Posted by Shih Tzu (cf-i2.doshisha.ac.jp/202.23.191.26) on March 14, 2002 at 00:38:21
In Response to Re: Well, here's some posted by Tomato on March 13, 2002 at 13:29:15:
> Eww, -ster is just wrong. It works good on like maybe 3 or 4 names, but ugh. But yeah -chan can be hard. In this novel I translated I HAD to translate the "chan", what's worse, is the guy's name was "Shin". I've racked my brain over and over and all I can come up with are crappy ideas for it. Urgh.
Shinny-poo!
> Well there are lots of theorists out there who say that as a foreign work it should retain its foreignness, so filtering it so that it sounds like the original writers had written it in English originally would be blasphemy. In some instances I agree with that thought. But then we're talking about games here, not literary masterpieces. Even so, I could see people hunting you down for "westernizing" something. But if you don't westernize it, then you'll also get people hunting you down for making it sound like a bad translation. Let's all just quit translating while we're ahead and keep everybody happy ;)
Yeah, it totally depends on the situation and there can be justifications either way. If I were translating, say, a Koizumi speech (yeah, like that'll happen), it would probably be unwise to fiddle with it beyond fixing it so he doesn't sound like Babelfish. But with games, I dunno. I have passionate, undying love for the medium, and so my translations so far have been done with an eye toward the player's overall experience and how the translation meshes with it. One could make the argument that, if one assumes the original text sounds natural and vital to the speakers of the original language, then a translation that sounds natural and vital to speakers of the target language would be one criterion for the success of a translation. Gah. It all depends. I'm still working on how to sort this all out. I don't want to wind up turning into the kind of bastard who'd reanimate scenes in Nausicaä or something. But I do want to end up with something that I'd want to play.
> Well, you've been studying in Japan for half a year with months still ahead of you, you seem to have a pretty strong grasp of translation theory, and you know Japanese pretty well, just get a few scripts under your belt and then you can shove people around and not worry about messing up so much ;)
Heh, we'll see. ^^;
Speaking of translation theory, of which I've read practically nothing outside of your essays, do you have any recommended reading on that? Particularly something that doesn't get too dense and academic, more along the lines of what Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct is to linguistics. Is there such a thing? I find it fascinating, and it'd probably help me develop my philosophy.