Kobayashi’s Maid Dragon Translation Notes
tlnotes.com
tlnotes.com
I highly recommend reading it even if you don't watch anime; it's a treasure trove of daily Japanese life references that don't usually turn up on mainstream media. It's also due to Kobayashi's Maid Dragon being set in modern day Japan with several slice-of-life elements, and Kyoto Animation tends to do an extremely good job of portraying those small moments of happiness.
Thanks for sharing this, didn't know it existed. :)
(R.I.P Mr. Takemoto, Director of Season 1. We lost so many great minds...)
Don't most modern compilers allow utf-8 characters in symbol names?
It looks ridiculous to have English syntax mixed in with Japanese variables, not great for legibility.
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3120/
Also default in Ruby as of 2.0: https://ruby-doc.org/core/Encoding.html#class-Encoding-label...
Nowadays it's less of an issue, but back in the days windows, mac and linux all used different default encodings. This meant that opening and saving the source file in one of the system could mess it all depending on the editor and how careful the devs are.
Also, there is the canonical writing issue, where you can write different utf-8 strings that all end up displayed the same. It's not an issue if it's just display text, it's a different story if you have a method that doesn't get called because the byte sequence was different, or more subtly hash indexes that seem to match but actually don't.
BTW there are companies that write some of the UT methods right in Japanese, as it matters less, and it's quite fun as there is less restrictions on what can be put in the identifier (full-width parenthesis, spaces, comma etc, are allowed in that context)
Also great show (KMD) last season's OP was great.
# Check if the IP address has changed
""" Generate a random session ID """
Seems accurate. :)
I worked as a Japanese-to-English translator for twenty years (until 2005) and wrote and translated some Japanese-language textbooks, but I was never into otaku stuff and never would have thought of producing something like this. Hats off to the author.
If you like Dropkick, you'll probably love Dragon Maid.
Also don't forget Fafnir x Takiya ;)
I presume a typical sapphic boob anime is also easier to translate. Literary greats tend to use more complex language or at the very least, very meticulously crafted language. That is, after all, what usually makes a work of literature a "great". From TFA you can see how much nuance and careful consideration can even go into the translation of a simple piece of pop media. The level of literacy (in multiple languages!) it takes to do justice to a more high-brow work is usually much higher.
I have to concede that you calling Maidragon a "sapphic boob anime", while a little dismissive, is accurate and amused me.
"Classic" literature often has a very high comprehension level and often relies on a shared history/culture for many things. Translation doesn't always really work.
In English, for example, let's take "Cry, the Beloved Country" by Alan Paton.
I don't know how to describe it, but that novel has a "rhythm". How on Earth would you translate that to Japanese and not lose that?
Part of the reason I wanted to learn Japanese is so that I can actually "read" people like Sōseki.
More people should give it a try! Learning Japanese—or any language—requires a lot of time and commitment, but being able to read literature in the original is one of the great rewards.
As I noted in another thread, I was a translator of Japanese for many years. I did it mainly to support myself and my family, so almost all of the work I did was business- or government-related, that is, work that paid decently. At that time, few J-to-E translators were able to support themselves translating literature, anime, manga, or other interesting or fun content. The work just didn’t pay well enough to justify the time required to do it.
Things might be different now with anime and manga because of their worldwide popularity, but I doubt if many translators can support themselves translating Japanese literature into English—the books just don’t sell well enough. Most prolific translators of Japanese literature seem to be academics or to have other sources of income.
As a result, only a tiny percentage of Japanese literature is translated into English, and the works that are translated tend to be chosen because a publisher hopes that their themes will appeal to people outside Japan. There’s a huge amount and variety of interesting, quirky, and enjoyable literature published regularly in Japan, and the only way to access it is to learn Japanese.
In addition, I think there's a different mind set when people consume translated literature versus pop culture works (games, anime, manga, light novel, pop music etc). With literature, the reader expect that the translated work should stand on its own - when you read All Quiet on the Western Front, you don't constantly remember that it was originally written in German, when you listen to Les Miserables, you probably don't think how the French version sounded. So you'd have to think of how to work around the clever rhymes, the double meanings, the local idioms, so you don't take too much liberty with the words but also don't take away the intended meaning.
Whereas with people who consume fan translation understand that it's there to help the viewer enjoy something both the viewer and translator like, it is not meant to be a stand-alone piece of art. So when needed, you can stick in a translator notes to explain the rhyme that got lost in translation, or put a full essay on how a throw away line is actually a historical reference that imply something different to what was said. It's much headache inducing and more fun to do.
Besides, let's be honest, do you really think a modern translation of Ulysses will get more views than even the most obscure "NY Times best seller" from the last 5 years? In terms of effort : enjoyment people get, I'd argue it's more worth your time to translate pop works.
At the moment I am thinking of Dogra Magra, which has a fan translation on a blogspot somewhere that only covered the first few pages IIRC, and a Machine translation bootleg being sold on amazon. No other translation I am aware of, though I have not searched exhaustively.
I've polled the 3 Japanese colleagues in my team and none of them have finished it, so I doubt it's something a lone translator would be able to tackle without spending years on it. The blogspot translator probably got into it and hit wall once the story starts going. That said, it sounds like a fun team project if someone were to organize it and keep everybody on track for at least a few months.
So I searched for To The Lighthouse translations, and of course it has been translated to several languages, but also among the first results were academic papers discussing the implications of how it was translated, which makes sense to me, it's interesting.
There's a lot more people that watch anime than read translated Japanese literature. I mean, I tried Murakami but it's just not my cup of tea (and just like a lot of anime, problematic).
Imagine trying to translate even mundane idioms like "Boris Johnson is like a well-greased pig", meaning "offers no angle of attack" to German, which is a related language, but whose people have no concepts of greasing up live pigs and making people hunt them for fun or as a prank - it's just not something we do. (I'm bringing that example here because some English journalist tried to use the direct translation in a recent interview).
Now imagine doing for complete literary works from cultures which developed completely separate from each other for aeons.
Translating high culture badly is not something we should encourage.
I may lack his eloquence, but... I mean, have you read Shakespeare's plays? They're like two thirds dick jokes. "Much ado about nothing" is literally a double entendre.
Today's sapphic boob anime is a generation gap or two away from being highbrow classic culture. Indeed, you can see the transition happening in real time as 80s/90s kids become old enough to decide what culture is. You can't predict what will stand the test of time in the moment, the same way that you can't predict which of a dozen similar games with no apparent redeeming features will go viral and which won't; but history amply demonstrates that some inevitably will.
The time is now - this is your chance to become part of the highbrow cultural history of the future: help translate some sapphic boob anime today!
Though apparently, whoever translates the Name of the Wind into Spanish is an exception...
This causes an issue with intuitions about a text: relative inaccessibility and the need for extensive study is common for works that have stood the test of time simply because of their age, and as we encounter this over and over, the very presence of these properties causes us to lean towards mentally filing a work in the "highbrow" category, and the lack of them otherwise accordingly - and thus "this is pop culture" or even "this is popular" become shortcuts for "this is worthless", without one actually needing to do the work to demonstrate the worth or its lack.
However, inaccessibility is neither sufficient nor necessary nor even particularly desirable for a work to be worthwhile; many classics of today were popular culture in their time, and so we must fight the instinct that causes us to think of the two categories as being mutually exclusive.
Will you learn more about America reading Mark Twain or watching capeshit? Which is more relevant to American society?
If we only worked on things that have the potential to make us famous, we wouldn't do much work. That is true for most industries - even writers.
The writer is specifically showing subtleties in the language used today which has nuance beyond a direct translation and why it works. I think that is highly important and commendable. And if we are to speak to something which would immortalize someone in history I believe if someone would write a companion guide to the brilliance of word play in the Monogatari series, that it would put them among the most famous translators of other foreign works. (Or even more impressively just managed to translate the word play directly.)