Hacker News Reader

Comment by whym | Hacker News Reader

You are thinking about foreignization, which is more common (but still not really common) in the translation of literary fictions than that of subtitles. I think most movies don't do that because they target casual audience who is not ready to consume too much foreignization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_and_foreignizati...

View on HN

Well, one more example for the TV show I spent time translating: It's a teen high school drama, but it's a Norwegian high school, not an American high school. The characters have all just started high school, but during your first year in Norway, you and your classmates will vary in age from 15-16-17, and high school lasts three years, not four.

If you use "freshmen" to describe them, you get the "new at school" aspect, but viewers will get the completely wrong idea about their age. If you use "juniors", you get the age aspect right, but their role and social standing at school would be completely off.

So in a case like that, domesticating the translation simply doesn't work, you'd get super confused as a viewer if you use American high school terms. So you have to foreignize it, you have to call them something else, and you have to make up new terms when translating the various Norwegian derogatory terms for first-year students that exist.

You see this in anime and manga translations- the source of the “translator’s note: kekatu means plan” - as they try to get across the information not carried in the words themselves.

For what it's worth, "freshman" is American, and the related British/Australian/NZ term "fresher" only applies to first year students in their first weeks at university - not at schools.

I'm glad you didn't use the word. It would seem really out of place.

In England, we just said "6th year" (cf Harry Potter), "lower sixth" or "Year 12", depending on how old fashioned the school was.

And "first-grader" is something completely different, those are six years old, not sixteen, so that was completely out. Plenty of traps and completely inappropriate translations as well.

I ended up using "first-year", "second-year" and "third-year", and "firstie" for when older students were looking down on them.

I think this is a good example of a time when even the “general audience” is best served by using a “foreignization”, or even by just using the original word with some notes as to what that means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com