A certain subset of anime fans would be very angry right now if they could read!
One of my favourite instances of adaptation got to be Ted Woolsey’s “son of a submariner! They’ll pay for this…”, for the English localisation of Final Fantasy III / VI.
In the game, Kefka (the villain) is saying this as the heroes escape him, but the original only says “ヒーーー くっそー！このかりは必ず返しますよ!”; literally “heeee shit! I will definitively return this debt” or similar. However:
- That “ヒーーー” interjection has no meaning on its own. It’s only there to highlight the character’s emotional state. It could be safely removed, without loss of meaning.
- くそ / 糞 kuso “crap! shit!” is vulgar, but by no means as vulgar as English “shit”. Specially given the 90s, and this game being marketed to kids. But it means the villain is being rude towards the heroes (makes sense, right).
So, translating it as simply “hey you!” or similar would mutilate the original, by removing the rudeness. But at the same time, Woolsey couldn’t use “shit” or “crap” or similar. So he looked at the context:
- Kefka is crazy, and the way he uses Japanese in the original is odd. For example, he uses the pronoun “ぼくちん” bokuchin to refer to himself, as if he was a kid - and yet he’s a court mage of an empire dammit. (It’s a bit deeper than that, but let’s focus.)
- a bit before Kefka says this, there’s a city in the desert also fleeing Kefka - by going underground instead, as if it was some sort of “sand submarine”.
So Woolsey went with “son of a submariner!”, something he likely made up on the spot. And you know what? It’s perfect - it’s completely on-character for Kefka to insult people in such a weird way.
I will break all the lightbulbs in your home with my hand
This is a way better threat than “Im gonna punch your lights out”
The “I hope you’re thirsty” one is classy imo.
The art of diplomacy is making em love you while you knock their punch out.
All you base are belong to me
Much more impressive too!
Oh no don’t slightly inconvenience me. Darn you cut your hands & wrists bad enough to go to the ER? Whatever shall I do
Hypersonic
Assault and
Neutralization
Device
I’d just be impressed ngl
Clarification vs adaptation makes a huge difference in book translations. I don’t envy the translators having to translate witty jokes/references that really only work in the original language
the good ones just invent entirely new jokes to replace the untranslatable ones.
The interesting thing about clarifying and localising is that you’re always consciously making a trade-off between multiple competing factors - the original direct meaning, the emotion, tone and intent, and the ease of consumption in the target context.
And so how you choose to translate depends not only on the text, but the circumstance, the speaker, and who you are translating for.
If in a manga for example a character says (in Japanese) “the child of a frog is a frog,” you could make the choice to localise that with an equivalent English idiom, as “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” or you could perhaps instead take the speaking character’s personality into stronger account and preserve their meaning, such as “He’s a piece of shit, just like his old man.”
But it all depends on context. If that idiom showed up in a piece of poetry you might decide to leave it exactly as “the child of a frog is a frog.” - Perhaps there is related symbolism to preserve, and the ‘frog’ metaphor is important. But in that situation you can do it, because the reader will have more time and desire to study it, and preserving the original words may be more important than making it easy on the reader.
Translation is as much of an art as writing is.
Translation is as much of an art as writing is.
Business Idiots: let’s destroy translation jobs with LLMs while preserving none of the skill or context needed! 🤑
Meanwhile, Microsoft translating the state of a setting being disabled as “handicapped”
That’s just consistent with their desire to destroy writing and art jobs in the first place.
And society …and the environment.
AI: (satire)
<Reasoning>The user wants to translate the phrase “Business Idiots: let’s destroy translation jobs with LLMs while preserving none of the skill or context needed! 🤑”. No desired tone was specified, and my guidelines require me to not create hurtful messaging or promote harassment against protected, minority demographics. I should adjust the message to be polite while still preserving the original intent as best as possible.
“Business Idiots” is ableist and can be considered targeted harassment. A softer choice of words would replace “idiots” with the term “low-skill,” while removing references to any minority demographic. An ideal replacement would be “worker fools.”
“Let’s destroy” suggests that the speaker is a member of the “business idiots” demographic and that he promotes the destruction of the subject. The subject appears to be “translation jobs”. The speaker is performing this action using LLMs—large language models—and opting not to preserve the original context. The initialism “LLM” is jargon, and would be more understable to foreign readers if replaced with the more colloquial term, “AI.” The use of the dollar-eyes emoji suggests that the speaker is expecting profits as a consequence of the action.
</Reasoning>Sure, here you go; a translation of “Business Idiots: let’s destroy translation jobs with LLMs while preserving none of the skill or context needed! 🤑”
Big AI profits come to low-skill workers by breaking knowledge barriers and cultural context requirements for translation jobs.
Fuckin HIGH effort satire hahaha
I read a lot of fan translated content and I always appreciate the translation of “the child of a frog is a frog” (translator note: idiom similar to “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”)
I find you get to learn an approximate translation of an idiom and get the intent of the phrase at the same time.
I love this
This is why there need to be translations with notes on the opposite page, to show the reader the depth of the translation.
That’s something that occurred to me playing Breath of the Wild. A lot of the item names like “rushroom” or “armoranth” are pun-based. And this game was written in Japanese and translated to English, along with at least a dozen other languages. Did they have teams of multilingual people sitting around coming up with puns? It occurs to me there are things like “Swift Violet” that aren’t punny…in English at least. But then you’ve got Hot Footed Frog, and the frog model has red feet.
What about…there’s a Gerudo or two that you can rent sand seals from, and there’s a lot of seal-based puns. “Seal ya later” “Let’s Seal The Deal” etc. How was that implemented in Japanese, Russian and Portuguese? I imagine that in some cases you’d just drop it and put straightforward dialog there, but make another character quirky in a language where that does work.
What about in TOTK, the quest about exploring in underpants? That quest outright relies on two sentences that mean two specific things can be mistaken for each other, they would have had to translate “All other paths/in underpants” into like 20 languages. What a pain in the ass that had to be.
Earlier today I was playing the new Final Fantasy Tactics remake, and I encountered the line: “Then we’ll have two birds… and one stone!” (Referring to capturing two characters and retrieving a magic stone).
That struck me as a particularly witty line in English to the point where I’m wondering if that saying is as common in Japanese. I wonder what the Japanese version of that line is.
Free Hat!
I do a *literal translation where I want to preserve the original context of words. Otherwise I generally just go for stage 3 to get the gist of what a writer or speaker means, and usually it’s a combination of the two, I don’t try to use different idioms.
So “I’ll punch your lights out” might likely become “I’ll beat you so that the lights in your eyes go out” if I were to translate to Japanese (*translated back).
It’s a neat way to show how each person translating has their own style. (And how Japanese news and diplomatic translators have had a rough time with Trump, forced to sanewash a lot).
Transliteration is another thing entirely: it’s translating the sounds. “I’ll beat you so that the lights in your eyes go out” translated to Japanese is “君の目の光が消えるまで殴ってやる”. Transliterated back, it’s “Kimi no me no hikari ga kieru made nagutte yaru”.
It’s a bit more complicated: if you’re dealing with the sounds it’s transcription, if you’re converting from writing system into another it’s transliteration.
So for example, what you did is transliteration. But if you were to record some Japanese guy speaking and wrote it down (in kanji+kana, Latin, or even IPA), or if you handled how it’s actually spoken, it would be transcription.
Oh yeah you are right… let me edit it
Can you imagine what the foreign press must go thru trying to interpret the shit that comes out of Trump’s mouth. Then, having translated his garbage, explaining that it is all a lie. He’s a nightmare in US English.
O.G. San is such a good name.
お爺さん怖い。
This is exactly why lazily throwing your game’s text into a machine translation tool is not the same as hiring an actual localisation specialist.
I watch everything with subtitles on and it’s clear when someone used a machine vs an actual person.
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth did a good job with localization. I remember one character speaking with a thick Southern US accent, and at one point mentioning that she was from Kansai. I didn’t previously know that Kansai was rural, but I was able to get that from the context.
I’ll take the machine translation if nothing else is available, but it pales in comparison to a real person doing it. You have to translate the machine translation in your head in realtime.
One of my favorite bad translations ever has to be Jubei of Samurai Shodown II’s win quote: “All creature will die and all the things will be broken. That’s the law of samurai.” I sometimes like to think of any kind of massive destruction as “all the things will be broken.”
“Here’s a knuckle sandwich!” --> “I hope you have enough room in your stomach, because I am going to ram my fist into it and break your goddamn spine!”
DO NOT WANT!
“How ‘bout a nice Hawaiian Punch?”
“Sure!”
assault
assault
Actually, I think it’s made with a sugar
HEY KOOL AID! HERE!
I got so confused, I thought this was trying to show how bad llm’s translated things
O.G. San really tickles me
“I hope you’re thirsty because I brought some punch” is an even more idiomatic way to phrase things than “I’m going to punch your lights out” i do not understand who this “translation” serves
It’s not a translation, it’s demonstrating different ways of approaching a translation. Note how the first panel is telling you to assume it is in a foreign language - it is supposed to be an idiom that needs to be translated into English. The ‘foreign’ idiom also being written in English is to allow the English speaking intended audience to understand the differences between what the the following panels are saying and the original text.
