Why Mistranslation Matters
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The documentary said that Japan used a super-obscure word, and that there was a team of translators digging through books who eventually told the president that Japan it means that Japan is both responding and not responding. They're giving a "NULL" answer.
In other words it wasn't the words that were mistranslated, but that Japan was using something that doesn't fully translate culturally.
E.g. apparently in Japan if you do something unusual while on the train then you may find that everyone around you is suddenly "asleep". They're so embarrassed for you for violating a minor cultural norm that the easiest way to make this better is to pretend to be asleep and that they didn't see it. (I guess I never made such mistakes while there)
If you've worked with people from other countries you may know similar things. Like in some countries they say yes to everything. They can't deliver some of the things, but it would be rude to say no.
Back on topic: In the end Japan did not answer in time, and "surrender or get bombed, we will end this war now" ultimatum doesn't give room for "No comment. We need more time".
Japan didn't say "we surrender". They didn't say "we don't surrender". Not literally. It's more comparable to "Yeah we definitely should hang out some time!". It's not the words that matter there. It's the meaning. And the meaning was unclear. And that was, to the US, unacceptable while people were dying every day.
And that was, to the US, unacceptable while the USSR was closing in on Japan from the other side, and they had two perfectly good bombs they wanted to test and send a clear, post-WWII-era message.
I wouldn't call dropping two nuclear bombs on civilians (men, women, and children) a concern for the human toll. Not even conventional bombing (which had gone on for a while) was needed at that point, Japan was giving up the ghost and just wanted to save some face.
You mean by showing massive amounts of restraint?
Nobody would have asked "why" if the Russians had burned most villages and murdered a good chunk of the German civilian population. More than a few people were surprised when the soviets didn't do that. Likewise nobody would have asked why if the US didn't stop at two bombs.
Sure a few people would have complained had the Soviets burned east Germany to the ground or the US had continued to atom bomb what was left of Japan but there almost certainly wouldn't have been any serious backlash.
The world had seen a lot of death and destruction between 1939 and 1945 (and a decade of depression before that). A couple million more of the people who started the mess likely wouldn't have moved the needle on most people's give-a-shit meter. People care about avenging the deaths of people they know and preventing more people they know from dying far more than they care about civilian casualties of the enemy.
Yes I know this is probably uncomfortable to read from your air conditioned office but when your drive to the front takes you through a burnt out village where some of your distant relatives once lived revenge starts looking better and when every page in your high-school yearbook has a couple people who won't ever be showing up to a reunion turning an island into a smoldering rock in order to not have to invade it looks like a really good option.
I can only imagine what the soviets would have waged on Japan had they landed an invading occupying force.
Well, close to 20 million Soviets died by the war, and they didn't have done anything to provoke it.
The US didn't have any of that excuse. And even Pearl Harbor (which was a tiny blip compared to the Russian death toll, and on an annexed island far away from the mainland US) happened after months of purposefully provoking the Japanese to attack so that the US government could convince Americans to enter the war.
The documentary The World at War postulated that the only reason why its not higher is that when the Germans had lost and started retreating most of the east German population fled in mass to the west because they know the USSR would treat them very similar to how the Nazi treated Russians during the occupation. About 10 million USSR civilians died and about 26 millions in total so the USSR had a lot of reasons. I have not heard any historian that claimed that USSR did not pursue revenge. I have heard however that the only reason Berlin was not razed to the ground was because allied troops rushed there hastily during the siege in order to be able to claim half of it after the war.
The Russians could have done worse, they could have had an actual policy of genocide.
The final stages of the Manhattan project hummed along without much political involvement. Dropping nukes to show the USSR who's boss really wasn't on the radar of the military (they were preoccupied with the war). Politicians outside the executive branch were mostly in the dark and Truman wasn't exactly keeping a close eye on things.
Remember, the alternative in 1945 was more firebombing and an invasion several months down the line. The Soviets just finished mopping up the problems in central Europe. They couldn't be counted on to commit their armed forces to the far east in meaningful quantities. "But the civilians" isn't really a valid concern when there's a Japanese army running around China committing war crimes and enemy civilians will commit suicide (or be murdered by their army) rather than surrender at all. In 1945 you can't justify the alternative courses of (in)action.
About the USSR: The deal was that they were supposed to attack Japan three months after the surrender of Germany. They did so to the day, on August 8, 1945 - two days after Hiroshima.
You can interpret this two ways. One is that the US wanted to send a message to the USSR. The other is that the US wasn't sure that the USSR would do what they said, or wasn't sure that it would be enough if they did. And in fact, there was a mutiny in Japan to disobey the emperor and keep fighting - even after both atomic bombs and the USSR attack.
So saying "that was just politics, sending a warning to the USSR" is very much not warranted, given the situation at the time.
>About the USSR: The deal was that they were supposed to attack Japan three months after the surrender of Germany. They did so to the day, on August 8, 1945 - two days after Hiroshima.
Citation? Both of those sounds believable but I want to read it somewhere other than a pseudonymous online comment.
>So saying "that was just politics, sending a warning to the USSR" is very much not warranted, given the situation at the time.
That's what I'm saying. The political situation with the USSR wasn't even on the radar of the people managing the bomb program.
For the second quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War (first paragraph under "Summary").
When I read people in the 21st century wagging their fingers at people's immoral behavior in the past, I often wonder to myself if they've read any history (or even better in this case, browsed some photos), look at the world through a lens so different than mine that I can't even fathom what the world might look like through their eyes, or with the overwhelming number of conveniences and hyper-optimized processes that power the bubbles we live in, maybe they simply can't see the amount of complexity and uncertainty there is in the world.
Yes, it was on the radar of the government.
You can blame the culture for not using communication efficiently, but saying a "null" answer to the demands of surrender was sufficient reason to one-up the violence by becoming the first and only country to use nuclear weapons and the first and only country to use nuclear weapons specifically against civilians, is absurd.
(To be clear: what I'm saying is that even with a gun to his head, the emperor probably wouldn't have simply said "okay, we surrender", at least no publicly)
But that's what actually happened. The military was afraid the emperor would surrender and launched a coup on the palace, and the record containing the announcement of Japan's surrender had to be snuck out in a pile of laundry.
And to be fair, Japan's current emperor can't legally resign or even ask to resign because of restrictions on imperial political influence imposed by postwar law, since abdication would require changing the constitution.
I have trouble understanding why killing a few hundred thousand civilians in a nuclear attack is in some way qualitatively different in a moral sense from killing a few hundred thousand civilians in firebombings. The only difference was tactical: now we can and will kill you with even less effort and risk. The US had bombed out most Japanese cities and countless civilians had died in the bombings. The firebombing of Tokyo alone killed as many as many as 200k, easily the same scale as the nuclear bombings.
I think the intense focus on the nuclear bombings is misleading. There was no "one-upping" or escalation. The same level of violence was perpetrated by a new method.
There was an evacuation of civilians, during the Vietnam war I believe[1], where the evacuees had to walk a narrow bridge to a boat. One man panicked and started pushing his way through, pushing people into the water.
A military official walked up to the man and shot him in the head.
There were no more paniced pushes by anyone, and everyone was saved. This doesn't mean that an innocent person panicking is worthy of the death penalty. Would there even have been a mass panic? We'll never know. Would arresting the man have been enough to prevent it? We'll never know.
> The only difference was tactical: now we can and will kill you with even less effort and risk. The US had bombed out most Japanese cities and countless civilians had died in the bombings. The firebombing of Tokyo alone killed as many as many as 200k, easily the same scale as the nuclear bombings.
Exactly. And this is the difference morally as well. The firebombing of Tokyo did not cause surrender. It wasn't until two bombs showed just how effortlessly the US could from now on wage the war that reality could immediately not be denied.
Yes, the main reason for the US to use the bombs instead of many planes with firebombing were to reduce their own military casualties and to show the Soviets what the new world order will be. But in another analogy: A criminal may fight one police officer, but it takes a special kind of criminal to choose to fight an armed SWAT team with only fists.
If I wanted to make excuses for the US I could add that in a total war there are no civilians. Japan's cultural expectation here was that every man, woman, and child would die before surrendering. A wake-up call can effectively shorten the war for both sides. Firebombings were evidently not enough of one.
Dan Carlin's currently talking about the Japanese side of WWII. I highly recommend his work. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supern...
[1] this isn't about the morality of the war in Vietnam.
Japan had good reasons to want to avoid a Soviet occupation because they had only just recovered territory they had previously lost to Russia.
Was it in the US's best interests to escalate the use of force? Sure. But I'm not American and this isn't the 1940s so I see no reason to judge the decision on those terms.
This sounds a lot like post-hoc rationalization. Are you trying to argue that a Japanese SSR would have tipped the scales so significantly the Soviets could have succeeded (and then done what exactly? start a nuclear war?)? Or that Japan itself would have been worse off (if so, why do you care if you're not Japanese?)?
You'd think legitimizing such an unprecedented, traumatizing, unspeakable act like using nuclear weapons would require something more plausible than "well, we really didn't want them to be annexed by the Soviets".
The recently concluded Tour de France was a standout example of this as journalists with responsable English sought to translate what English-speaking supporters/fans and riders had said. Sometimes it is close enough, but some commentators and journalists get it really, really wrong - on in particular (who seems to be rolled out for any sport where the winners are likely to speak English) is famously bad, sometimes inventing what he WISHED the person speaking had said rather than something close to what the person actually said. Good for a chuckle when its not consequential, but potentially disastrous for more serious matters.
Essentially every show on Netflix seems to have some lines which are translating 100% incorrectly. They're not just issues of interpretation, they are full blown mistakes. Let me give a few of examples:
The West Country (an area in England) was translated as "America" in the subtitles.
"Boogie board"(a small surfboard-like toy) was translated as "electronic memo pad"(there is an electronic memo pad with the brand name "Boogie Board").
"Middle of the road" (not good and not bad) was translated literally.
Most of the mistakes I see seem to stem from the fact that the translator didn't understand the original content. I assume they are an individual Japanese native speaker, or a team with no English native speakers.
The article also mentions Trump's tweets, one of which triggered a very strange phenomenon in Japan. The famous "grab her by the pussy" tweet was deemed "untranslatable" by professional translators and the news repeated as such. It won't surprise you to learn that Japanese has plenty of words to describe genitals, both vulgar and not. The translators were essentially lying. There is a huge gulf between "can't" and "won't".
There's a famous blooper in the Finnish translation of Star Wars where the phrase "Maybe it's another drill" is rendered as the type of drill that cuts holes (pora), not drill as in exercise (harjoitus).
https://archive.is/3Lyem/bcd9c7ef4efb3ff594bb5dba1d515dc0182...
The famous joke
>"Three tomatoes are walking down the street -- a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and squishes him... and says, 'Catch up.' "
Instead of "Catch up", they translated "Ketchup".
But as "Ketchup" doesn't sound like the German "Catch up", it sounded like an anti-joke.
If I recall correctly, the works of Edgar Allen Poe are famous for having liberal but high quality translations in German. Song writers also sometimes do this when "translating" a song to another language.
e.g. another joke like this Did you hear about the country with the fastest growing capital? It's Ireland - every day it's Dublin.
I can't think of any way how to translate this joke so it would be funny in German. But I have a feeling that these word play jokes aren't used much in German speaking countries anyways. Most of the humor is about people acting different or surprising.
The closest equivalent I can think of are sentences where the joke lies in using a different word at the end than the (likely, extremely crass) one the audience expects. These tend to work better in German than in English because of the sentence structure, I think.
EDIT: Example of a dad joke pun: "Was sagt ein Sachse auf dem Weihnachtsmarkt in New York? Ä Tännschen, please." -- "What does a man from Saxony say at the Christmas market in New York? A fir, please."
The joke is that "ein Tännchen", "a (small) fir", when pronounced with a Saxony accent, sounds a bit like the English word "attention". The joke works because most Germans know the phrase "attention, please" from movies, vacations and/or multilingual announcements. I believe this particular joke was invented some time in the 60s or 70s and ceased being funny about two seconds after, but that wouldn't stop "your dad" from using it.
I'd say that most of these double meanings are hard to translate. At least if you compare German and English (the two languages I am "proficient" in). If you want this in a more modern context I would be completely unable to translate Dendemann lyrics to English so it would still be lyrical or funny.
The English word wear can mean (among other things) something that you have on you or that something is worn down from usage.
Guess which interpretation google used in the play store when translating Google Wear to Swedish?
Automated translations in UI:s, just don't. You will without question make a fool out of yourself and seem incompetent.
In a perfect world it's easy to see how a team of two experienced translators could work on a movie for a few weeks and get it just so, but in the world we live in it's a small miracle that any of it ever gets done right. Hats off to them.
The people I really feel sorry for are the workers on either end of me: the transcriber, and then the person who takes my translated text and has to sync it up with the film. Both of those strikes me as more monotonous and tiresome than my own role.
That's not the case in many parts of the world...
I'd rather assume that people are doing the translation without having seen the film at all. I've noticed that by watching wrong translations that don't come from cultural misunderstandings, but plainly not matching what is seen on the screen (maybe by using the wrong gender of people, or misidentifying who's doing the talking, or having words with two meanings using the one which doesn't match the current scene at all).
The economics of subtitle translation (either commercial or fan-made) favor uploading as many films or episodes as soon as possible, so it's likely that some people are just downloading the original text dump, run it through an automated translator, and editing it by hand to make it sound natural. I assume people who get regular commissions from established platforms will behave a bit better, but sometimes it still makes you wonder...
The pair is one of the most well-known "false friends" between the two languages, but somehow translators sometimes still get them wrong from time to time. The last time I noticed it was in a Star Trek TNG episode where the monologue didn't make any sense because of it. I constantly second-guess the translation when hearing the word.
Anyways, I don't have exact examples in mind, but one that stood out (and again, I don't remember the exact details), was the subtitles saying the exact opposite of what they were actually saying.
1. it's ridiculous, and it also happens in the opposite direction, when I end up reading the Japanese subtitles to Hollywood movies.
It's interesting to see how much the subtitles diverge from what's spoken. Sometimes you can see they've apparently just simplified it a bit, not losing anything important, but sometimes the differences seem gratuitous, or somewhat creative. Do the subtitles come from the original script, perhaps, while the lines were adapted by the actors on set without anyone updating the (tran)script?
The subs either work or don't (e.g. machine translated garbage).
A handful of times there's a discrepancy e.g. T2 Trainspotting.
This is "official" subs from BluRay or Itunes.
For example, in this transcript:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-tran...
It clearly says "When you're famous, women [you don't have a relationship with] will consent to [aggressively] grabbing their vagina". I added the brackets based on the context, but I didn't add the word consent: in the original the word consent is the word "let". A perfect synonymn. If you say "I let him do that" in the past means exactly "I consented to his doing that." It's the exsct meaning.
(We know that "they" refers to the women and not the media (i.e. they'll let you means the women will consent, not, the media will let you get away with it) because immediately before, Trump set the topic of what women will and won't consent to.)
Immediately before, he mentioned how he was rejected:
"I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it."
(After a followup)
"I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. "
This is hard to translate and must be done with care. As a translator I would look at some of the context, the whole context. This is as follows:
Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.
Unknown: Whoa.
Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.
Unknown: That’s huge news.
Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.
She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —
I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married.
I would be 80% confident that the correct translation is: "I made an advance on her, but she rejected me and I stopped." (It is hard for me to know what "moved on her like a bitch" means. I am puzzled.)
But the parts I have given clear, unambiguous black and white translations for is that, in the context of being famous, usually women will consent to very aggressive sexual advances.
That's the meaning of the words.
Not the meaning of the words: "You should just grab women by the vagina without asking."
The English-language culture (on both sides of the aisle) is not used to interpreting someone.
So to bring things full circle, I would translate the excerpt:
And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
(Man) Whatever you want.
Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
"Even grab them intimately, they will allow even that."
----
That is the correct translation, because the translator's loyalty is to the speaker, not to the media, politics, etc.
"Let" is definitely not a perfect synonym for consent. It often means, "not prevent or forbid."
Consent is always active, not passive - permission is given.
So let's jump into a possible pussy grabbing scenario. Someone could be shocked in the moment and not physically stop the pussy grabbing. And then after, they might not run screaming to the police, because it's his word vs hers and he is a very powerful man. Technically, she "let" him to do it, in that she didn't prevent it. But it's certainly not consent.
Just to let you know I know what you mean, here's an expression using "let" in both senses:
1. How could you let him do that?
2. I didn't "let" him do that. How was I supposed to know he would do that? He never asked me.
Here 1 uses your meaning and 2 uses mine. Donald Trump's transcript uses 2, not 1. (Another usage of 1 is whenever someone says 'how could you let this happen'? That never means allow.)
Another example is one someone says: "I can't believe I let this happen." They don't mean "allow" then. However, in Trump's transcript he means the allow meaning.
You can be quite certain, because he set the context clearly.
Basically, quoting "grab them by the pussy" is leaving out the meaning as uttered.
It's a nice scary quote. As a translator you have to kind of mistranslate it so it is shocking but also grammatically kind of still matches the imperative.
But that's not what was said.
Knowing that women don't let him do that might might be a good reason to put words in Trump's mouth and remove "they'll let you" from his sentence, but it is not a faithful translation.
What he said was that they let you do that. It's not true that the women let him do that, but that's what was uttered. As a translator, you don't get to change what someone said, to instead match the truth that you learn from somewhere else.
For an example, a famous lie is that Nixon said "I am not a crook." We know he was a criminal who resigned due to his criminal activities. So can I change that line from "I am not a crook" to, "Nixon called himself a crook"? After all the reason for his statement or the use of the word crook was the fact that he was a crook, and making a public address on this subject.
Of course not. And likewise it's wrong to change "they let you grab 'em by the pussy" to "grab 'em by the pussy" by misquoting the sentence. It's there in black and white, you just have to read it.
I disagree. "Letting" someone do something is a passive affirmation at best, and could also be out of fear for consequences. "Consenting" is active affirmation.
There's so much nuance and implied connotation that simply cannot be expressed across different languages, even if you're lucky enough to have the surface meanings fit.
The "I will bury you" example is entirely plausible: it might have been a fitting translation if the intent was merely to say "We will still exist when you are long gone" but the connotation is "We will kill you before you can kill us", which might have been completely lost on the translator (or even worse: it might be a misunderstanding of the original phrase's intentions resulting in an intentionally hostile translation).
Really the only way to avoid this problem is to use extremely specific registers in both languages, but that's rarely feasible outside of legal or technical documents. And even then the two languages might have slightly different meanings to some seemingly shared vocabulary translators need to be aware of.
"We will bury you" can mean either a) that we will kill you or b) we will outlast you. But either way, we will be alive after your death and present at your burial.
Regardless of which meaning was intended, Khrushchev's decision to bring up the topic of the death of the entire "first world" at the UN was deliberately provocative, so it's hardly a mistranslation to conclude that the US and NATO have just been threatened, no matter how obliquely.
There's still a difference between mere provocation ("I will live longer than you...") and a direct threat ("...because I will kill you first"). The former could still merely be a statement of confidence (i.e. "our form of government is more stable and resilient than yours, whereas you're overextending yourselves and will deplete your resources").
Better yet would be to preserve the original ambiguity. Especially important for fine literature where sometimes the ambiguity is the whole point.
Japanese writing is especially fond of intentional ambiguity, and it's really hard to decide how much to localize away. Keep the ambiguity and it sounds unnatural, but if you want it to sound natural you need to cut away the ambiguity.
The second one yields the best translations, but is akin to writing the work yourself and may not be acceptable for either the original author, the fans, or the publisher.
Some of Terry Pratchett's translators (like the recently deceased Jan Kantůrek) won awards for their work because they had to use the second option, the first one would have made the translation completely pointless.
But for things that make cultural references, like Gintama, even someone who knows the language itself won't know every cultural reference, so they can be useful.
Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous statement in 1956 — “We will bury you” — ushered in one of the Cold War’s most dangerous phases, one rife with paranoia and conviction that both sides were out to destroy the other. But it turns out that’s not what he said, not in Russian, anyway. Khrushchev’s actual declaration was “We will outlast you” — prematurely boastful, perhaps, but not quite the declaration of hostilities most Americans heard, thanks to HIS interpreter’s mistake.
The response of Kantaro Suzuki, prime minister of Japan, to an Allied ultimatum in July 1945 — just days before Hiroshima — was conveyed to Harry Truman as “silent contempt” (“mokusatsu”), when it was actually intended as “No comment. We need more time.” Japan was not given any.
Whenever I see interpreters on footage of trials or negotiations, I have the impression the interpreter is a native to the target language, and is there on authority of his government, i.e. A Soviet interpreter working for Kruchev translates from english to russian, and a US translator working for USA translates from russian to english. I could be wrong though, but I always thought the responsibility of correct translation was placed at the receiver of information (otherwise, the non-elected interpreter would have the final word on phrasing a comment!)
The 2 examples of Kruchev, and the failed pre-Hiroshima bomb are phrased in a way that insinuates the problem to have been at the foreign side!