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.
The following are a bunch of comments from our friendly neighbourhood fansubber, koda. Naturally, we share the same thoughts. This is regarding the Umineko VN, and the terribad/horribad literal translation thereof:
Sterling01: Yeah the translation was very stiff for the earlier chapters of Episode 1, though it does get better.
miasmacloud: …do they get rid of the honorifics spam later? Because it’s quite terrible.
(I’m guessing “no” based on their multi-page grimoire entry about honorifics.)
Sterling01: The honorifics don’t go away… though I really don’t see the problem with them. (This may be because I read it in Japanese)
Well we could have used Aunt and Uncle instead of Obasan and Ojisan…
miasmacloud: Stuff like this. I was really apathetic about every nii/nee and shit being preserved in dialogue, but Rolo’s constant cry of NII-SAN!!! in R2 quickly wore me out on that. When used as an honorific, nii/nee should be removed. “George Aniki” -> just “George”. The line I linked in the screenshot could very easily be made to say, “he was like a brother to me” etc etc. As it is, mixing “brothers” and “aniki” in the same sentence is fucking dumb. Whenever nii/nee is used as a noun, it should be replaced with the persons name unless you absolutely positively don’t know what the name is. (IE: Kyon’s little sister) Like I have 2 older brothers, I don’t go around calling them “Brother [Name]“, I just call them “[Name]“.
And super casual stuff like “hey bro/sis” is a different story, but I don’t think that’s relevant to Umineko because of the time period it takes place during?
Shit like -san I think can be totally omitted unless it’s one of those “quit calling me -san” things. -sama can easily become Mr or Mrs/Ms. -kun/-chan you can sometimes just omit, but other times you might be able to come up with a nickname! (Unless the name is too short to nickname. Some people just put “little” or some variation in front of the name, I think.) Let’s go for the gay and say Battler-chan could be turned into Battie. *^_^*
Anonymous: >Battie
8/10
miasmacloud: Gonna have to sub Umineko now just to call him Battie.
Bocom: Ironically enough, there is at least one scene where it is a “stop calling me -san” situation. (’_’;)
miasmacloud: Then just put Mr and make it “Quit calling me Mr”. ┐( ¯3¯)┌
miasmacloud: Additionally, Blue-kun told me about a line in the translation where one character who usually uses ore switches to using watashi. There are some times when it is genuinely “lol idk how to do this” but that situation is very easy to translate by just having the character who usually uses ore speak in say, non-contracted more lolelitist-sounding language, and have the character who points it out say something like hurr durr you don’t like sound like a tuff gai or ic you speak better now or whatever the situation calls for.
Anonymous: Well, thinking up clever titles and changing the language to fit the tone of each character would require ::effort:: especially considering the massive amount of text. In any case, you should continue reading to at least see Beatrice, one of the greatest troll characters ever.
miasmacloud: I don’t think you’d have to fit language to tone of each character. Using stuff like casual and contracted language is just standard fare for uh, idk… “modern” dialogue so using un-contracted and trying to make it sound less casual for only the segment in question doesn’t exactly sound magically hard?
miasmacloud: Okay, Sterling, are the amount of notes that can be found in the Grimoire.doc’s really necessary? (´_ゝ｀)
• “We gotta start picking up tips!”
The original line in Japanese was 「後でツメの垢をもらってきてやるから一緒に飲もうぜ。」. “Tsume no aka wo nomu”, “to drink the dirt under someone’s nails”, is a Japanese expression stemming from the belief that if you make a potion with someone’s nail scrapings, you’ll steal their talents by magic. Considering its unintuitive meaning, we adapted this way. Obviously not conveying completely the expression, but any extravagant analogy would have more risk of a very different meaning.I don’t see why this is needed for what’s basically, “We’ll follow in your/their/whoever’s footsteps”.
I also don’t see what’s so magical about the shinkansen that it can’t just be put as bullet train.
Sterling01: I did find the amount of translation notes to be a bit much for Ep 1 and many weren’t really necessary. But once the meta world shows up and you get into different types of checkmate (Epaulette mate, Back rank mate, etc) I think some type of note is needed.
miasmacloud: Seems more like a “Wiki on your own time” thing. ( ´∀`)