easily be "I""

Borderline. In my opinion, it's the translator's responsibility to suck it up and pick one in situations like this; the amount of information the reader gains from it is not commensurate with the distraction caused by the note.

3.

On post #578029 ("神風の術～！"):
"Divine wind technique! She's literally saying "kamikaze", but means the traditional literal wind meaning, rather than the "suicide mission" western definition established during WWII."

No. Unless you believe it's a pun, the fact that the Japanese word used here is 神風 is of no interest except to students of Japanese, who can read it for themselves.

スラッシュ said:
...

Yeah, I'm basically cool with everything you said just now. I'm not taking this personally – my opening paragraph was meant as more of a comical introduction (though it was a fairly accurate description of how I felt upon reading that wiki). Like I said, I do see the need for it and everything.

jxh2154 said:
It doesn't contradict at all. It's called using common sense - you want to render the text comprehensible in English but let's not pretend the original isn't Japanese, a vastly different language coming from a different culture.

Right. My common sense says to me that when translating something from one language to another, I should discard the things that can't be directly converted from the source language to the target language, unless they significantly alter the meaning of the text, in which case I attempt to communicate them differently.

This is why I don't do "[she] picked [the] flowers" and that type of shit.

Frankly, 99% of the time honorifics don't affect the meaning of the text in any way that's remotely significant.

Suiseiseki said:
The dub of Azumanga Daioh and it's "Miss Sakaki" left the whole thing feeling weird.

In my opinion, they should have just left it "Sakaki". The fact that she's always addressed by her family name already effectively communicates the "social" difference in English.

glasnost said:
3.
No. Unless you believe it's a pun, the fact that the Japanese word used here is 神風 is of no interest except to students of Japanese, who can read it for themselves.

I actually redacted that note after having read this thread this morning. If you notice in the comments though that very point came up in the few hours after I did so. I've since reverted it for that reason.

If we decide not to use notes like that I can keep from using them in the future. In this case though I thought the information might be useful to the reader, and according to the comments it was. I don't see the real downside to having it there.

Additionally, the dub of Azumanga Daioh was hampered a great deal more by the noble but ultimately ill-fated attempt to convert the whole show into America, which we don't have to do. It's not the best example.

I'd also like to point out that saying "it's common sense" is a logical fallacy and not helpful. For me it's common sense not to pollute one language with another (and for the record, I really hate this when people do it in my native language too, and it happens a lot), but apparently for others that's not the case! Hence the discussion--proving that if anything, it sure isn't common sense.

*looks down* Yep, moving too fast dammit. Gonna go sleep and when I wake up, y'all better have fixed everything... and clean the kitchen while you're at it!

Gah, this thread is moving way too fast. :3

glasnost said:
The audience of Danbooru's translations understands and is not distracted by simple honorifics (e.g. "-san", "-sama", "-chan"), so there's no reason not to use them.

I refuse to lower the quality of my translations simply because readers are already somewhat familiar with certain aspects of the source language. :\

glasnost said:
2.

On post #556595 ("はぁ、負けちゃった"):
"Darn it, we lost. The subject is omitted, it could just as easily be "I""

Borderline.

I wouldn't call this bordeline at all. Subjects are omitted all over the place in Japanese, and a competent translator can almost always safely assume from context. Otherwise we'd have such explanatory notes all over the place.

スラッシュ said:
Additionally, the dub of Azumanga Daioh was hampered a great deal more by the noble but ultimately ill-fated attempt to convert the whole show into America, which we don't have to do. It's not the best example.

Eh? No it wasn't. The manga kinda tried that at first, but the anime's dub didn't at all. It was kinda inconsistent about the honorifics though, I seem to remember a few being retained, somewhat randomly.

Anyway, I think that while, in general, Honorifics should be preserved in translation, there will almost always be exceptions, so nailing down a hard and fast rule is probably not a good idea. But encouraging their use does seem to be a good idea.

Shinjidude said:
I actually redacted that note after having read this thread this morning. If you notice in the comments though that very point came up in the few hours after I did so. I've since reverted it for that reason.

Wow, talk about eerie coincidences. It would seem my intuition as to what the average Danbooru reader wants in their translation notes is a bit off. Like you say, there's little downside to having them there, so I suppose the only reason to remove them is if they're utterly inane or don't do their job of making the actual translation clearer.

Soljashy said:
I refuse to lower the quality of my translations simply because readers are already somewhat familiar with certain aspects of the source language. :\

But is it really lowering the quality? For a general audience, the answer is an obvious 'yes'; you're forcing them to try to wrap their heads around a system of expressing relationships between people that simply doesn't map well to English, all for what is probably a very small gain in information. I would argue, though, that the blade cuts both ways; because the system doesn't map well to English, removing the honorifics often means removing (or worse, altering) information. (To use the Azumanga Daioh example, leaving it as "Sakaki" would have communicated the social difference, but unless you're in boarding school or the military, addressing someone by last name alone is terribly uncommon and almost impolite in English. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.) If the audience understands and accepts the system, there's no reason to remove that information.

Now, you could make the argument that the Danbooru audience doesn't really understand the relationship between (or is unduly distracted by) even the simpler honorifics, and you might be right, but that's neither here nor there.

glasnost said:
(To use the Azumanga Daioh example, leaving it as "Sakaki" would have communicated the social difference, but unless you're in boarding school or the military, addressing someone by last name alone is terribly uncommon and almost impolite in English. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.)

Neither is it uncommon to address someone by their family name followed by "-san" in Japanese.

Soljashy said: My common sense says to me that when translating something from one language to another, I should discard the things that can't be directly converted from the source language to the target language, unless they significantly alter the meaning of the text, in which case I attempt to communicate them differently.

The idea that things you can't completely convert should be discarded wholesale is anathema to me. It's that sort of sanitized approach I can't stand. It also leads to the completely unnecessary clusterfuck of constantly questioning if the honorific is significant in a certain given instance, which is the kind of shit that causes R1 anime translations to handle them so terribly. "Well gee we can fudge/ignore it most of the time because our audience is fucking stupid, and then when we really can't ignore it we'll come up with an even more awkward compromise that we only use half a dozen times. Totally intuitive!" Instead of just keeping them in consistently from the start and letting the significant parts flow naturally from the overall framework of how characters address each other and how it changes over the course of the story.

There are going to be cases where not using them is arguably acceptable, but it's something to be decided on a show-wide basis. E.g., I can watch Heroic Age without honorifics if need be, but not Clannad, and in no case is leaving them in ever a bad choice. In Danbooru terms, where you are generally translating shorter pieces with less context, it becomes more important, not less, to err on the side of leaving them in. Because context is limited the last thing you want to do is throw out any information when it gains you nothing to do so except a few less letters in your note.

jxh2154 said:

I wouldn't drop or change titles in any language, Japanese or not.

Are you for real? I don't mean it's necessarily a bad thing, could be kinda cool in its own elitist way. I have just never heard anyone anywhere suggest that for translating languages like, say, Dutch, Norwegian, Lithuanian, or Bulgarian. Even when dealing with Russian, it is extremely rare to see titles like gospodin left untranslated.

What about those cases when the characters depicted are specifically English, such as Emma? Is the Danbooru policy that we want too see the interaction the way the Japanese authors see it, rather than consider them just having "translated" it into Japanese, trying to reflect the "real" English communication in a way comprehensible for their own audience?

Well, that's comforting. I don't translate as much anymore, but I think I follow most of those rules already.

Soljashy said:
Neither is it uncommon to address someone by their family name followed by "-san" in Japanese.

Huh? I said it is uncommon to address someone by their last name alone in English. It's also uncommon to address someone as "Ms./Mr. Lastname" in English when you're as close to them as the girls in Azumanga are. (I can't imagine inviting someone over to my house and still calling them "Mr. X", unless it was my boss and I was angling for a promotion or something.)

Either way, focusing on the example is missing the point; all it's meant to show is that there are situations where the relationships implied by Japanese honorifics can't be represented succinctly in English without some loss of meaning, and I'm sure that's something we can both agree on. (Not saying anything about the prevalence of those situations, mind you; just that they do exist.)

Katajanmarja said:
Is the Danbooru policy that we want too see the interaction the way the Japanese authors see it

Yes, this is a Danbooru policy, because it is policy for all translations. The purpose of translation is to convert a work from having an audience who speaks the source language to having an audience who speaks the target language, while changing the message of the work as little as possible from the author's original vision. This is not a point of contention.

(Of course, you could make the case that the author actually imagined the work occurring in a different language, and simply 'translated it back to Japanese' for their audience's sake. In the case of Emma, where Kaoru Mori clearly spent a huge amount of time researching 19th century English culture, I might agree with you; in the case of most manga and anime works, though, this simply isn't the case.)

The question, then, becomes the age-old translator's dilemma of 'sticking to the source material' vs. 'making alterations for the sake of flow in the target language'. The reason that including honorifics from the source language is not common translation practice is because in 'real life', the audience of your translation very rarely knows anything about the source language. In these cases, the information gained from including honorifics is heavily outweighed by the extent to which the break the flow of the translation for the average reader.

On Danbooru, however, we are in a rare situation where this is not the case; the audience here understands and is not unduly distracted by the presence of simple Japanese honorifics. This means that in the 99% of cases where honorifics contribute nothing to the work that couldn't be expressed equivalently in English, our balance sheet reads zero; we're not adding meaning to the work by leaving honorifics in, but we're not losing anything in terms of readability to the target audience, either. In the remaining 1%, though, we've gained some meaning with zero (or, at least, an inappreciable) cost to readability.

(There are some caveats to what I'm saying, of course, but you can read those from my previous posts in the thread. I've typed this line of reasoning out once already, you know :<)

jxh2154 said:
The idea that things you can't completely convert should be discarded wholesale is anathema to me. It's that sort of sanitized approach I can't stand.

We already do this when we translate. Whenever we assume a pronoun, unless we put in a stupid note, the reader has no idea that it was assumed. Consider verb inflections, for instance. English has like a handful of forms for a single verb, where Japanese has a whole bunch of them, each with a slightly different meaning that can't be directly communicated in English. What do we do? Do we write "I will teach you my forte [-te yaru]" or "dad wouldn't want to hear that [-deshou]" or some such crap? Not me, I'm sorry.

The only reason you're arguing for an exception for honorifics is because you and the rest of the userbase happens to be familiar with a couple of them.

This is the same thing that sometimes happens when I'm designing a system as a programmer. Because the client happens to know a bit of coding, he tries to dictate the way I should design the system. (By the way, you can't imagine the stuff-up I'm gonna have to deal with in the new year thanks to one such client).

EDIT: And it's not discarded "wholesale". As I mentioned in my post, this applies when the information actually has some bearing on the meaning of the text.

glasnost said:
Huh? I said it is uncommon to address someone by their last name alone in English. It's also uncommon to address someone as "Ms./Mr. Lastname" in English when you're as close to them as the girls in Azumanga are.

Sorry, I misread your post there. However, the fact is, the "Ms./Mr." needs to go. Translating "-san" like that in a school kids context is retarded. As for calling people by their surnames, I was called by mine by most people in high school, so what you say doesn't quite gel with me.

glasnost said:
A few things:

Do we have a formal romanization policy yet? If not, it might be good to link "our romanization rules" in section 7 of part 1 to forum #31038 or other relevant discussions.

Oh oops, I was supposed to write one. Totally slipped my mind. Sadly I won't be able to do anything before friday at earliest, so if I forget about it again, hitting me with a stick wouldn't be bad at all.