MyVisionity wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 5:52 pm
Language
is culture. There's nothing "gratuitous" about acknowledging that what you are watching is in fact a Japanese show born of Japanese and Chinese culture. If anything, it does the viewer a service by opening their minds to a language and culture outside of their own. There's the old, "if a kid feels the need to go and grab a dictionary, that's not a bad thing" idea where learning via art is greatly significant.
I do not understand you at all here. The show is in Japanese. The point of subtitles is that they explain what you're hearing in a readable manner, because you're watching a Japanese show
in Japanese. Randomly deciding to just drop untranslated terminology into those subtitles works against the entire point of translating it, and doesn't help you further grasp that yes, the Japanese show that you are watching in Japanese is a Japanese show; I -- like most -- DON'T understand Japanese, I DON'T have a context for this stuff. Randomly deciding to not translate words for "Greatest under the heavens" or whatever else isn't giving me a context for the cultural underpinnings, it's just obfuscating the show I'm trying to watch by leaving it in a language I don't understand. It's all well and good to say that encouraging people to look stuff up is good, but making it impossible to understand what's going on in a given moment for the sake of that? That's not making the translation more faithful, that's making the subtitles shittier at doing their job.
To quote Tom Scott off the top of my head, "The job of subtitles is to work as a substitute for audio, to let you understand what's being said, and otherwise to get out of the way." Or more specifically to subtitles of foreign content, the subtitles are a substitute for speaking the language. The entire point is that you don't understand the language, so deliberately making it so you can't understand what they say without researching an aspect of the language is entirely counter to the reason subtitles exist.
And here's the thing: Language is not culture, and I'll be honest, I think that's an utterly ridiculous thing to say.
Culture is culture. You could have an excellent understanding of a language and have no idea about the culture, just as you could be an expert on a culture with next to no understanding of the language. The language is just that, language. It's the form of communication used by a culture. Often cultures that are entirely different share a language, and cultures that are very similar have an entirely different language.
I think I have an idea of something you might be getting at, though; when you translate, you will undoubtedly have to either figure out a way to localise cultural references, or you'll have to leave them alone. But the thing is, this isn't exclusive to translation. When a British show is potentially to be imported to the USA, there'll be cultural differences that won't be understood. If a French show is imported to one of the many, many other countries in the world that primarily speaks French, there'll be cultural differences. Sometimes that'll make it impossible for the show to work in the given territory.
When you translate a work from another language, you have to deal with that. But inherently, you are rewriting the text of the show. So, most translators would opt to localise or explain cultural references where possible.
Goku calls Bulma a "Yokai" in episode 1 of DB, which Mandelin renders as "Goblin". Not an exact match, but a close enough equivalent. Similar for around episode 2 or 3 when Bulma asks turtle if he'll bring back a "Pandora's box" in the subtitles, whereas she says.. Something different in Japanese. It relates to a Japanese folk tale about a box given to someone by a turtle that they're not supposed to open, and then they open it and they die, or something.
You have to reconcile these cultural differences, yes. And it can be a difficult choice, but 9 times out of 10, there's a close enough equivalent that delivers the pun.
For instance... Bulma's name should be Bloomer, really. Her name is a pun on underwear, just like the rest of her family (Dr Brief, Trunks, Bra, Tights...), and while Japanese usage of the word isn't exactly the same as English, it renders the pun in a way English-speakers can understand. That's how translation works. It's not a science of exactly explaining every detail of what the original meaning was, it's a matter of finding equivalents for the likely intent of the original. Finding a close enough equivalent.
But here's the thing... Language and culture are two separate things. A translation has to deal with both things, and leaving something in its original language doesn't mean you've dealt with the cultural underpinnings, it just means you haven't rendered that element in a way understandable to an English-speaker. In my mind, that means the translation has failed there.
... But Tenkaichi is completely irrelevant to this, as is "Kami-
sama". When Mandelin has the subs say "The goal is not to be Tenkaichi", once again, it's like "Just according to Keikaku!"
You're not maintaining a cultural underpinning, you're just refusing to translate a word, and there's not really any reason for that.
MyVisionity wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 5:52 pm
I'm not sure exactly why you felt the need to bring up my past comments on Buruma/Bulma's name here, only to reiterate how much you think that it's nonsense. I'm sure that I stated before that it was never about "accuracy at all costs", but instead how to best represent the character's name to the audience while respecting the source. If you don't understand my reasoning or simply disagree with it, then please just say so instead.
I'll be honest, I forgot that was you, but I still stand by "Buruma" being an utterly stupid suggestion.
I don't speak Japanese. I'm not intimately familiar with the intricacies of Japanese culture. Which makes me the same as most people watching the show. So, do you address that by localising something to an equivalent term ("Tenkaichi" > "Greatest Under The Heavens"), or do you just not translate at all, and let me just sit confused? ("Buruma", "Tenkaichi", "Keikaku") Or, do you do the weird half-measure that misses the point of both where you leave the untranslated term, but the first time it shows up, you add a little note explaining what it means... Which just raises the question of why one would bother leaving it untranslated... If there's a "cultural underpinning" that can't be understood by translating it, I don't see how leaving it untranslated fixes that, but clearly, if translating it ruins it, then explaining it in its first appearance also ruins it, however on the flip-side, if you have to understand it to understand dialogue after the first appearance, then surely you should just translate it so people can understand the dialogue (y'know... Because that's the point of subtitles -- they're there so people can understand the dialogue).
MyVisionity wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 5:52 pm
I
really don't know what you mean by calling it a "translation from the early '00s". That's not something I remember with Bulma/Buruma. And I certainly don't remember "accuracy" as being a prevailing attitude in the early 2000s. If anything, the opposite.
Perhaps I should have been more clear; I meant it read like a stereotypical "iffy '00s fansub" with
gratuitous Japanese everywhere.
It's understandable why this attitude happens sometimes; people have had to deal with shitty translations of works, particularly in the form of shitty dubbing, for so much anime, for so long. Even today, there's issues with groups like Funimation still inserting their own changes into the original work to an annoying extent.
But over-correcting for a problem doesn't fix it. In this case, it just makes it worse. Creates an artificial rift between the shitty translation that's readable and understandable in English, and the shitty subtitles that are "accurate".
In Dragon Ball, this isn't so much an issue, but the subs have their moments; "That's what we call the weasel's last fart", "The goal is not to be
Tenkaichi, life isn't always that easy", "The man training Goku is Kami-
sama", etc.
MyVisionity wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 5:52 pm
Additionally, it is striking to me that you would say all this about Bulma when you seem so adamant in your usage of
yamucha, which is clearly an approximation of the Chinese
yam cha.
A fine example of whataboutism if I've ever seen one. And quite an easy one to counter, but doing so would arguably just play into the role of whataboutism in today's discourse, so I'm afraid I will not be responding to this properly myself; I'll just say this: Read
Herms' name guide, there is an explanation of sorts there, and I generally follow Simmons' & Mandelin's naming conventions, with exceptions where I see fit.
MyVisionity wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 5:52 pm
Which is *exactly* why I argued previously that the official subtitles can and should be questioned by the audience, and not just be blindly accepted or assumed to be 100% accurate.
Yes, and I agree with you.
I never said anything against that here.
If I did in the past, then let it be known at this point that I was wrong in the past, and have come to know better.
But, as I noted above, generally I follow Simmons' and Mandelin's conventions. They're clever chaps who did a good job, and generally their translations are faithful but understandable in English. But there are adaptational choices they made that I disagree with. And I mean... It's not like I'm a newbie who has to wade through this to understand anything... I know Dragon Ball pretty well, and I generally have an idea of what most translations tend to call a given character, and Herms' name guide is out there for stuff I don't know, so if I don't like a particular name, there's no reason I can't come up with my own way of saying it that I prefer -- for instance, I don't think "Gurumes" is a good way of adapting the name of the villain from the first DB movie; a friend of mine came up with an alternative, Gourmeth, which sort of splits the difference between romanising and relating itself to the pun on the English word "Gourmet", so that's the term I use now (and I think a few other people have come up with it independently too). It's just a TV show, ultimately, and these names are in Japanese, whereas we're communicating in English, so... As long as I'm understood, it doesn't matter what I actually call something, or how I actually describe it.
To put it another way: The language I use is irrelevant, because the point being made by that language is what's important.
This is a philosophy of mine that a lot of people don't seem to understand, and I think it's the source of a lot of frustrations I get in discussions online.
And this philosophy of mine extends to how subtitles should render ideas from other languages and cultures; the point is to get the meaning across, not to have an exact word-for-word reproduction of the original in another language.
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.
