While the field of videogame translation can be said to still be in its relative infancy, literature translation dates back aeons. Translating videogames has its own unique qualities (such as the added consideration that must be paid to the animation on screen), yet at its core it is still based around the task of expressing the sense of a set text in another language. The majority of this blog's posts involve shining a spotlight on the English translations of Japanese videogames, pointing out moments of superb translation or when it diverges from the source text. The translation of some videogames (in particular, JRPGs from the nineties) have long been a target of criticism, and have even seen retranslations. Indeed, translator Tom Slattery did this for the rerelease of a number of Square Enix games (such as Final Fantasy VI), and once commented that his job was, "translating games that have been translated already." Some games have also even have fanmade retranslations; see Final Fantasy VII or Chrono Trigger. One day I intend to devote some time to analysing the necessity of these retranslations, but for this post I mention them as way to highlight how some classic videogames have translations that have caused tongues to wag and new translations to be produced. The same is true of classic literature!
One of the most common pieces of advice for aspiring translators is to read as much as possible. On the forums of Gengo (a freelance translation company), Mohamed Yehia, an English to Arabic translator offers the following advice...
To read books, novels, daily news, technical or non-technical articles, all written in the target language of your pair, (i.e. Arabic in this pair). I think this will help to enhance your language, and to find the suitable expressions as sometimes we know the meaning in English but we maybe unable to say it in Arabic. Also will enhance your knowledge about the topics you are reading.
I think this is good advice. And anyway, reading is fun! I'm always reading something, and my most recent novel was The Count of Monte Cristo, an adventure novel by French writer, Alexandre Dumas. It was written in 1844, and today stands as a literary classic. Although it was originally written in French, it has been translated into virtually all modern languages. Over the past 150+ years, the novel has been so frequently translated into English that this matter has its own section within the novel's Wikipedia entry. I chose to read the Robin Buss translation, widely recognised as the best available option. The book was a delight to read, and I would sincerely recommend it to anyone. In regard to the matter of translation, after finishing the book, I deeply enjoyed reading Buss' 'A Note on the Text' in which he comments on the various translations of The Count of Monte Cristo. On this site, I frequently analyse the translation of videogames, so it was fascinating to read the comments of a professional such as Buss on such a similar topic, albeit in regard to a book rather than a videogame. I think it is a fascinating read for anyone with an interest in translation, so I have taken the liberty of quoting parts of the chapter.
First, in regard to some of the differences between the original text and its classic translation, he writes:
Anyone who has read The Count of Monte Cristo only in this ‘classic version’ has never read Dumas’ novel. For a start, the translation is occasionally inaccurate and is written in a nineteenth-century English that now sounds far more antiquated than the French of the original does to a modern French reader: to mention one small point in this connection, Dumas uses a good deal of dialogue (he wrote by the line), and the constant inversions of ‘said he’ and ‘cried he’ are both irritating and antiquated. There are some real oddities, like the attempt to convey popular speech (which does not correspond to anything in Dumas), when the sailor in Chapter XXV says: ‘that’s one of them nabob gentlemen from Ingy [sic], no doubt…’ Even aside from that, most of the dialogues in this nineteenth-century translation, in which the characters utter sentences like: ‘I will join you ere long’, ‘I confess he asked me none’ and ‘When will all this cease?’, have the authentic creak of the Victorian stage boards and the gaslit melodrama.To reach for a videogame parallel, this latter point of the translator's attempt to convey popular speech brought to mind the remark of, "You Spoony Bard!" from the original localization of Final Fantasy IV on the SNES. This remark (which is intended as an insult) has become so infamous that it is now part of popular culture, appearing in memes and being referenced in other games. The Final Fantasy wiki has a whole article on this line, and Legends of Localization has a fantastic feature that highlights the amusing moments where this reference has popped up in other games. On the topic of retranslation, LoL makes the interesting point that:
An interesting side effect of this line’s infamy is that it’s been kept in every English-language port and remake of FFIV since the game’s original release!
To return to Buss' writing, this next quote is a continuation of the previous paragraph. I include it because I can empathise with his bewilderment at finding story elements expunged in a translation.
It can be argued that this language accurately conveys an aspect of Dumas’ work, but not even his worst detractors would pretend that there is nothing more to it than that. Still less acceptable, however, than the language of this Victorian translation is the huge number of omissions and bowdlerizations of Dumas’ text. The latter include part of Franz’s opium dream at the end of Chapter XXXI, some of the dialogue between Villefort and Madame Danglars in Chapter LXVII, and several parts of Chapter XCVII, on Eugénie and Louise’s flight to Belgium.Buss goes on to comment on some of the more precise differences in translation, and concludes by offering his suggestion for why the translation differed from the French original.
What we see here, interestingly enough, is a stage in the process of transforming Dumas’ text into something simpler, less complex, less rich in allusions, but more concentrated in plot and action. The 1846 translator already has an idea of what kind of novel this is, and that dictates what he, or she, can afford to omit: travelogue, classical references, sexual and psychological analysis, and so on. None of these is essential to the plot of a thriller, and if some of them will embarrass English readers, then why leave them in? The only problem is that, nearly 150 years later, we do not have quite the same idea of what is and what is not important. It was high time to go back to Dumas, entire and unexpurgated.Since the genre of a game is defined by much more than just its text, I can't recall any games that have switched genres during a translation process. However, some clear parallels to videogame localisation can be found in Buss' other remarks. In the early nineties, videogame translators were subject to similar barriers as the abovementioned nineteenth century literary translator. For example, Nintendo forbade any game on its system to contain religious references. Accordingly, the literal translation of The Tower of Prayers was renamed The Tower of Wishes, and the Holy spell was changed to White. Moreover, on the issue of embarrassment, a similar sentiment is present in a post by (localisation director) Janet Hsu on the localisation of the second Phoenix Wright game. (For the sake of context, it's worth knowing that the character named Pearl is an eight year old girl).
...There have been times when the original Japanese dialogue was simply too over the line. I’m speaking of course, of everyone’s favorite lecherous fake doctor -- Director Hotti. To say nothing of what he says about Mia, which, while not necessarily taboo, was definitely skirting that line between a T and an M rating back in 2006, if you show Dr. Hotti a picture of Pearl in AA2, episode 2, he says some pretty average-sounding things on paper that become three text boxes of “Absolutely Not!” when combined with his grabby pervert animation. ...I was thinking of changing the animations altogether to further reduce the ick factor, but unfortunately, the team was unable to change the animations for the localized version, so a text rewrite where Hotti’s lechery is directed at an adult nurse was the option we chose to go with. Does this count as “censorship”? Maybe. But again, creators are not out to offend their players either. ...Japanese humor related to pedophilia and perversion is calibrated to a very different standard than the one we use in America. ...But how a culture chooses to deal with these sorts of issues is up to that culture, and in Japan, it’s still OK to have lecherous characters to laugh at in order to defuse some of the harshness of reality.
Buss wraps up his commentary with some overall thoughts on translation. I have included the entire passage as I think it is fascinating.
On the broader question of translation, I have tried above all to produce a version that is accurate and readable. A great deal of nonsense is written about translation, particularly by academics who approach it either as a terrain for theoretical debate or, worse still, as a moral issue: ‘the translator must always be faithful to his original,’ Leonard Tancock wrote, oddly assuming that translation is a masculine activity, even though on this occasion he was prefacing Nancy Mitford’s translation of La Princesse de Clèves (Penguin, 1978). ‘… he has no right whatever to take liberties with it… Nor has he any right to try to smooth the reader’s path by the omission of “dull” bits, short-circuitings, explanatory additions, radical transferences or changes of order.’ Why? And who says? Is it the reader who is demanding this perfection, this absence of explanatory additions, and so on?
Such academic theorists insist that a translation must read like a translation – it is somehow immoral to conceal the process that has gone into making it. ‘Ordinary’ readers usually demand the opposite, and reviewers in quite respectable papers sometimes show little appreciation of what the process means and involves: ‘Not all of this material works in translation,’ said one serious review of a book by Umberto Eco; and another: ‘… the stories [of Viktoria Tokareva] are well served by their translator, who hardly ever gets in the way’.
In philosophical terms I am quite willing to admit the impossibility of translation, while still having in practical terms to engage in it and to believe that everything must, to some extent, be translatable. I feel no obligation to avoid smoothing the reader’s path and none, on the other hand, to ‘getting in the way’ from time to time. Above all, I want to convey some of the pleasure of reading Dumas to those who cannot do so in the original language and, through my one, particular version (since no translation can ever be definitive), to reveal aspects of his work that are not to be found in any of the other existing versions. This is a new translation and consequently a new interpretation of a great – and great popular – novel. If nothing else, most people would surely agree that it is long overdue.This matter of accuracy is something that I often ponder. Many of posts on this blog have eagerly highlighted instances when a game's translation has strayed from the original text. Although I still feel this is an interesting, worthwhile and above all enjoyable pursuit, I fully understand the doubt Buss raises over whether the reader would necessarily demand such a thing.
What moves me the most is his desire to use his translation skills to convey the pleasure of reading the text in its text language. Can anyone argue that the pursuit of this goal should ever come second to stiffly sticking to the language of a source text? One of my favourite pieces of videogame localisation work is the first Phoenix Wright game. I have devoted many posts to analysing the ways in which the English and the Japanese version vary, yet despite these differences they both manage to give the game an overwhelming sense of character and likability. In short, the English localisation fulfills the goal Buss mentions of translating not just the Japanese words, but also the sense of enjoyment contained in reading them!
I hope that in the future I will be able to impart similar feelings to a videogame player ~
Thanks for reading! If you have any thoughts or questions about this topic, please leave them in the comments :)
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