So in the last post, I talk a bit about the layout and design challenges present in books and game media.
I’m going to dig a little deeper into some of the things that cause professional translators* problems when they first encounter them. For some of you just getting into the language, they might be mind-blowing. For those of you who are at the ikkyu or “I read actual short stories/magazine articles” level, this stuff is old hat.
* Am I a professional translator? Well, I’ve translated — a lot — for money, so I guess so! Although it’s not my day job, else I’d be a lot faster at it than I am now!
The reason this is important is “Voice and Flow”: This is supremely important when making a text easily accessible to a new audience. The text has to flow and not “stutter” (with things like constant obvious grammatical mistakes, constant switching of perspective from 3rd to 1st person, etc); and it should have a voice, or a consistent method in which it speaks to the reader.
So interestingly enough, after two solid runthroughs of the text by guys with solid editing (in terms of grammar for both, and one had a lot of skill with ensuring consistency across the text, asking questions that a reader might ask, and doing some copy-editing) skills, I tossed the text to a friend of mine who had a lot of experience with editing, including for various tabletop role-playing games. He was going to help with a third round of editing, but slammed on the breaks.
BUDDY: Andy, um… About the text. It needs a lot of editing.
ANDY (ME): Huh. I thought the text was pretty solid, save for the grammatical pieces we missed. What in particular?
BUDDY: Well… basically… um… This text needs to be totally rewritten from scratch.
ANDY: … … … … … … …wut?
BUDDY: From scratch. All of it. Needs to be totally redone in order to be Perfect.
QUE ANDY HAVING A STROKE.
So after we hashed it out for a bit, my shock and horror turned to “Ooooooooh, so THAT’s what you’re talking about. Yeah, never mind that.”
Basically, my friend was coming from a place of Total, Exacting Perfection (for English grammar) for the text. He said that the content was okay, that the organization was fine, that there certainly wasn’t too little and if anything there may be Too Much text and explanation. But what he was concerned about was the grammar. Specifically, the fact that there were some sections (most of them throughout the World/Setting/Characters material — where the “voice” of the original authors in Japanese is strongest – rather than the Rules sections) that didn’t flow perfectly. A few sentences that seemed stilted. A few sentences that were almost run-on sentences. More than a few places where Passive Voice (“The kingdom was conquered by the Oni” rather than “The Oni conquered the kingdom, etc”) is used.
This feedback was great! But I quickly realized something interesting about the text.
The text *feels* Japanese! It’s not a stuttering mess of classical Japanese grammatical problems with English ala Engrish and the like (if you’re interested in what that looks like in an RPG, check out “Take Back of Freedom!” a Game Chef experiment from a few years ago). But as I went through the text in the original and subsequent translations, I actually did something subconsciously that I later — when it was pointed out by my friend — made a deliberately conscious effort to continue: I preserved the Voice of the original text as much as humanly possible in the English translation.
Instead of tearing it down to its raw meaning and reconstructing it back in always-perfect English writing form, I instead made the decision to keep a few of those “telling grammatical choices”: A few run-ons, a few predicate-less sentences, some healthy Passive Voice, etc. And in the end, the author of the original Japanese text was throughout the writing really giving you the feeling of the sheer largeness of the setting, the sheer awesomeness and limitlessness of the characters and world. I did everything possible to keep that tone while at the same time preserving English grammatical rules so as not to kill the Flow (which would have made the text “Cool” but at the same time “Frustrating to Read”).
In other words, I didn’t want to “Whitewash” the text: To remove everything uniquely Japanese about the writing in order to make it fit our classical English literary-form buckets. To keep the essential meaning of the text yet totally sift out the tone because it got in the way. I’ve read some translations of various novels in English that lost the tone to appeal to an English-speaking audience (probably due to a conservative and aggressive editor), and honestly to me the effect ranges from “rubbing me the wrong way” to screaming “this is BULLSHIT!” and throwing the book across the room. Just like the art and setting and rules, the actual writing itself is a unique and distinctively Asian/Japanese piece of work, and I wanted to make sure that showed!
I think I did a good job of this! For if nothing else, when I explained this clearly to my friend, the light instantly went on in his head (he’s a huge fan of anime/manga, but just wasn’t “in that zone” when his English editor cap was on on his first readthrough), and he totally Got It. He too agreed that whitewashing the text would really deter from the goal of publishing the game. We agreed that while it might give English majors some fits in places (although of course I did my best to ensure that it was as grammatically sound as possible, and flowed as smoothly as possible given the voice/tone of the text), the only reply to those criticisms — sans the few actual grammatical errors that make their way to print — is, “That’s the tone of the Japanese authors. Deal with it!”
Okay, I’ve got a general post about “cool differences between English and Japanese grammar” in the works, I’ll save it for later; this post is long enough!
