User blog comment:Damesukekun/Song Translating and Mistranslating/@comment-2605:E000:8595:8100:610B:965E:83C8:B6AF-20170923220755

I'm sorry that I'm about to put a long comment on this page, but I seriously think this needs to be on this page where the people who are reading this can see it.

I know this page was made with good intentions, but I am a little concerned about the fact that 1) you seem to be unaware of the actual intent and purpose behind translation as a field, and that 2) this page has the potential to have a lot worse effects than you think. It seems that you have the impression that the most (and only) important thing about translation is fluency in both languages, but as someone who's specifically taken training in translation for a career, I'm finding a lot of really significant, worrying points about this page.

The most important thing I need to state here is that as much as you might consider translation as having "responsiblity", and as much as I may agree with you to a certain extent, it's not a sacred field. It's a bit of a grey area between a technical field and a creative one, but there is a general consensus among those who treat translation as an art form that a translation is considered a "derivative work", like a fanart or fanfic. It's written with the original text as a base, but because there are stylistic choices (more on this later) to be made, each translation is considered to be the "work" of the individual translator. This is why it's considered possible to "steal" translations by reposting them without authorization or credit -- that translation was filled with their individual stylistic choices and re-interpretations, and it also takes away the potential for them to fix any mistakes they might have made (again, more on this later).

Of course it's frustrating to see that the fanbase has had certain misconceptions about how certain lines or titles have been translated since the advent of the Miku phenomenon in 2007, and speaking as someone who's accidentally seen people run off with things I've mistakenly said before I had the opportunity to fix them, it's an awful thing to see happen. But at no point were said translators claiming to be the Gospel -- it was each fan's choice to put faith in that person's accuracy, and moreover the fact that the lyrics are open for anyone on the Internet to analyze means that there's nothing stopping a more accurate person from coming up and providing their more accurate version. It's an unfortunate phenomenon to see happen, especially when a more popular translator accidentally causes misconceptions and one that gets lesser attention isn't able to correct it, but doesn't that happen all the time with information flow? Should we discourage the reporting of information just because this is a natural fact of life?

Fundamentally, the issue here seems to be that you're convinced there's a "correct" way to translate. There's definitely "wrong" ways to do it (being semantically incorrect), but there's no such way as a "correct" one, and the standard you seem to want to enforce is completely antithetical to what translation actually is -- like I said, it's very different from just "being fluent in both languages".

I'm going to address some specific things I find worrying:

"'Tell me if you find mistakes' is another sign of your giving up the responsibilities."

...Except isn't it the exact opposite? When people say that they want people to inform them if they find mistakes, it's exactly so that they can assume responsibility for it! It's admitting their own faults as a human being and saying that whatever mistakes or misconceptions they might have caused by being semantically wrong, they want to fix! This isn't a contest about glory or presenting yourself as a professional translator -- the purpose is to get the information out, and admitting that, despite the fact you did your best, you may have slipped up a few times and want that to be fixed as soon as possible should hardly be considered a bad thing.

"Constant asking of quality check means you still have a long way to go, and you should concentrate on your Japanese study more than translating songs for fun. You are expected to have the ability to read Japanese newspapers and magazines and write Japanese sentences fluently without always reffering to dictionaries if you call yourself translator."

I find it extremely ironic you're saying this in regards to Vocaloid, a creative community that is famous for fostering amateurs and helping them get comfortable in their creative field of choice.

Look, what you're asking for is ridiculous -- you're basically saying that they're not allowed to translate anything until they get N1 or 2 certified, and do you know exactly what that entails? How do you think people got the necessary practice in for getting to that level? Because it sure wasn't by translating nothing but sanitized school-provided texts until they got their certification that deems them qualified to translate amateur songs in the Internet. Furthermore, as I said before, fluency is not the only factor in determining a good translation, and in fact you're still very, very capable of butchering a translation in ways that have nothing to do with your semantic fluency. You need to get that practice in somehow, and again, that's not something you're going to get in a school environment, especially for something like amateur music.

Perhaps you're saying that if they're going to practice then they shouldn't be doing it on the works of amateur creators on the Internet. Maybe so. But we're all amateurs here! We're making amateur music, amateur fanart, amateur comics, and those aren't expected to be professional quality. Again, translation is considered by many to be a creative art where you're making a "derivative work". It's not as cut-and-dry as attending school until you hit some level of Required Fluency and become magically able to do translation.

"If you are going to learn the language, you should take a Japanese class with a qualified teacher. Yet some months of studying basic words, expressions, conjugations and particles is not sufficient to grasp the whole framework of Japanese grammer."

In fact, a lot of amateur translators are already taking classes. It's true -- you can't learn Japanese just by translating songs on the Internet. Usually, amateur translators are people who are currently learning the language in school or some other formal way and are applying the knowledge to translation since they're now able to understand the lyrics and want to share that with other people.

What I find most worrying about this entire page

It seems you do understand some things about the impact of cultural influence on translation, and the distance between Japanese and English in terms of grammar structure, but despite having whole sections dedicated to this, you then proceed to list off a whole witch hunt on people who have failed to meet your standards. And you seem to have set some unusually high, specific standards -- you're persecuting people for things as small as making a few grammar/particle mistakes that don't have a huge impact on lyrical semantic meaning (if at all).

Firstly, once again, you seem to be under the belief that what qualifies you to be an accurate translator, and the only thing that qualifies you to be an accurate translator, is fluency in both languages, and any person who's taken formal training in translation knows this isn't true at all. Professional translation requires some degree of interpretation, but most importantly it requires less knowledge of semantic words and grammar and more of "emotional accuracy". (Described very well by Janet Hsu, localization director of the Ace Attorney series that's received huge acclaim for its localization despite its enormous changes to names and setting, here .)

You're not translating words. You're translating emotions and feelings, especially when it comes to a poetic art form like song lyrics. You want people to "feel" the same way they do when someone who knows the original feels when they read the lyrics. And something you seem to miss is that as much as you talk about how difficult Japanese can be for an English speaker, the truth is that English itself is a very difficult language to use for things like this. It infamously has tons of words that have the same dictionary definition but have minor, subtle differences in nuance, and mastery of which words have which nuance can be the key to avoiding the wrong implication. Certain combinations of words and certain grammatical structure can suddenly change the "feeling" or nuance, and translating it directly from Japanese can cause a corruption in that nuance -- something that someone not English-fluent won't detect.

It's a very common maxim in the translation world that the most accurate translations come from the people who are fluent in the target language -- that meaning that you're more likely to get an accurate translation from someone who's not so fluent in Japanese but a native speaker (note that I say native, not just fluent) in English than from someone who's a native speaker in Japanese but not native in English. And if you think about it, it theoretically makes sense. If you have a producer whose specialty is making beautiful lyrics in poetic, archaic Japanese, and you have a person who translated it with complete semantic accuracy but stiff and hard-to-parse English, versus someone who might have taken a little more creative liberty with the semantic meaning but produces it in beautiful Shakespearean-esque poetic English, whcih one do you think more accurately captures the way it was intended to be conveyed by the creator?

I hate to say things like this, but I'm looking at your list of people you think are "good" translators, and I can tell some of them aren't English-fluent. They seem to have retained the semantic value of the original lyrics well, but while the resulting English is grammatically correct (most of the time -- sometimes it's not!), it's very hard to read and really nullifies the "sense" of the lyrics. That kind of translation would easily be criticized as a big problem in the professional translation and localization industry, and often elicits worse reactions from the audience than a slightly semantically inaccurate but fluid-reading one would. Meanwhile, although I wouldn't doubt there are people who have made legitimate mistakes on there, in your "avoid" list you have people who very clearly made deliberate stylistic choices and whom you're accusing of "corrupting" the original meaning when it's obvious they were doing it specifically to preserve the original feeling.

By this same thread of logic, the translator for Project DIVA's lyrics, 8-4 (one of the most respected localization companies in the industry) is a repeat offender for literally having "changing things in order to preserve how it comes across to the English-speaking audience" as their trademark. (And if you honestly expect me to believe that 8-4 cleared every single minor choice with every single individual producer, you clearly don't understand how the game localization industry works.) Yes, even grammar edits are considered part of this -- some things just really don't read well in English when you use the "correct" grammar form, and what the translator is often doing is making an edit to that in order to make it flow better so that they won't come off as stilted to the reader. Because the vocabulary and semantic meaning is often the same either way, it's considered a small enough sacrifice that leaving it untouched would do even more damage to the meaning. This is, again, why translators are so insistent that they be given proper attribution for their own translations -- partially because of the work they put in, but mainly because it needs to be made clear that it was their personal interpretation of the thoughts and feelings behind the song, and that someone else's may differ.

Basically, let me put it this way: Would you persecute Natsume Souseki for believing that saying "I love you" directly wouldn't fly in Japanese culture and believing 月が綺麗ですね, which has exactly zero things semantically in common with the original sentence, was a much better way of accurately capturing those feelings? If not, then why are you persecuting people who have made much less significant changes?

Secondly, even if you're making it specifically for the purpose of addressing mistakes, the fact you're keeping such a list at all is really, really awful. Are you considering how much of a negative effect this can have on people who want to try translation themselves? Even people who want to do it by the abnormally high standards you've set are now going to be intimidated by the fact that you might put them on a page to be publicly scorned by people like they've committed some kind of sin to be ridiculed for. And the people who did put all their effort into providing a service for other people, even if they made a few mistakes here and there, are currently being shamed on a public board like this. Is this really the right thing to do?

Look...people are human. Hell, even the people at 8-4 are human. Did you know there's pronoun errors and occasional questionable localization choices in 8-4's DIVA translations -- and, as I said before, that this is one of the most respected localization companies in the industry? How many times do you think this happens across professional translations in the industry? In court interpretations, where the difference between an accurate translation and an inaccurate one can literally be life or death? Of course it's a natural desire to avoid portraying the original creator's intention incorrectly, but can we really avoid such mistakes happening once or twice?

I've had my own work translated to other languages before, specifically Turkish, Russian, and Japanese, and in all cases I was much more comfortable leaving it to someone else's discretion even if it meant they might have made a mistake or re-interpreted the lyrics in a way I didn't intend. I know nothing about the first two languages, and while I understand the third I felt that leaving it in a native speaker's hands would be more likely to convey what I wanted rather than having me do it manually and potentially create awkward phrasing because I didn't grow up as a native speaker in Japan who understands every tiny nuance. I ran that risk when I saw my work being translated, but hey, if you want me to put another Mark Twain quote here:

"I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the author considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment -- but if he would do the translating for me, I would try to get along without the compliment."

If they hadn't been so kind as to translate my work, the people who don't speak English wouldn't have been able to understand my work at all. But by the logic you're asserting on this page, they shouldn't have tried in the first place.

Please stop this.