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Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

I have had very similar experiences to the author when doing a magazine translation job from Japanese to English. Very regularly the editor would take issue with me writing an English translation that sounded natural but didn't use a word with the exact same meaning and part of speech as the original.

Having worked in translation for a little while, bad and awkward translations really do stand out a mile. "How nostalgic!" is such a common way to translate "懐かしい” but I've never heard anyone say that in English.

The distance between the languages will always leave the translator with a sizable challenge. It's a real shame to hear the Kojima was not on board with this style of translation.

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> It's a real shame to hear the Kojima was not on board with this style of translation.

I have to agree - I found the dialog to be a high point in MGS1 and a low point for later installments, where Kojima's more florid moments sometimes came across as gibberish when directly translated.

But I guess the counterpoint would be, Kojima seems to have been consciously trying to form an auteur presence (he had that whole "a Hideo Kojima game by Hideo Kojima in association with Hideo Kojima" thing going on). So one can easily imagine him bristling at the idea of having someone else's fingerprints on the final product.

Yup, almost everything in I have ever worked with in Japanese to English translation has been shackled by the need to produce English translations optimized for English speaking Japanese readers.

I did a fair amount of scanlation back in the day (very obscure manga). One of the things I liked about scanlation was being able write hacked up English on the assumption that the reader knew enough about Japanese culture/language to make the leap from awkward English to Japanese concept. But, if I was writing for a larger audience I think it would be incredibly difficult to write idiomatic English and still capture the Japanese sense of the sentence. I'm in awe when I see people who are successful. I'm convinced you have to be an incredibly good writer of English to be able to pull it off (which I am not ;-) ).

I admit do having a wave of nostalgia now :-) Few things brought me as much pleasure as scanlation...

    One of the things I liked about scanlation was being 
    able write hacked up English on the assumption that 
    the reader knew enough about Japanese culture/language 
    to make the leap from awkward English to Japanese concept.

First of all, thank you to you and the other scanslators of the world. You made a lot of things possible for your readers!

Translating manga must be so tough. At least in anime, if you're watching English subtitles, you can hear the characters speaking in Japanese which helps to retain some of the original meaning. I don't speak Japanese, but I can recognize at least certain things like honorifics that convey a lot of meaning... that adds a lot of meaning to the subtitles I'm reading.

But with manga, there's no such luxury... you did a really challenging job.

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