Discussion The Addition of "ba" in Translations

You might not agree, but id still like to put this out.

While i can see your point, but the way you phrased it just rubbed me off wrong? You can understand it if it's 'a fan translation of a high school kid. The moment someone earns money from it, stuff like this has to go'?
Well excuse me, but 1) I'm a fan translator 2) I do NOT earn money from it and 3) I am certainly NOT in high school either. I use it because i cant find an alternative meaning for it, but if i do yes it does go. You make it sound like we don't try? Also if i receive money for my hard work i have to start listening to all your demands? I'd rather stay a fan translator then thank you, at least i get to keep my freedom on how i translate text.

As said previously, you can accept '-chan', '-san' etc just because they're 'widespread' and everyone should know them? So you're say if i make 'ba' widespred, you'll accept it yes? More like, it's only widespread because it doesn't have an english alternative for it. So I'm kind of questioning your double standards right now.

This was kind of ragey and I apologize for any unpleasant feelings caused to anyone else unrelated.

 

I think that's a personal preference

 

I agree with this 100%, and it goes way beyond the 'ba' and 'la' stuff. When people ask me my personal philosophy on translation, I tell them this: My goal is to retell the story and give the same experience to the English readers as what the Chinese readers had upon reading it.

My levels of translation go like this:

Level 1: Translating word by word (this is close to MTL).
Level 2: Translating entire clauses. This requires understanding how to 'reflow' those clauses for proper English.
Level 3: Translating entire sentences as a whole. This requires understanding how to 'reflow' entire sentences, destroying the Chinese grammar as necessary to make the English grammar work.
Level 4: Translating entire paragraphs as a whole. This may require all of the above plus reordering sentence structure, changing or combining them, etc.
Level 5: Translating the entire chapter as a whole. This may require reordering paragraphs, excising them, adding more, combining them together, etc.

Almost all of us (myself included) start at level 1 and proceed from there. For webnovels, I'm usually anywhere between level 3 and 4.5, mainly because the prose in webnovels often isn't that complicated to begin with so there's often not much that needs to be reflowed.

For a practical example of the first four stages, with the third and fourth combined:

胡运来身为三星符篆师，走到哪里不是被人拥簇的对象，谁对他不是恭恭敬敬？即使现在跟随在震天王的麾下，震天王也对他客客气气，从未说过一句重话，但现在一个毛头小子，却指着他的鼻子在哪里叫嚣，胡运来哪里受得了这种侮辱，冷哼一声，身体爆射而出：“不知死活的小子，今天就让你生不如死！”

Level 1: Hu Yunlai was a three-star sealmaster, everywhere he walked he was surrounded and praised, who would not be respectful to him? Even though now he followed the Sky Shaking King's as subordinate, Sky Shaking King was very polite to him, never saying a harsh word, but now a hairy-headed little kid, pointed at his nose and was right there mocking, where did Hu Yunlai ever experience this sort of insult? Cold snort, his body explosively shot forwards: "Brat who doesn't know life or death, today I'll let you have a life worse than death!

Level 2: Hu Yunlai was a three-star sealmaster, wherever he went he would be surrounded and praised, who would ever show him any disrespect? Even though he now followed the Sky Shaking King as subordinate, the Sky Shaking King was very polite to him, never saying a harsh word, but now an immature brat was pointing at his nose and mocking him, since when did Hu Yunlai ever experience this type of insult? With a cold snort, he shot forwards with an explosion: "You conceited and reckless brat, today I'll make your life a living hell!"

Level 3/4: As a three-star sealmaster, Hu Yunlai was accustomed to being praised and fawned over wherever he went, and no one would ever dare to be disrespectful towards him. Even though he was now the Sky Shaking King's subordinate, the latter always treated him with great courtesy and never once said a harsh word to him. And yet, today an immature brat was pointing straight at him and mocking him to his face? There was no way Hu Yunlai could stand for this sort of humiliation! He let out a cold short, then shot forwards with explosive speed: "You conceited, reckless brat! Today, I'll make your life a living hell!"

Hopefully, this was helpful and illustrative! Getting back to the main point, translating stuff like 'ba' and 'la', to me, is a sign that the translator is still translating at the lowest level, word by word.

 

While I agree with this, I'm personally not a fan of translators adding in content into novels or reordering content etc. Sentences are fine, but I've seen some go waaay farther than that. Not sure if you remember the controversy a few years back regarding The Amber Sword when TL admitted to adding content into the novel and basically making it a spin off of sorts? Or something along those lines

 

Singlish?
The language that said haish instead of sigh?

 

-- Level 5... Is pretty much a novel of it's own.

 

I find it the most ideal translation though. It shows that you and the author are on the same wavelength if you're capable of doing so.

 

But if you aren't on the same wavelength, the novel won't be the same anymore. The characters may have a different feel to them from the original, especially in more complex settings and plotlines.

 

The 'added stuff' should not change the nature of the story itself, unless that was negotiated with the author directly; that would be a betrayal, and not one with integrity. As I said - the plot and the characters belong to the author. When I'm talking about for a 3/4 is on a much lower level. For example, something that was clear in Chinese from cultural context but not clear in English (due to that lack of context) might need a few words or a line added in. Linguistic puns are particularly terrible. Alternately, if you want to want to keep a Chinese idiom that doesn't make full sense in English, you might want to add in a 'narrator line' that doesn't exist in the original. That's what I'm really talking about at the 3-4 level when it comes to 'adding' stuff.

An example of super large-scale reordering content (an apex level 5) done right is what Ken Liu did with the Three-Body Problem. In the Chinese version, the Cultural Revolution stuff was all told piecemeal in flashbacks throughout the novel, whereas (with author permission) Ken Liu sifts it all out and puts it together at the very beginning in the English version. The reason he did this was because the author also agreed that having it together at the start was superior, but since the Cultural Revolution is a very sensitive subject in China he was afraid that putting it in the forefront would result in censorship/banning issues. Hence, Ken Liu pulled it all out and reorganized it and rewrote it into a single part at the beginning. This is an example of translation at its absolute finest.

I fully understand what you are saying, and as translators we should preserve as much of the original feel as possible. That being said - no translation (good or bad) is exactly the 'same' as the novel, nor should it be; it's an adaptation. You will never read Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem, you will always read Michael Liu's version of Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem, and the higher quality the original source is, the more pronounced this truth will be.

I said this elsewhere, but languages aren't just a form of communication, they also represent the cultures and cultural contexts from which they sprang. You cannot translate culture (although you can explain it), and therefore you cannot truly 'translate' a novel; at the highest novel, what a translator does is completely rewrite it using the same characters, plots, dialogues, and descriptions, except in a different language.

 

lol
we say a lot of onomatopoeia?
or just add meaningless words on our sentences

 

I mean Singlish is a mix of Madarin, Dialect and Malay, reflective of our culture. When you go to the hawker centre, they will ask you "da bao" or "chi fan" right? The transition is so seamless by this point that its practically another language.

 

I'm from Greece and never knew that!
Guess I should have paid more attention to the Ancient Greek lessons... (not that it would have come up in a regular lesson remembering the teacher we had)

Edit: I think there was a word for it, "κυανό" and for light blue it was, "κάλαϊς". Now it's "μπλέ" from the french word and "γαλάζιο".

 

Ooooooh. I don’t know much about the words themselves, just that there was a major debate over colors in Ancient Grecian writings. This includes Homer’s Odessy where he compared a sea’s color or depth to wine. This debate has gone on to the point that some people even considered the possibility that most people in Ancient Greece were colourblind (Very unlikely).

One source said that the Ancient color words included white, black, and one other I can’t quite recall. There were a few other colors that were derived from these base three by combining the two. Let’s say that third color was red for examples sake. Red-White or something similar would refer to something close to yellow or orange.

Another interesting fact I dug up while crosschecking what I knew before posting (I try to avoid being terribly inaccurate) is that the beautiful white marble statues we have come to appreciate were fully coloured back in the day. You can see some images of recreations here: https://moco-choco.com/2014/04/18/true-colors-of-ancient-greek-and-roman-statues/

 

I'm familiar with the debate over the "wine-dark sea."

Also, Athena is sometimes called "grey-eyed Athena" which may or may not be accurate since the word means both grey and blueish-green. It might also mean "owl-like eyes" hahaha.

 

The funny thing is, when I first saw it, I didn't get it. But very soon, I got used to it and understood the implied meaning. It's not very professional including it, but I don't mind either way. They do give more meaning to the sentence; every ba, ah, ne, etc. can express something additional in the sentence. It can be hard to substitute them or cut them out. So I understand the decision to incorporate them into the translation.

 

Wait shit I just realized this...
Kindergarden = Kinder + garden = Children's garden??!!

 

While not novel, there certainly have a manga. *random ref to toaru series*

 

level 5 seems like it is from your time working as a diplomat or whatever because imo, level 5 seems to be interpretation and now translation.

like you said, translators should retell the same story that the author wants and not add extra bits because

for example, many people diss on the amber sword's translation because the translator actually adds in his own fight scenes and rewrites numerous parts of the story, yet none of the things he does actually messes up with the storyline.

that said, i have to admit that the translator of the amber sword actually does a better job of telling the author's story as it is much more fun to read

by any chance, would this be your "level 5?"

because imho, your levels seem to make less and less sense after level 3 despite level 1-3 being ideal as it actually differentiates those who understands the language and those who does not.

 

I like 'ba' , it gives a different tone in the sentence
So, I do leave some of them in my translation where it's appropriate~~

 

Level 4 is still primarily about proofing and grammar, except at a higher level. For just one of the most common examples, you will get entire paragraphs in Chinese which have only commas; in English, this would be considered a massive run-on sentence. You would need to break down and restructure the entire flow of that paragraph, forming multiple sentences where there was only one in Chinese.

As for level 5, I explained a bit more in detail on what a level 5 is up above via using Michael Liu's award-winning translation of the Three-Body Problem as the finest example of what an apex level 5 is. You will almost never see a "true" level 5 in webnovel translating because a) the amount of work is immense, b) it's not worth it, c) very few translators are up to the task.

I am not familiar with 'amber sword', but what you describe is not legitimate unless the author was consulted, and it definitely constitutes 'messing with' the storyline. The storyline isn't just a matter of the main plot, it involves every action that was taken, and a fight that wasn't in the original story has multiple branching impacts; even something as small as to write out a scene only hinted at in the novel where Person A using Falcon Punch to overcome Person B's Falcon Kick impacts the 'storyline', because now something is established (or suggested) in the English version which was not true in the original Chinese version: Namely, that Falcon Punch is superior to Falcon Kick.

Anyhow, levels 1-3 are definitely not 'ideal'; these levels constitute a translator who is able to translate words but not necessarily ideas and/or write well in the target language (English). Level 4 is ideal for webnovels and is generally 'good enough' for normal novels as well. A true level 5 is complete overkill, unless/until we move into literary publishing and things like that.

There are a lot of other things I'd like to get into, but I want to make sure you understand these parts before we continue