Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Are Common English Loanwords Mistranslated So Often?
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Fhoo
Posts: 23 |
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God, this reminds me of the Bakemonogatari blurays where they use a more literal translation in the sentence with a bunch of deliberate nyas that the cat girl was saying instead of translating it to a sentence with a bunch of meows like fansubs I've seen.
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whiskeyii
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From my perspective, obviously "jelly donuts" is a step too far. But honorifics, to me, aren't really all that important unless it's brought up in the story itself; Kenshin and Angelic Layer both have scenes where characters address the use of "chan", and each show approached it differently. I feel like there's almost always other interactions that clue the audience in on how each character relates to the other, so I don't really see them as necessary. If it were, say, something like Fullmetal Alchemist with a hierarchy like the military that relied on certain honorifics, sure, throw them in. But in general, I'd say it's not really all that important. On the other hand, I might not really go to great lengths to find another word for "moe", "otaku", or "cat girl". Those are words that I think even the newest fan has probably encountered, so I don't think it really needs much more context. "Hikikomori" I might replace with "shut-in", though, just because I think it gets the meaning across much more concretely. And in cases of puns or humor, I think I'd try my hardest to find an equivalent English reference. But I'm getting bogged down in the weeds here. TL;DR: I don't view not using honorifics as demeaning to an audience, as there are usually far more organic ways of detailing character interactions in the story proper, unless it's a central theme of your story. That said, if you've sunk to 4Kids' level, obviously something's gone wrong. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 943 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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As others have touched on, many of the examples listed in the question and the article are only "wrong" in common American usage; they're perfectly fine in UK or Australian English (and possibly other dialects as well). Bloomers, as one example, in Australian usage mean the exact same thing as in Japanese usage. Yes, as outerwear, though not usually as a uniform. (Or maybe not these days, but at least when I was in school they weren't too uncommon.) "Maker" is a perfectly valid, if somewhat less common, word for "manufacturer". One of the things that drives me up the wall about anime and manga translations is when a valid and correctly-used English word is "helpfully" translated to American English. Worse is when they're helpful enough to translate a perfectly good Metric measurement to the equivalent in an Imperial measurement. I know the companies in question are American and cater to a primarily American audience, but I can still be annoyed by it, dammit.
As for name and suffix usage, for the most part leaving them as-is is the best way overall. Enough of the time, they indicate things about the characters' relationships with each other that English convention doesn't, and as awkward as it can be to leave them, it's more awkward to act as if "John" is different from "John" the same way as "John-kun" and "John-chan". Or trying desperately to get an equivalent with "lil' John" and "John buddy" or something like that. Sure, I can hear it, but it's still a bit jarring when the subtitles are so awkward.
It really wouldn't. The French formally do this, but in reality loanwords still get used all the time, usually making their way into usage before an official French word for something is decided on. And in any case, should we not also get rid of all loanwords from English, then? Considerably more of the words we use than you think are loanwords from other languages. But we've been using them for so long they might as well be English words, you might say? Same situation in Japan. |
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TheFinalWooser
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This is certainly an interesting topic. As an active professional translator, here are a few reasons why you might see situations like the questioner described.
1.) Sometimes it's simply an error. "Juice" as a general term for soft drink is a common one for this. The translator simply doesn't know what the meaning of the word is, and makes the wrong assumption. Words of that sort generally aren't taught in school, so it's possible to go your whole life not knowing what they mean exactly. Anime translators in general, by and large, are US based and grew up in the US (Primarily because people who grew up in Japan tend to lack the English language skills necessary to produce something as complex as an anime translation) so it's possible for them to have no exposure to simple things like being asked to buy something from a vending machine. 2.) Sometimes the word works better if directly translated to English. One example which I think one of the other posters brought up was the word "Bitch", which is generally used in Japanese to mean someone who sleeps around. It's most often seen in anime not as an actual description of someone's behavior, but just as a generic insult towards a woman. Despite the actual meaning of the word, since it's more common to use the word "bitch" as an insult in English, it works well if it's just left as is. "Feminist" is another example (For what it's worth, the usage of feminst as 'someone who cares about women' is more or less obsolete at this point, given the rise of actual feminists in Japan over the past... decade or so? Hard to say how long exactly.) The sleazy guy who tries to get on women's good sides by saying "I'm a feminist" is practically a trope at this point, and in Japanese the word is usually being used the same way (Some guy talking up how great he is so he can seduce a girl), so if left literally it works well. I don't know if I've ever translated it myself that way, because the use of the word has fallen pretty hard out of favor over the majority of the time I've been working professionally, but I do remember seeing it in older shows and thinking it worked fine. 3.) Some terms are simply expected by the audience. Regardless of whether the bloomers in anime are similar to real bloomers, 90% of the watching audience will know them as "bloomers" and think you're bowlderizing it if you put down something else. I'm not translating for a judge somewhere, I'm translating for my viewers, and viewers of any kind of anime where the word "bloomers" shows up are going to expect to see it translated that way. There are also a lot of situations where simply putting down "athletic shorts" or some other equivalent for bloomers would damage the resulting translation pretty badly. (Think the fairly common scene, or at least it used to be common, where someone is complaining/excited that the school gym class requires the use of bloomers. "Athletic shorts" in English are completely inoffensive. There would be nothing noteworthy about a gym class that required the use of athletic shorts, that's every gym class in the United States.) So yes, direct translation of loan words is a common issue, and it's something a lot of people screw up (I've been guilty of it a few times myself) but sometimes there are fairly solid reasons for it. |
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WatcherZer
Posts: 293 |
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You've used an image from a US Basketball team, this is what was being worn in Europe, where do you think the Japanese got them from? 
Swimming costume 
The butter/margarine thing is due to much looser use of genuine butter usage in the USA during the early 20th century where there was a lot of faking going on and the government had to impose a tax to try and stop it. A lot of US companies were selling fake butter so the US has a much looser interpretation of the word than UK/Japan. |
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WatcherZer
Posts: 293 |
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The mansion thing is more interesting, something I guess US readers wouldn't pick up on since its never had the same meaning in US English as it did in British English, but blocks of apartments used to also be called Mansion Blocks in the UK in the late Victorian up to WW2 period. Ironically its a loanword which since being transferred stopped being commonly used in the mother tongue.
Evidence: http://www.cityam.com/219892/ever-popular-mansion-flat In Japan the usage became over time looser, not a palatial apartment possibly even with servants quarters but to any apartment building built in the western style using concrete or bricks rather than traditional Japanese construction materials like wood. I imagine originally these first western style apartment buildings would have been very prestigious and grand. |
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luisedgarf
Posts: 664 Location: Guadalajara, Mexico |
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Thanks for being the reason why I stopped watching as much anime as used to be in past. If i wanted to know Japanese, I would want to go to a language school first, rather than learn it by watching TV. I understand, at least in the American case, the reasons why English-speaking fans prefers literal translations, but when 95% of all Japanese-to-English translations (both official and fansubbed) are from this kind of translation, you know there's a serious problem. And let's not talk about Japanese-to-Spanish translations (the latter is my native language), when a 99.5% of all translations are from this kind of crap. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4714 |
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Personally I can't stand the overly-literal professional translations that have blossomed in the post-digital-fansub era. To me, the true purpose of a good translation isn't to attempt a one-to-one correspondence between words in the two languages, but instead to capture as accurately as possible the experience of a native speaker watching the series. (And yes, this may occasionally involve adapting obscure cultural references or arcane linguistic tricks into the functional equivalent in the target language: I can't help but think back fondly to the FLCL dub's usage of Crystal Pepsi and "Naked Lunch Hawaiian Punch" rhyming strings.) That's especially crucial when dealing with languages as linguistically dissimilar as Japanese and English: nothing takes me out of the viewing experience faster than being blindsided by an awkward bit of phrasing that's clearly attempting to ham-handedly mimic a verbal structure that doesn't even exist in English. Too many translation attempts remind me in all the worst ways of my high school Latin assignments, when I paid more attention to slavishly using the offered definitions for each word instead of producing something that actually sounded reasonable in English. (Or for another example, if there are any Catholics out there, just think of the revisions to the English Missal from several years ago. *shudder*) Translation is far more of an art than an exact science, and there is no single "correct way" to render a certain phrase into another language.
My real pet peeve is when a translator or group declares certain words or concepts "untranslatable" and leaves them as-is with wordy explanations. (Besides the obvious fake meme ones, the use of "nakama" by the original prominent One Piece sub group immediately comes to mind.) To my mind that's a direct admission that the translator doesn't really understand what it is that they're supposed to be doing, or at the very least is severely lacking in imagination. I don't mind the odd translation note in principle, but many groups took them to a hilarious extreme, including multiple pages' worth of references in certain episodes. (Just for the love of God keep them at the end of an episode or in separate notes; no one needs "keikaku means plan" popping up at the top of the screen too quickly to even read in the moment of watching the episode.) Right up there is companies like FUNi kowtowing to the fansub crowd and insisting on including honorifics in official subs. I don't need to see the blessed things spelled out when I can already hear them in the Japanese dialog, and the same effect can be achieved by proper usage of word choice and varying text formality. It just reads like a weebish insular self-indulgence designed to make the subtitle text as inaccessible to casual viewers as possible. |
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frapagook
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That was a fantastic question and answer. I'm trying to learn Japanese, and that was eye-opening to realize that those loan words don't always mean the exact same thing in Japanese as their original English roots. I just started learning Japanese but I've been watching anime for years and hadn't caught on to it. It makes a huge difference to know that. Thanks Justin and Juliana
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Loanwords are funny. I sometimes got frustrated when my Japanese teacher insisted that I pronounce an English loanword the Japanese way (for example, "cohee" sounds just enough like "coffee" but not quite, in a way I find grating). But my father is from France, and he often reminds me that a lot of English words are derived from French--but don't necessarily have the same meaning in both languages (and, I'm sure to his ears, pronounced all wrong).
For example, "mansion" has come up a lot in this discussion. It's from an Old French word, which was derived from Latin. In hundreds of years of use, it makes sense that it could mean different things in different languages. And yet, I often like a more literal translation, especially when I'm hearing one thing but reading another in subs. A dub can be much more naturalistic and drop honorifics and change name order, but in a sub it stands out to me that it doesn't quite match, no matter how strange it is to me that the character is, say, referring to their spouse with "-san" to begin with. (Reminds me of reading old British novel in which old married couples refer to one another as "Mr./Mrs. So-and-So", just feels ancient for, say, Krillin to call his wife "ju-hachi-san." But he does. I can't unhear it, so might as well acknowledge it in the subs).
English has a big ol' mix of German and French in its base, plus words from tons of other languages filling our dictionaries! |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 943 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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I just don't understand this as an argument - every day we learn all sorts of things from a variety of different sources, TV being one of them (accuracy of what you learn from that aside...). If the TV news has a piece on war in the middle east and mentions a historical reason for a particular conflict, do you complain that if you wanted to learn history you'd sign up for a course in it? If a character in a TV drama talks about their favourite chicken recipe, do you complain that if you wanted to learn to cook you'd take a hospitality course? I never set out to learn about the native peoples of Sweden, for example, but it came up in a scandi noir TV show, so I now know something about it. What's the problem with learning some detail or other of Japanese language and/or culture while watching anime? Are your schools so bad that you wind up conditioned to hate learning anything new?
I can't say that's a wrong approach, but neither is it the One True Way. And it's not just a matter of how "weeaboo" (god, I hate that term...) someone is that dictates where on the literal-liberal scale they like their translations. One person I know - who normally has no interest in anime at all - was interested in seeing Crayon Shin-chan, but was bitterly disappointed that the English dub for it was an almost total re-write to be "functionally equivalent" for an English speaking audience. He wanted to see the Japanese take on crude humour that he'd heard stuff about, and there's any amount of natively English crude humour he could have gone to more easily than the re-write dub of a Japanese cartoon.
You can hear them. Doesn't mean everyone can, or that it's a good idea to leave potentially significant details like that to expecting the audience to be listening for them. And I disagree that the same effect can be achieved by wording choice; I'm yet to see an attempt at that which isn't incredibly clumsy. I also disagree that honorifics make everything incomprehensible to casual viewers; at worst they might need to ask or look up what they mean, and it wasn't uncommon at one point for fansubs and even some official subs to provide some brief notes to explain them. But even without an explanation, they're really no worse off understanding-wise than they would be if the honorifics were just omitted. |
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Actar
 Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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This! Definitely this! Sakagami Tomoyo, from your other responses, I see that we share quite a number of opinions on the subject. Oh dear, does it get annoying when centimeters gets rendered into inches and yen into dollars. I'm like... but they're not using the Imperial system or dollars, are they? Also, sometimes it really does feel that people are arguing for the purity or sanctity of the English language based on whatever variety of the language that they're most used to without acknowledging the fact English is a language that is based on a multitude of languages, is spoken by a myriad of different cultures worldwide, has the capability to incorporate new words into its vernacular and is constantly evolving. Immersion and accessibility is one thing, but people do have to realize that when dealing with a foreign product, there are things that are going to be, for better or worse, foreign. The viewer has to reconcile that fact and put in the effort to actually want to learn and embrace those elements. Conversely, I posit that making the dialogue overtly "natural" and localized achieves the exact same alienating effect. Not to mention, what might sound "natural" to you, might not be "natural" to me, purely because of our different backgrounds. This is one of the reasons I'd like to appreciate anime for its differences as opposed to yearning for it to be rendered as familiar as possible.
Similarly, I could just as easily argue that if I wanted to watch something that pandered to my sensibilities 100%, I'd stick to shows that were produced locally. Sigh... In all seriousness though, I don't know why people love creating this false dichotomy. Entertainment and education are not mutually exclusive, no matter what your parents told you growing up. You learn new words and concepts all the time from shows. Heck, that's one of the main ways kids absorb knowledge of the world around them. I don't understand why people aren't more open to actually embracing new knowledge instead of remaining closed off when it comes to anime. |
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SWAnimefan
Posts: 634 |
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What? Even the Japanese say it's Bloomers. Have we forgot the famous song from Mayoi Neko Overrun! ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvdQezBvCK4 But while people are argue these aren't bloomers, you aren't exactly wrong. Words can evolve in meaning. While it was originally named after it's creator Amelia Bloomer in the 1850s, it later became simply associated as female garments below the belt where it took new meaning in Turkey. And in Japan, the original bloomer of the 1920s simply evolved as it became shorter and eventually evolved into the feminine shorts Japanese girls wore until the start of the 21st Century. So while Bloomers aren't bloomers (design), they are bloomers in every sense of the name. So I think the Answerman really dropped the ball on this simple research. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9927 Location: Virginia |
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@SWAnimefan
I think you misunderstand. Answerman did not drop the ball on this. While both the word bloomer and the clothing item evolved in Japan and in other locations, it did not in the US. Here the word still takes its meaning from the initial introduction of the garment and is actually not in very common usage. A US audience seeing the word is either going to think of the original or not know what it means at all, likely depending on age. Concerning Crunchyroll's use of US English, that they are thinking of the US audience as primary is probably correct to some extent. However it is also likely that that the majority of their translators do speak US English. They probably either are unaware of the alternative varieties of English or simply default to US English. It is probably just as well. An attempt by a native speaker of US English to produce a translation in say UK or Australian English would probably get it wrong. Somehow the idea of a US based company trying to provide five or a dozen English language variants and then stream them according to location just doesn't seem workable. |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 671 |
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Just to add some color to this conversation, and to demonstrate how complex an issue translation can be, the Oxford English Dictionary has cited that "run" is the most complex word in the English language, the verb form consisting of over 600 individual case uses. That means, there are over 600 - I believe that actual number is 645 - different contextual meanings just for using the word "run" as a verb in English.
Not myself being a fluent speaker of Japanese, imagine then taking a sentence that uses the word run in it and having to translate that to English. You can go the exact literal route and translate it as "run", but you risk your audience coming to 600 different interpretations of what that sentence could mean, worse yet if the term is being used as part of a joke. Context is king in language, and literal translations tend to vastly overlook this aspect. |
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