Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

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I was a translator for an anime fansubbing group, so I have (good!) stories to tell about the fansubbing and scanlation community.

That's for another time though. For now, I'll just cut to the chase and copypasta something I wrote a couple years ago regarding translation quality between professional and amateur work:[1]

Japanese has a very rich history and is also significantly more expressive than English is, so academic teaching of the language can only do so much. You really need to immerse yourself in Japanese literature/media and partake in just ordinary day-to-day conversations to simply begin to understand the depth of it all.

Translation is also hardly an appealing job unless you find love in the art of translating itself, speaking as someone who has done translating as a hobby (both FGO and otherwise). Almost nobody knows or cares about the effort that goes into translations, most readers only care if it "sounds right" in English. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people who read the bad translation pointed out in the OP won't realize it's bad. It's very hard to keep yourself motivated when your readers don't and can't give a crap about your work.

So combine a language that is very different from English with people who probably aren't all that motivated anyway, and most professional translations end up being shit. The work is thankless and giving more than the absolute minimum quite sincerely doesn't pay off because the readers don't know and can't care.

Good translations require passion from the translators and the editors, passion that simply just isn't there outside of the hobbyists and enthusiasts who enjoy the art of translating rather than doing it for their paychecks.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...

I grew up watching fansubs and reading scanlations. I still prefer them.

As one simple example the word "nakama" is almost impossible to translate properly into English. It's like a combined "comrade, crew, squad, friend, family" type of concept that has no English equivalent. Scanlations will typically have explanations for certain things on the side which adds a lot of depth to many stories.

It's also cool because it passively teaches you about the culture and other aspects.

> Japanese [...] is also significantly more expressive than English is

My first reaction was to doubt it because I remember reading [0] that spoken languages have roughly the same bit rate ( 39.15 bits/s on avg ). However, bit rate is far from everything (and this is also written not spoken), so could you try to explain what creates the expressiveness compared to other languages you know?

[0]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

One of my biggest problems when translating from Japanese to English is figuring out how to convey everything. It sounds easy, but it really isn't; usually the English text becomes far too long and unwieldy.

For a specific example, "itadakimasu" (literally "I will take it.") spoken at the start of a meal is a complete bastard to translate to English. "Thank you for the food." would be a translation of the core spirit of the phrase, but it lacks the elegance and respect of the way it is conveyed in Japanese. "Amen" would be a western cultural/religious counterpart that most westerners could relate to, but this adds religious undertones that are not in the original Japanese.

Not to mention, "Thank you for the food." also overlaps with "gochisousama" (literally "Mr. Feast", "-sama" is an honorific) spoken at the end of a meal. Two very obviously distinct and different Japanese phrases, but the English translation ends up being more or less the same.

None of this is to say English isn't expressive, but Japanese takes the expression game to a whole new level; yojijukugo[1] are the epitome of this using just four words to construct and convey what would be entire sentences or even paragraphs in English.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo

Insightful, thanks!

Isn't it just problem in general translation rather than specific problem with Japanese? I couldn't think of any good translation for "Amen" in Japanese that is as compact either. Or something like "Bless you", whose concept doesn't exist in Japanese.

Definitely, langages differ in plenty of nuances, especially cultural. With the possible exception of the very technical and matter-of-fact stuff there’s a huge amount of taste and artistry involved in pretty much every translation, with the exception of very close languages (commonly close enough to be debated as dialectal).

That's like saying most programming languages fall within similar runtime performance, but translation is also like porting codes. Doing that line by line or per-function especially for human reading can be hard and/or weird and/or borderline wrong, like you might have to stuff class definition for a struct, guess variable types from name, explain "// onload means entrypoint in HTML", things like that.

Japanese tends to be vague, nonspecific, and the Japanese dislike directly saying what they mean. Since English should be specific and direct, there's a lot of interpretation and elaboration that needs to happen as part of the translation process.

Japanese is, for the most part, not more expressive than English, it's differently expressive. Same for every other language. The bit rate you mention is mostly a limitation of how quickly speakers can speak and listeners can listen. The cohort of listeners and speakers mutually agree on how to bucket the spectrum of experiences into a finite number of words, but different cohorts can bucket experiences differently.

In practice this means there's a lot of English words that get smushed together in Japanese[0], and a lot of Japanese words that get smushed together in English[1]. Japan also has a lot of shared cultural experience that Americans or Brits won't recognize, and vice versa, which translators have to spend time explaining.

[0] https://jisho.org/search/とおる

[1] https://jisho.org/search/知る vs. https://jisho.org/search/分かる

I would love to hear those good stories sometime!

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