Literature in Translation, or: The Culture Barrier: Not Just for International Travel Anymore!

[cimorene]

Learn something about Japanese culture and/or Japanese story-telling before you attempt to apply your culture-centric Western aesthetic to a Japanese narrative (yes, this means anime and manga and dramas).  This applies perhaps more so to Japan than to somewhere closer like Sweden or Spain, but it applies there, too.

The fact that you are reading a work of literature in translation should never allow you to forget that you are looking through a window into an alien worldview. All those little threads that lead off into associations in English (and, in fact, in much European) literature not only don't lead there in literature in translation, they lead to somewhere completely different , somewhere that you could never anticipate.

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

The other reason I don't really read or write a lot of animanga fic, besides the fan Japanese, is that it just never feels right. It would be different if I were reading the canon in English, too, but as it is, it's like we don't even have the same source material, because most of the rest of fandom is getting theirs filtered through someone else's translation, which may be oddly Americanised if it's official, or may be poor quality if it's fansubs/scanlations.

[aeslis]

To butt in on a related tangent, that's one reason I feel really weird every time I read Rurouni Kenshin fiction. I'm not sure if you've read or watched it, but the anime is almost like a different universe from the manga, and there are two original characters in the anime that keep popping up in fic that make me twitch. They don't exist! They're not real! Stop bringing them into this!

...Is what I want to say.

And on another mostly off-topic note but still kind of related: the filter thing is why I really have issues with people double translating. By which I mean taking things that have been translated from, say, Japanese into Chinese and then translating the Chinese into English. I translate, sometimes, and I know just how hard it can be to wrangle meaning properly into a target language, and the idea that someone might take a translation I've done and put it into like, Spanish or Korean or hell, Arabic, makes me wince.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the anime/manga differences are yet a third reason why I stay away from animanga fic. I never watch anime, yet western fandom is a lot more likely to be anime-focused rather than manga-focused (though that is changing). With stuff like Fullmetal Alchemist where the anime and manga are completely different that means I spend a lot of time being confused if I try to read fic. I might as well be reading for a completely unknown fandom it feels like.

Translating from a translation definitely sounds like a bad idea.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

There are a few chapters of the Hikaru no Go manga where the fan translations available are Japanese to Chinese to English and they're hilarious, yet barely comprehensible.