flemmings | (no subject)

Hmph. I have finished vol 9 of Bleach. That only took me since May. I think I can see what people see in it, and I might too--

--except for the fricking translation.

Oh but Viz's translation is bad. It's as bad as my first manga translations a dozen years ago, and it reads exactly the same as them. The editor should have stepped in and rephrased or cleaned up or done something to avoid the clunkiness of expressing Japanese phrases verbatim in English. It's all there, all the worst linguistic tropes of shounen manga- the 'cold chills', the 'what are you saying?!', the 'You-', the 'Why' 'did you come here?'

Cold chills of delight or worry are a Japanese peculiarity, along with 'quivering with courage.' We don't do that. Cold chills go up our spines in the presence of the supernatural or the eerie and that's about it. We can go cold all over in a wider variety of situations, but I never see people going cold all over. No, people who zokuzoku or zottosuru always have cold chills.

What are you saying? is dicier, but my NAmerican ear wants to hear What do you mean! instead. At least make it What are you saying! to get the tone of voice right.

The yous. Ohh, the yous. The untranslatable glory that is the Japanese pronoun. Yes, it means something when a character says 'Omae---' to another character, but we don't say that. In moments of emotion we say the person's name instead. 'You---' is usually 'You--!!!!' and the emotion involved isn't a positive one.

And yes, Japanese manga break up Japanese sentences, and because their word order is the reverse of ours, break them in a way that's hard to express in English, where the operative word that comes triumphantly at the end in Japanese must must /must/ come near the beginning. Me, I don't care any more where the break comes in Japanese. Rewrite the flipping sentence so that the break, if it must come, comes where it would in English.

Worse, Japanese gives sentence fragments without the verbs that are absolutely necessary in English. A Japanese character saying in bewilderment Yukihiro ga--? posits a situation in which Yukihiro has done something and the character is wondering did Yukihiro *really* do that thing, *could* he have done that thing, blah blah blah. In English, 'Yukihiro--?' implies 'Is that Yukihiro?' The workaround is to translate it as 'Did Yukihiro--??' but that's not what we say. You really have to expand it in English, and if it doesn't fit the dialogue bubble, make the bubble larger.

I'm not au courant of what Viz's reputation is in the translation field. The Death Note translation read elegantly to me, without any of the quirks that make reading Bleach so annoying. That may be because the editor was on the ball, or because Obata likes literate scripts that avoid the cliches of shounen manga Japanese. Dunno. All I can say is that reading Bleach is a chore. And I must look at HnG again to see how they managed to make the sound effects so much less irritating there than here.

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I actually wasn't about to go near Prince of Tennis, thank you. ^_^ Schoolboys and sports do nothing for me, and worse, I've seen perfectly sensible people lose all rationality over the thing. Hence I assume there's a Seekrit Power to the thing, and I intend to stay far away from it.

Viz is hit or miss. Had to stop reading Prince of Tennis. In fact the only serires to date I've flat sold and went back to reading scanlations because I couldn't handle the translation. It was in large part names, but not entirely (their decision to ignore that a character was for all intents and purposes monosyllabic in Japanese and to make him downright loquacious in English was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back you might say).

Names, huh? I'm getting itchy reading the Miss So-and-so and Mr. So-and-so used in situations where no western adolescent would use an honorific ever. Either say -san, which makes the point that this sis something only a Japanese would say, or leave the honorifics out, period.

Ah, in this case it's the long time fans who have read the scans and seen the subs suddenly coming face to face with first names and going "Who? Who the hell is ... is Kippei?!?"

The are approximately 2 characters off the top of my head in the early bits of PoT that get called by their first names, and even then only by their teammates. And some characters I honestly didn't know their first names at all and I had to do a double take to figure out who they were talking about amongst the other characters. I know it isn't a big deal for anyone new to the series, but for anyone who already knew the characters, it was extraordinarily jarring.

And again, I cling to my French translations. Not that they're perfect (kidou is not "necromancie"), but they're decent, and I have a weakness for "Amene-toi" as a way of conveying that sort of pose and statement.

Besides, Ichimaru Gin gets to say, "Ceci n'est pas un wakizashi," before going into his Special Move, and you know the translator must have purely cackled over that one.

(Then again, let's not go into the gate guardian's nose-blocked accent when rendered in French. "Z'ai . . . Z'ai berdu . . . Guand le guardien berds le gombat, il doit laiser basser le vainguer . . .")

And the other thing that bugs me, while I'm ranting here, is that though they insist on translating -san, they throw Japanese words in wildly and then give maybe a paraphrase. I know this is a problem when you make up vocab, as Bleach and YYH did, but scads of Japanese words with no kanji to tell me what they are just adds to the dense incomprehensibility of the work. Clearly Japanes eor nothing for this one.

I'll be interested to see if they start giving the full romanisation of attack names and particular words once they start hitting areas when they use them. The French version gives the romanisation of the Japanese, together with a footnoted translation. (So when Kurotsuchi-taichou pulls out his special attack, they have him stating, "Konjiki-ashisogijizo!" with a footnote of "Tueur dore des regions nerveuses des membres!")

(Annoyingly small print, though.)

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

I got the first vol. of Bleach by patiently waiting in the library queue (as I'm now doing for Naruto)--and I like it just fine, but the translation! It's not the overly literal translations that bother me so much, but the way the overly literal translations are mixed with modern urban slang--it's truly disconcerting.

I'll be content being put off by the over-literalness. The slang grates the way the onomatopeia does, but at least it's not dated slang. Well, not yet. That's the worst, by me.

So far, Death Note is the only decent translation of theirs I've read - though the scanlations were so godawful for that series, it'd be hard to do worse. I rarely buy Viz books anymore.

Ahh. That's useful to know. What I'm finding here, as with Tactics, is that the manga makes no sense in English, which is frustrating. I'm sure it does make sense once you supply those things that need supplying, but if you simply give the literal meaning of the Japanese it's worse than surreal. It's very close to gibberish.

It doesn't help that with the Tactics manga ADV managed to screw up the genders of two characters.... Here's hoping Tokyopop fixes that when they rerelease the series.