Discussion Literal vs Liberal Translations

So your point is that the Japanese honorific is sort of generic
Things like Your Excellency is a good fit
Many forget that translation is not about equivalents sometimes

 

Can be summarized like that. Most of the time you can replace it but for a certain scene, you need to make sure to have multiple words that you can use to show the different between suffix. There are several more example I think but I can’t remember it now

 

Both translation styles have their advantages.

I prefer a mix of both but it also depends on the novel.
For things that have an English equivalent, then it's fine to have it translated and add footnotes/tl at the end.

Liberal translations tend to break the immersion when reading a story but as always there are exceptions.
Some novels are mainly about comedy and have a lot of puns. Using literal translations will make it feel awkward.
Also suffix and verbal ticks work better with a liberal style.

In the end, it's up to the translator. Having a translation of decent quality is better than none at all.

As a sidenote, mixing literal and liberal styles is how the meme "All according to keikaku, TL: Keikaku means plan." came to be.
Literal: Exactly as planned. Liberal: Keikaku doori. or something along that line

 

As a reader I support liberal translation the most. Japanese and chinese phrasing is quite different from english, and if you are quite literal you end with short sentences with weird syntax positions, which is less enjoyable to read.
Also, I prefer when no untranslated words appear in the translation, things like untranslated cultivation realms can be really confusing.
Next, on the -san dilemma, I prefer no japanese suffixes. They can feel quite awkward at times.

 

I don't actually do novel tl (just idol fansub and some doujin scanlation; though I'm looking into tl-ing some webnovel for fun), I support the moderate way to go. These are just my two-cents from idol/doujin related translations.

One of the main things is that by leaning closer to the literal translation, it's easier to avoid making a mess of the story's meaning if the translator isn't skilled at manipulating his/her words to make a well flowing liberal translation.

For example with the honorific example, leaving the honorifics in allows for the translator convey the meaning of respect or disrespect, etc. without fumbling around and messing up the connotations by trying to find an English word that fits. This holds especially true in non-Western settings (like Japan, ancient China, etc.) as the honorifics are already made in order to fit the societal structure of the setting and thus best reflect that society.

I would say that the time to translate honorifics would be when translating stories not set in Japan/China/etc. as the Japanese words would interrupt the flow of the story and destroy some of the suspension of disbelief (eh? why is there suddenly Japanese when you're in xxx fantasy kingdom of blonde haired blue eyed princes?), but otherwise, I support leaving them in.

Examples (where translating the honorific doesn't really work)

Chinese
wang > King
(due to the differences in nobility hierarchy seen in ancient China settings to the Western noble order [King-Duke-Marquis, etc.] by translating the status related words to English, it may often add to more confusion of what character has what power. For example, a wang is not an emperor and is lower than one of the princes.)
(Things like eunuchs, the various types of concubines, the Emperor, etc. should be changed to English equivalents as there wouldn't be that sort of confusion. -my two cents)

laoye, shifu > Master
(sometimes by translating to English, the translator loses some of the meaning of the word. For example, laoye would be the master of the house. You would call him 'Master' in order to convey the respect that a lower person would have to his master. However, shifu is also a master, a master in teaching something. Therefore, you might also say 'Master.' Then, suddenly, there's a confusion in masters as the lord and teacher connotations are stripped away. You might say that you should just call them 'Lord' and 'Teacher,' but there are also honorifics that mean 'Lord' or 'Teacher,' so you would be faced with the same conundrum. At these moments, you have to choose between translating or not; either way you'll have to leave a footnote or explanation.)

Japanese

(girl name)-sama > Mistress
(I recently saw this when reading a translation with an interaction between classmates where one boy was talking about a girl who he was not acquainted with but knew that she had a higher social status than he did. As the setting was a pseudo-European one, it makes sense to translate the honorifics. However, the translator should keep in mind the connotations of the words being translated and the words translated to. The Japanese implies respect toward the girl due to status differences or because of politeness in address. The English 'Mistress' implies servitude.)

-kun > ???
(Honorifics like -kun are just difficult to translate since there's no direct English translation. It's usually attached to boy names [like in shoujo manga], but there's also the situation of being attached to a girl name or to the name of a junior in a workplace)

 

That makes sense if your reader can actually understand the subtle difference or even care?
As an average reader I don't give a shit!
I hate to break it to you but that is translating for translators or eroge fetishists.
I recommend reading @Cream post below
That makes sense if your reader can actually understand the subtle difference or even care?
As an average reader I don't give a shit!
I hate to break it to you but that is translating for translators or eroge fetishists.
I recommend reading @Cream post below

 

I'm moderate cuz not really mind both side

 

The - kun/chan part is mostly untranslatable, because the english doesn't have the cultural aspect the japanese have, so you're going to have to change the sentence somewhat to be able to reflect the relationship the speaker has with the spoken.
Removing it often works too though.

 

In your example, I would most definitely suggest translating the honorifics. As my post above said, honorifics in japanese are okay for when they don't matter too much, but here we have the honorifics used as a joke. Which means anyone not understanding the honorifics would lose out on the context of the story. This means translating the honorifics, even if not equivalent is more important than their actual representation.

I wouldn't say they are untranslatable, it's similar to "boy" or "lass", not that I would use them.

 

I'm with you xD

 

I would say there's a fourth category, extremist.

I've seen some who literally translate word for word with little to no English grammar (i.e MTL with zero editing). On the other end of the spectrum, I've also seen some who has the nerve to translate one entire chunk of paragraph (we're talking at least two sentences in raw, and Chinese sentences are usually run-on and abnormally long) into an over-summarised one-liner in English that is evidently insufficient...

 

Off-topic.
I don't know why, but this line made me think of "Boy" from God of War. Rather than calling his son by his name, Kratos keeps referring to his kid as "Boy."

In most Official English publications of LN, I see the translators drop these suffixes, -san, -sama, -kun, -chan, etc.

------------ Side Topic in regards to Literal vs Liberal---------
I've seen Japanglish translations, sometimes with Manga and webnovel projects. And some are comical while, in other cases its quite distracting to read. If you haven't been exposed to Japanglish here's a youtube vid.

It works sometimes, but I think it irritates some people.

 

I'm a liberal translator and that definitely stemmed from having to translate in Japanese class in uni. For class, you had to make sure you found an English equivalent for everything. No instructor would allow you to keep -san, -kun, -sama just like that in your translation.

However, I have a question for those who do literal translations? How do you guys differentiate 美化語? In case you don't know, it's when Japanese add o- or go- in front of nouns and verbs to give more respect. For example:
A: お茶を飲んだら？ (O-cha wo nondara?) = Why don't you have some tea?
B: 茶なんか要らねぇ。 (Cha nanka iranee) = I don't need no tea.

Here, would you leave it as "o-cha" and "cha"? And what kind of notes would you leave? Personally (as you can see above), I would just leave it as 'tea'. The way to differentiate is through the rest of the sentence; have A speak softer while B speak rougher. As a reader, I dislike having so many footnotes, so I keep that feeling with me as a translator.

 

I can't speak for Japanese, which is the majority of what is being discussed here, but I am on the "extremist" end for Chinese.

I don't recall very well if there is a strong difference between written/literary Japanese and spoken Japanese, but Chinese literature (even casual webnovels) invoke a different writing style than what would happen if spoken aloud. It isn't as extreme as before 1950s, but it still exists.

Written Chinese is about expressing ideas beautifully and full of immense feeling. It is pretty frustrating for a translator to see so many characters strung together that basically mean the same thing, but when it is read in Chinese, it is very impactful to have it written that way. That kind of beauty is lost in modern English (no matter what type of English you speak).

Furthermore, the structure of the words deeply emphasize what is important and relevant. Some important points can be casually written in somewhere, but the location in the sentence indicates its importance to the character/story/whatever. It also develops a tone of what does the reader need to pay attention to overall. Things that would be emphasized and written out deeply are only briefly mentioned or obliquely brushed. You as the reader should know what is happening due to the context of everything. This works for comedic conversations, deep verbal sparring, and mentions of beauty. The whole aesthetic is different from Western ideas, so getting frustrated at it just indicates you want a webnovel that when translated basically another novel produced in English under the more familiar Western perspective. If that is what you want, then go read the ones in English. /rolls eyes

Also, I laugh at you guys who complain about run on sentences in Chinese. Originally there was no such thing as punctuation. Knowing when a sentence stopped or didn't stop was part of your training. Furthermore, even though every country has added punctuation in its modern form, each language has their own punctuation rules. The ones ascribed by English isn't the end all be all. Your white power imperialism tail is showing. The whole concept of punctuation is very lose, but the point of it is to convey feeling and emotion. This stems from literature that is intended to always be poetic. Literature and poetry are separate in English works; this isn't the case in Chinese.

For those who don't give a shit about the nuances of the story, then why don't you just MTL instead of nitpicking at translators? You lose the nuance anyway, and since you want a shallow story then the MTL will give you a shallow story.

 

I would just leave it as you do, writing the sentence to convey the politeness of the speaker's words. I wouldn't differentiate between o-cha and cha as words but just use the o- as a sign of speech patterns like conjugation, etc. Not translating nouns like tea, etc. starts getting into the area of not translating (since if I write a footnote like "tea, but said formally" then I might as well just write "tea" in the sentence itself). I believe that the translation should be written in the most understandable way with the least loss of connotations.

That makes me think of another topic that I had talked with a buddy about. The translation of certain types of nouns. While I wouldn't write "o-cha" as "o-cha" there are foods like "o-zoni," "mirin," etc. that I personally would just write like that.

My friend tends to translate all of the foods, thinking that the Japanese names are not known enough and would cause confusion. I think that's good too. The meaning isn't lost. Sometimes it makes the translation a bit annoying with the extra typing, and it might hinder the flow of the sentences, but these cons aren't more than the cons of leaving the word as is. Of course there's the excessively liberal route (the famous Pokemon jelly sandwiches), but I'd rather ignore that.

I usually decide whether or not to leave it in the Japanese name based off whether I can google say "o-zoni" and get enough coherent results in English to assume that English speakers would understand what it is. (O-zoni has a pretty decent wikipedia page.) For another example, I think people know what mochi is in the same way people know what carbonara is (I'm not going to translate carbonara into "Italian pasta dish from Rome made with egg, hard cheese, guanciale, and pepper").

What's your stance on translating cultural (?) item names?

 

As a reader, I don't have many problems with how in-depth the translator feels they should explain certain terms. If you leave the -sama and other terms while providing a flowing sentence, its good enough. Keeping some of the nouns that a reader in this information age can relate is also not a problem. If I'm reading a Japanese translated novel, I appreciate the translator who keeps a certain aspect of the culture intact. It helps the mindset in picturing the background.
What is disruptive occurs when the translator feels they need to explain certain plots, sentences or terms in the middle of the paragraph. It breaks the flow of the story. The best method I have seen is the type used in reference books. Include a numeral so the reader can scroll to the end to interpret and understand the mood of the translator and eventually the Writer.
As for cultural names, if it's easy to understand, then no need to explain in depth. If the Writer focuses on a particular scene during a cultural event, a brief included sentence to explain to the translated audience might be appropriate.

 

Something that I haven't seen explicitly stated here, is that the choice of where to stand on the literal/liberal spectrum (which may not necessarily be 1-dimensional) has to factor in your target audience. If you want to make it so that it is accessible to the non-weeb, you might want to localize a bit more. (Also, those jelly donuts are a straw man by extremism, not that it didn't happen.) So it's kind of the aesthetic preference of the TLer, in addition to the intended target audience.

I know where on the spectrum I stand, but I don't think it's right to force it on others without persuasion of any sort. The sorts of TLers that I will be less fence-sitting and more keyboard warrior with, are bad-english translations. Certain brands of bad english just triggers me in ways that are hard to put into words. But that's more of a pet peeve.

 

I am not sure that people are complaining about the things you mention, but I haven't actually read the complaints. Personally, I prefer that the translators leave suffuixes, such as -san, -kun, -sama in, because as you said, they cannot be translated and the flavor of the dialog changes after removing them.
However, sometimes translators would leave stuff in, that can be translated and there doesn't seem to a reason for not doing so. The latest example I've come across, is the translator left sake as nihonshu, which might make sense if you know some Japanese, but imo should've been just sake. I had no idea what nihonshu was and it turned out - just a way to pronounce sake in Japanese, referring to the alcohol we all call sake in the west.

Now, this is a great example! While the first dialog is fine, the second is just bad English. Even though translating ikura to roe can be left as is, the second sentence is just ungrammatical and makes no sense at all. I've read plenty of translations like these and they hurt your brain after a few chapters. Since Japanese and English have a completly different sentence structure, you shouldn't just translate word for word as is. At the very minimum, if you are translating, you should keep sentences grammatically correct. I understand that this supposed to be some pun in Japanese, but it would be better to properly translate it and leave a note, explaining the wordplay.

 

I am not a translator, but in this case, shouldn't it be fine with just using polite English? Something like: Would you like to have some tea, sir?

 

A moderate/liberal translator would make a new pun that works in English, a lazy translator would go with TLs and a total weeb with little common sense would go for ikura/ikura.