owen: See, a lot of this is due to lazy-as-hell or non-proficient translators who know their Japanese but suck at English, period. All that leaving in of -chan/-kun/-san go a long way towards pointing you to a translator who treats English (an SVO language) as Japanese (an SOV language), since if they’re lazy/weeaboo enough to leave in honorifics, something’s gotta give, eventually..
Which brings me to editors–their role is to transform the translated line into English. Hilarious, I know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some fansub groups skip the editing process altogether, considering the quality of what’s out there.
Maybe I’m alone – or maybe my weeaboofu is over 9000 – but I hate it when -chan/-kun/-san are changed into stuff like ‘lil sis, or changed at all, for that matter. Unless you’re translating katakana-based loan words (sorta re-translating), it’s futile to try and “translate” one exclusively Japanese meaning into another Engrish one. What exactly does “itadakimasu” mean? I don’t know, but it probably doesn’t mean “let’s eat”. Just like if you really think about it, what does “you’re welcome” mean? It’s a metaphor, but if you take “welcome” very literally, the phrase makes no sense. Similar confusion arises with prepositions. Why are things “under control” or “in control”? Again, they’re metaphors, they make use of reification, which makes no sense if you take it literally.
So if you take for granted that translation is by necessity just a whole process of compromising language, there are three kinds of “translation” (as our definition quickly becomes inoperative). In academia, book reviews of translations will always gripe about whether the translator tried to be as accurate as possible, simply trying to “convert” a text into English, or if they took liberties and tried to make it “flow” in English – of course, doing the latter could be viewed as being very “unfaithful” to the original.
The third kind, however, is the kind of lazyness Owen points out. Or is it lazy? If a goal of translation is to stay as close to the original as possible…wouldn’t it make sense to leave as much of the original intact as possible…in the original language? [It makes me wonder exactly what the hell kind of research Bang Zoom was doing when dubbing Lucky Star.] This is why it bothers me slightly when someone will translate onee-chan into big ’sis, or something. Of course, it only annoys me because I’ve never heard someone actually say big ’sis in real life, me being an average east coast, dc metropolitan area american. However, if translators really want to take into account regional varieties as a whole, they would not simply make an English translation, but they’d have to try and make regional translations. If you’re translating the slang of Japanese teenages, you’ll have to translate it to match the teenage dialects of the areas in which your viewers live – impossible, most likely. That’s why instead of, so to speak, the anime coming to the viewer, the viewer has to come to the anime. At least that’s why I think translation is best when it translates least. wwwwwww
So what about the role of the editor? Fuck the editor. Weeaboo culture may be over 9000% wwwwww, but it in itself presents a real (with all the faggerjack philosophical/theoretical implications) alternative to the canon of “translation”.
Let me quote a passage from this book: My aim, nonetheless, is to convey not my nationality but my transnationality. To succeed, the original ought to read as if written already in translation – a translation without an original.