As some of you probably know, for the past couple of months I’ve been part of a translation group that’s been working on providing an English release of the latest Haruhi novels (volumes 10 and 11). We finally completed the project earlier this week. Baka-Tsuki, the group that had provided fan translations for the previous nine novels, could no longer work on the series, so myself and a few other dedicated individuals took on the task. I translated and edited one chapter myself (72 pages) and edited two that were translated by someone else (222 pages). Since this was the first major translation project I’ve worked on, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about the experience…
Translating is exhausting work even if you’re 100% fluent in the language. So it’s doubly exhausting if you’re not completely fluent, as is the case with me and Japanese. Though I majored in Japan/Japanese in college, visited the country twice, and have been studying it formally and informally since 2004, I still have quite a lot to learn.
As has been the case for a while, I more or less have a firm grasp on all the major grammar points in Japanese – verb conjugation, particles, sentence structure, etc., – I just need to memorize vocabulary, kanji, and the myriad of unique idioms, slang, expressions, and nuances that exist in every language. Besides this, working on the translation project has reaffirmed and taught me other things…
Japanese sentences are ‘backwards’: Unlike English, Japanese is a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language – meaning that the subject, object, and verb of its sentences usually go in that order. Because of this, the verb in Japanese sentences is at the end, while in English it’s directly after the subject. So a sentence like “I went to school yesterday” would be literally translated in Japanese as “yesterday I school to went – 昨日私は学校に行きました” In addition to this, phrases describing a noun occur after the noun in English while they occur before it in Japanese. For example, the phrase “the movie (I) saw last week” would be “last week saw movie – 先週見た映画” in Japanese. With these two major attributes of the language that are practically the opposite of English, I found it much more effective to translate Japanese sentences starting from the end rather than the beginning. Many times I would start translating a sentence from the beginning only to scrap it and start over with the end of the sentence, especially for the very complex ones (which Haruhi novels have a lot of).
Lack of pronouns: Again unlike English, pronouns aren’t typically used in Japanese if the noun that they’re describing is understood. This is actually a pretty easy thing to get used to, though a couple of times I wasn’t clear on who was saying/doing what was described. I wonder if Japanese people occasionally have misunderstandings due to lack of pronouns?
Electronic dictionaries are your friends: Rikaichan and my DS Kanji Dictionary were my constant companions during translation work. My friend and partner in the project, Ultimatemegax (who I would say did the most work) has a program that takes scanned images of the novel pages and converts them into actual text files (though its accuracy in certain kana/kanji isn’t the best). With that, I was able to upload the Japanese text of the novels online and then use Rikaichan to help me translate. If Rikaichan wasn’t clear enough or the kanji didn’t come out right in text form and I had to rewrite it, I would then turn to my DS Kanji Dictionary for more thorough explanations and sample sentences. I can’t imagine how much longer the whole project would have taken without these helpful tools!
I enjoy translating dialogue the most: Out of everything I worked on, I enjoyed translating characters’ spoken dialogue the most. Well, technically all of the Haruhi novels are made up of spoken dialogue because Kyon is the narrator. But I meant dialogue besides his narration. It’s fun picking up on the nuances in Japanese colloquialisms that can tell you more about a character than external descriptions alone can. I also enjoyed figuring out how to properly convey their dialogue in English, as a lot of it can’t be accurately translated (polite vs casual speech for example). And except for characters that speak in long, complex sentences (like Itsuki and Sasaki), translating dialogue is usually easier than regular prose. After all, conversation is often used as the first step in learning Japanese and it’s mostly what we hear when watching anime ;) Hmm, maybe I should translate manga since that’s just dialogue XD
Editing can be harder than translating: I was translator and editor for one chapter of the novels, which took a lot more time than if I had someone else edit it. But the compromise is that I could freely tweak the translation to my full satisfaction. Editing someone else’s work, however, can be more straining because you want it to be the best it can be but you don’t want to impose your personal idea of what the best translation is for a given sentence on the other person’s work. You just have to set limits for yourself and remember that it’s a fan translation and isn’t supposed to be of professional quality.
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It’s difficult, tedious, and time-consuming to translate any substantial work, especially novels as opposed to manga or game dialogue. But I feel the rewards of self-accomplishment and being able to bring joy to your fellow fans makes it worth it, especially if what you’re translating is a portion of your favorite series =) The six members of our make-shift group finished translating roughly 600 pages in approximately 70 days – not bad for a bunch of amateurs =D I can’t say when I’ll take up a big project like this again, but I’m sure this isn’t the end of my fan translating ^_^V
Phew, really good job. Glad you made it through to the end. お疲れ様でした。
Translating can be really hard work (even harder than actual work sometimes), I’ve had my share of difficulties before. However, knowing that you learned a lot through editing and translating (grammar structures, etc.) can help your current understanding and proficiency at the language by a lot, and I find that satisfying enough to make me happy. In general, anything new that you can learn, and when you apply yourself to the fullest, at the end feels satisfying and self-gratifying.
Studying Japanese at the moment, I understand that Japanese can be (scratch that, IS) harder than most languages because of its unique structure. Thus, I take my hat off and can’t congratulate you enough. Take a good rest, you’ve earned it.
Thank you so much for the kind words! That really makes my day ^_^
I actually don’t think Japanese is as hard as English because, in most cases, it follows all its grammar rules with few exceptions. On the other hand, English has rules but there are tons of exceptions (something I discussed further in a previous post actually). The main reason Japanese seems hard for someone learning English is because the writing system is so different (memorizing kanji!) But if I had to compare learning English as a foreign language to learning Japanese as one, I would take my chances with Japanese ^^,,,
I see. Well, it’s not that hard, but it is certainly hard to apply it. Not many people know the language, which is a shame. :(
Wow… I have to say that was a lot of hard work!! But I really, really, REALLY appreciate the hard work you, and everyone who translated this, invested in this. I like the Japanese language, but I’m too far from being able to read myself. So a really big THANK YOU is in order :)
Translating is extremely difficult. I’ve done real-time translation of conversation between English and Spanish, as well has helped translate lines for some games as a community project (The X series of games). And it is really, really hard work, even between languages that share similar roots. I cannot imagine how much harder it is to translate from a language as different as Japanese.
But you have to know how much I do appreciate the work you’ve invested in this. Thank you. I’ll start reading today after I get home from work!
You’re welcome~ Thank you for the big thank you!
I’ve heard that Japanese pronunciation is similar to Spanish. That, and I know in Spanish pronouns can usually be excluded too. So the two languages have at least a couple of similarities =) But yeah, the writing system is still the tricky part. The only other native language that would have a head-start with learning Japanese is Chinese since they share one of Japanese’s three alphabets.
Congatulations on your translations and editing work! Like you said, you might considering doing manga translations in future. I’ve done some translations from Chinese to English and encountered some of the problems you mentioned, although luckily Chinese has pronouns and slightly similar sentence structure to English. But I’ve also done some professional editing on two collections of critical essays with many contributors, and that was quite exhausting for the reasons you also mentioned.
Thanks!
I wouldn’t mind translating manga for fun, but as you probably know, I don’t enjoy reading manga as much as watching anime. There are few manga series I feel motivated enough to read rather than watch their respective anime, so finding one I’m motivated to actually translate would be even harder. But you never know what might come along =) The Kannagi manga still has yet to resume…
If you’re ever up to some masochism, I recomend translating Japanese into a Slavonic language. As you probably know, Slavonic languages, such as Russian, Polish and soforth, have really complicatet lexology and grammar, and it is possible to convey most of the things that simply would have to be lost in translation to a Germanic language, such as English. This however, causes one grief problem: almost every longer japanese sentence would come out unusually eloquent, a nightmare if you’re working on a scene/paragraph/page where in the original the characters talk casually. One of my friends from Bulgaria joked, that we all in the Slavonic countries shoud translate Japanese to Old Church Slavonic (the language used in Orthodox Churches of the so called Slavonic Rite), because only then the translations would seem more or less ‘normal’, i.e. pompous and rhetoric.
And that’s why we, the Slavonic philologists prefer to translate to English and not care about our countrymen- in our countries no one reads our translations from Japanese, only translations from English, made by people who aren’t actually good at English are read…
That’s very interesting. I never knew much of anything about the Slavonic languages so thanks for the info! =D I have my hands full just learning Japanese, but it’s good to know about other languages ^^,,,
Hey, long time no see. I think that’s pretty cool and I would love to be able to translate anything for someone. I’m actually taking a Spanish (Espanol) course at my school. However what I learned reciently is that even though you think you understand what they’re saying in class it’s totally different when a native says it. So… I’m gonna keep working at it.
bye.
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Yeah, I think you can only really become fluent in a language (past the “critical age” of around 12) is if you spend years in the country or are constantly surrounded by native speakers another way. Classes can only do so much.
Spanish, French, and other European languages were all that was offered at my schools until college. I took two years of Spanish in high schools and actually learned a lot because I had a great Spanish 1 teacher (unfortunately my Spanish 2 teacher wasn’t nearly as good). I had no reason to keep up Spanish after high school though so I kinda forgot everything. I took Sign Language in high school too but all these years later, I pretty much only remember the alphabet =P
Wow, that’s really hard work, so I am glad you all got through it well. Translating is not always easy, but as long as you translate something you like and something that can make others happy it is worth all the hard work, right? And you have also learned a lot while translating, that’s good to hear.
Well, I just want to thank you for your hard work. You make so many people happy because you translate everything into English. I myself don’t read Haruhi Novels but still I think it is so great what you and all the other translators do. So keep up the good word :)
Thanks for the kind words ^_^
Yes, I wouldn’t have this kind of motivation to translate anything but my favorite series. It helps to be an anime fan if you’re learning Japanese because you’ll always have ways to practice through translating.
Thank you! I love it when someone does comprehensive articles on the Japanese language like this. Also, you seem to give us details in layman terms. Your explanations seem easy to grasp for me.
BTW, I found this nifty little site that does romanji japanese to english translations of words. I’m not sure how accurate they are. But I’ve found it quite useful for basic Japanese words.
http://www.eudict.com/index.php?lang=japeng
Thank you for the compliments ^_^ And thanks for the link too.
Asians could have an advantage here because of the similar grammatical structures.
Being one of the many Filipino anime bloggers in the lot…=_=
I don’t know about other Asian languages, but those who know Chinese have an advantage when learning Japanese because they use the same kanji (though the pronunciations are different).
Translation projects are quite effort-intensive to pull off, so for that I’d say kudos. I’ve actually fooled around with fansubbing and translating manga, and it is so much tougher than people might expect.
It’s a satisfying experience, yet at the same time really increased my appreciation to all the fansub groups out there that speedsub stuff in a matter of hours. Of course, I also appreciate all the fan translations of light novels too ;) It’s real tough work, which I’m sure you’ve experienced as well.
Thanks. It was very tiring work. I’d imagine the advantage to translating novels and manga over anime episodes is that the written text is available to you so you don’t have to rely on hearing the dialogue alone.
Great post. Good to hear you survived… I hope you took notes, heh.
I’ve never translated Asian languages, but have done a number of European languages before… the most fun of which was Dutch (I like their use of verbs, for some reason). Japanese can be notoriously time consuming to translate, from the one or two translators that I know, but I’m sure if you have a passion for it then there are plenty of ways to make it enjoyable. I imagine that if I ever stop being lazy about it and take that next step of “enjoying anime to the fullest” by learning Japanese, then translation will play a big part in that.