I’ve been thinking a lot about why translations suck.
I think it’s sometimes the fault of the translator, for sure. Sometimes they just don’t pick up on a nuance or choose the incorrect word. These mistakes happen. I think that translators should be careful, be teachable (ego is the enemy of almost everything), and accept that sometimes mistakes happen.
But errors in translation aren’t always due to mistakes.
English and Japanese are fundamentally different in one huge way. I don’t mean grammatically, syntactically, anything like that. Yes, it’s different in all those ways, but that’s not what makes translation difficult. They’re different in the way they reflect the cultural mindset of their users.
English is a very precise language. We have linguistic constructs that are specifically designed to make a sentence, or an idea, as unambiguous as possible. For example, take the notion of “double negatives”. You’ll be told never to use them, but they’re actually a really important part of the language. I can say “I will do that”, or I can say “I won’t not do that”, and they have very different meanings. This is a very common structure in English, and it’s used to subtly change how the sentence is to be taken. “I will do that” is a very definite statement. “I won’t not do that” adds an element of wishy-washiness or uncertainty to the sentence. As far as I know (and I did a small amount of research to make sure I’m not talking out my ass) this concept isn’t used commonly in Japanese.
Other concepts that don’t translate well from Japanese to English (and vice versa) are sarcasm and formality. Japanese, for example, has, what, over 20 ways of saying “thank you”? These ways run the gamut from very informal and borderline rude to incredibly formal (formality and self-effacing seem to be the same thing in Japanese). English just has one. “Thank you”. Sometimes when watching anime you’ll get some very subtle changes in the formality and/or familiarity of the words chosen that simply cannot be translated.
But it’s the precision of words that gets really sticky.
Let’s take my favorite example: When Reina in Sound! Euphonium says “this is a confession of love” (kore wa ai no kokuhaku). When translated to English, this has a very precise meaning: I love you in a romantic way, and I am telling you. But in Japanese, it’s not nearly as precise as that. The word “kokuhaku” can run the gamut of meanings from that meaning, all the way down to “I love something about you” or even “I love something about that”. You’re expected to use context to figure out what that word means. And the word “ai” also has a meaning that doesn’t directly translate (this is an example of an English word having a broad meaning that Japanese has several different words for). That’s why I would have translated it “I love that about you” – because the Japanese word encompasses all those meanings, and you have to choose the correct English words to distill that context into a word or phrase that more accurately represents the Japanese meaning.
And, the worse part is, you’re going to fail. Some things just aren’t translatable.
For example, the changes in formality when addressing people. In “ID@LMASTER: Cinderella Girls” there’s a whole scene where the producer is being coaxed by the girls to address them more informally, but he is unable to do so. It’s the difference between saying “ikimasu” and “Iku”. The words are translated exactly the same in English: “Go”. (and again, in context, it could mean “I’m going”, “I will go”, “here I go”, “I’m off”, or a whole bunch of different ways). But in Japanese there are different respect connotations that just don’t translate.
One could make the case that they’re simply not important, and in one sense, they’re really not. English does not have those structures for a reason: we don’t care about respect in that way. You can lose that bit of information and it will not matter one bit to the translation. Except, well… it does, in the end. Because that’s a bit of context that, while not important to English speakers, is of paramount importance to Japanese speakers, and to not have that context loses an important cultural element that you can’t get back.
If you saw some of my posts before I moved them to another blog, you’ll know that I’m not a particular fan of multiculturalism or any of that jazz, but I am a fan of engaging with a culture on its own terms, and that means losing as little as possible when translating ideas and concepts between languages. And, well, if English doesn’t support a concept, and you need to understand it on its own terms, well, that’s where translation fails, and where it will always fail.
In fact, I feel so strongly about that, there is a part of me that thinks translation simply should not exist except when absolutely necessary. If you can’t be bothered to learn enough Japanese to enjoy anime on its own terms, then perhaps it should be out of your reach. That’s, of course, an extreme and impractical viewpoint, and I don’t seriously mean it, but I kinda do. At least know enough about the language to understand what you’re missing. I think that’s such an important thing and then those insufferable constantly offended X tourists (I hate that word in this context but it describes them) would at least have a concept of what they don’t know.
Until you can engage a language in its own context, and a culture in its own context, translations will always fall short. And, at the very least, as a consumer of translated context, one should, at the absolute bare minimum, understand that fact.
This is why translations suck, have always sucked, and will always suck, and why people who refuse to understand a culture at least enough to understand what context they’re missing probably should not consume the content. It just leads to trouble for everyone.
(And if you don’t understand what that last sentence means and why I used it, then, well, perhaps you’re the intended audience for this post.)