The old Anime Con, which was a convention held in San Jose that was the forerunner of the present-day extravaganza (going on right at this moment), Anime Expo, was the first anime convention that I was able to attend as a professional. Since the industry was so young, they actually invited me to speak on a translator's panel after only about a year and a half of professional experience.

On the panel, one of my fellow translators mentioned that he never read any translated material. He only wanted to experience manga or anime in its original, unsullied form, and didn't want to experience it through the eyes of somebody else.

Whereas I can understand his motivations to a certain extent, I disagreed with him then as I still do now. There's a lot to be gained for a translator in reading other translated works.

The fist benefit is perspective. In reading translated works (especially subtitles where one can see the translation at the same time as hearing the original Japanese) you begin to get a feeling of what constitutes a "valid" translation and what one would consider "out of bounds." That is, a "valid" translation is that kind of translation where "you can get there from here." By which I mean, if the words in Japanese say something, and you can get much the same meaning from the translation, then it's valid. If it adds information that isn't there, or takes out information that is significant, then it falls into the "out of bounds" area. I mentioned this briefly in the Bad Translations entry, and I'll try to go into it in more depth in a later post. Suffice it to say that reading other people's translations gives you perspective on translations as a whole.

But the thing I like to do most when reading someone else's work is to mine for translations. Everybody has what is called an idiolect. That is a personal vocabulary that you use in your speech. But the number of words you commonly speak is far smaller than the number of words you understand -- and a different mind than yours might come up with more elegant solutions to a translation problem than you might. For example, there was a time during the subtitling of one of the Ranma movies where the sophisticated character Nabiki mentions that someone's clothes are out of fashion. My company subtitled the work and our rewriter, Jay Parks, came up with "That's passé." I was floored. I never thought of that translation, but it was perfect for the character and the situation, but it was also very short as well (perfect for subtitles).

Similarly, when watching one of the first Ranma episodes Toshi Yoshida and Trish Ledoux translated a line of Ranma's when he said, "iinazuke da, ichiô," as "She's my fiancée... more or less." It was the first time I had heard "ichiô" translated that way, and since, it has become my preferred way of translating the word.

That's what I call mining a translation. It's best done with subtitles for the reasons stated above, but it can also be done with manga and dubs as well. Sometimes, just the phrase in English can tell what the original words were in Japanese. The idea is to keep your antenna up for words or turns of phrase that you would personally like to use. Then you remember them and wait for your chance. There were phrases that I waited years for a chance to use (but when I finally got to use them, it's a feeling like completing your collection).

My response to the translator on the Anime Con panel was, "You don't read other people's translation? But that's the best place to steal other people's ideas!!"