TokyoPop has announced that several of their titles will be sold to the public exclusively on their website. I am pretty sure that this will turn out to be a disappointment for them in terms of sales since online sales for a single book have never been all that great -- even at Amazon.com which is one of the most visited on-line bookstores in the nation. But I can understand why their doing it.

First, a little background. All of the production costs and licensing fees of a book are paid by the publisher. But despite that, the publisher usually only gets about a quarter of the cover price. The bookstore usually gets the book at about half price and the distributor's cut is about half of that half. Thus if a book sells, the bookstore gets about 50% of the cover price, the distributor gets another 25% and the publisher gets the remaining 25%. The publisher's 25% pays for licensing, freelance talent, and all of the salaries and business expenses of the publisher. That means that a publisher needs to sell probably somewhere between 7000 and 10,000 books to simply break even (more if you're selling for a lower cover price). There are a lot of books that don't sell that well, so the publisher needs a few break-out hits to balance out a number of books that are a drag on the company's profits.

Now I have never worked for or with TokyoPop, so this is all speculation, but remember that I've been in a similar position and had to make similar decisions.

Let's say a publisher has a book that they started to try to license a year or so ago. It takes a long time to get production up and running so proposing a contract a year or more in advance is not all that unusual these days. Last year, while trying to figure out whether to license it or not, the publisher made inquiries to the chain bookstores and other influential sources to get a ball-park guess of how many copies they would expect to order. Let's say that the buyers weren't thrilled with it, but they gave guesses that would make the manga profitable in the long run, so the publisher went ahead and proposed terms to the people representing the mangaka based on those guesses.

Fast forward a half year or so, and all the details are worked out on the contract, so finally the editorial department can begin production on it.

Fast forward another three or four months, and the in the last 3/4 of a year, the market has changed. The shelves have been filling up with popular series that have upwards of 20 volumes each, and the more marginal titles are being squeezed off the shelves. And a major buyer says, "Sorry, but shelf space is tight and your new title has just a little too much sex/violence to bet on. We're revising our order numbers way down." (Remember that this is speculation. The chain-store buyers may not have ever had a chance to see the manga or make an estimate before being asked to make their final orders.)

Suddenly the publisher is looking at a book that has already had a pretty big investment in production and advances on royalties for the mangaka. The publisher realizes that now the book won't even make up the printing costs, let alone licensing fees and production costs and business expenses. But the contracts are already signed, and the publisher is committed to putting out the book, so what does one do?

Go back up and read the second paragraph, and you'll have an answer. If the distributor is cut out completely, and the retailer is the publisher itself, then instead of working with 25% of the cover price, the publisher now has 100% of the cover price to work with. Sure there are extra costs inherent with working one's own retail outlet, but they (hopefully) won't add up to 75% of the cover price.

So, how about a discount as Brigid of MangaBlog was looking for? Well, that's the problem with the contract being last-year's contract. A 3rd-party retail outlet can put on any discount it wants as long as they pay the agreed-upon wholesale price to the distributor, but unless the publisher has worked a retail discount for itself into the original contract with the mangaka, the publisher is contractually bound to sell the book to the public at the cover price.

I think Chris Butcher of Comics 212 and Dave Taylor of Love Manga are a little off base when they think that TokyoPop is "biting the hand that feeds it" when it decides to do an on-line exclusive. Every publisher would like to get the books into the retail outlets because that is where the shoppers are. More than likely, the retail chains bit TokyoPop's hand first by deciding on low orders. (Actually, I doubt anybody bit anybody's hand here. These decisions were probably made by looking at the numbers on both sides. I doubt there are any hard feelings on either side over these books.)

In any case, I would like to see TokyoPop's experiment succeed. If a publisher can sell weird and off-beat manga from their site and still make a profit, it means that there is a viable avenue for things like more Josei manga, more quirky seinen manga, more older manga, and more of any other genre that doesn't do well in retail by giving them a way of succeeding on fewer units sold.

I wish TokyoPop all the luck in the world with this experiment.

Edit: My apologies to anyone who thought that the percentages that I listed above were the actual percentages negotiated with the distributors and retail outlets. They are very general ball-park figures in order to illustrate that the publisher gets a much smaller percentage than most laymen assume. You can figure a margin of error of up to 10% on these figures. In my own defense, these are percentages that I would use when trying to calculate whether a manga series we were looking at would be profitable or not. The actual percentages are slightly better for the publisher, but also remember that the publisher eats the returns, so in reality if the book sells poorly, the publisher's cut could be even worse.

Posted by dojosensei at 10:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

After my first fly-by-night manga company flew by night, I still had work with Studio Nemo doing anime translations and subtitles, so I wasn't desperate. But the anime companies were basically paying rates that would make one person a nice middle-class living -- but that money went to three of us. So I went in search of more manga work.

Searching for manga work isn't all that difficult. You send out query letters and e-mail to any company that is doing even similar things to what you are doing. A Japanese subsidiary company was putting out English-language versions of children's books based on the Miyazaki movies, so I bought one, sent in a letter praising it, sent in a few pamphlet manga of the work I had done previously, and left with the parting phrase, if you need any translation work done...

It was a fortuitous letter because at that very time, they were looking for new translators. (Don't be too surprised. I wouldn't doubt that at this very moment, there are manga companies that have just had several new titles licensed, and their managing editors are right now wondering who they can give the work to.) The company almost immediately sent me an artbook to translate, and they indicated that they had manga work coming down the line.

This subsidiary company had one reason for existing. They had a partnership with a major Japanese games producer to publish their accompanying magazine, and they knew that if the games producer ever wanted to take over the publishing of the magazine themselves, the subsidiary company would fold, and everyone would be out of jobs.

This led to a get-rich-quick attitude among the subsidiary company. The odd thing is the parent company had some great titles, and if the subsidiary company had taken the long view to building up a line of manga and anime-related items over a period of time, they might have weaned themselves gradually off of the magazine-only existence. But instead they expected everything they put out to sell huge and solve their problems all at once. A computer-based naked-eye 3-D book sold well, but not as well as they expected. (I had to learn how to cross my eyes, and make out the 3-D image in order to translate that one.) The manga I translated hit 147 on the Diamond charts for a month when most of the most popular manga were hovering around the mid 200s, but they were hoping for a number much higher. And they entrusted a Miyazaki movie to Troma Entertainment for distribution (famous for B-movies like Toxic Avenger) and were disappointed when it didn't bring in the ticket sales they hoped for. I remember looking at a newspaper in Tucson and finding out that the movie was playing. There was no advertisement and no description. Just the text of the title in a little box.

Basically, what it meant was that they put out relatively successful products that were well made and popular among the small audience that existed. But they weren't interested in that small audience, they wanted to be moguls. Within a few years, the company was no more. I honestly don't know what happened to it since my association with them ended with the conclusion of the manga, but they certainly didn't seem to be following a path toward lasting success.

Is there a lesson for a translator in this? Not really. The freelancer treats this kind of company with the same respect due to any company. But if you see this kind of compulsion in one of the companies you work for, you will want to make sure you are working regularly for at least one other company as well.

Posted by dojosensei at 10:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There are all sorts of moods in manga, and while the vast majority of the tone is set by the artwork, it's also necessary to set the tone (or support the tone, if you will) in the dialog and captions.

This is brought to mind since I am presently working on a volume of a new manga that Del Rey recently announced, Mushishi. The story follows a somewhat modern-looking expert of an odd, primitive life-form called mushi as he wanders through the backroads of Meiji- or Taishô-era Japan helping people with the problems created where the world of the mushi meets the real world. The tone of the dialog is low and understated, like a quiet conversation late at night. This comes off of the shouting, over-the-top tone of School Rumble I worked on just prior to this assignment, so the difference in tone hit me especially hard this time.

There was a time when I (as an editor) received a translation of an art book that I basically had to rewrite since the tone was wrong. It was an art book for a romantic shôjo manga, and the translation (while very accurate) was far too matter-of-fact. The gorgeous, romantic artwork screamed out (to me, at least) for a more poetic tone in the captions. Instead of words such as, "like," or even, "love," this book was calling out for words such as, "passionate," "adoration," or, "obsession." So I pulled out the Thesaurus and rewrote it to match the images. I use this to illustrate that even captions need to have an appropriate voice as much as dialog does.

As I mentioned in a previous post on humor, comedy can call for different tones. When an artist is setting up a joke, they are usually playing on story-telling stereotypes to lure the reader into a certain expectation, then in the pay-off panel, they turn the expectation on its ear. So the translator should translate the buildup panels as if they were a part of that stereotypical type of manga.

Steam Detectives was playing on the techniques of superhero-style manga where a villain is as evil as evil gets. The tone for that kind of manga means that subtlety is inappropriate. This is where a translator has to pull out the best Eeeeevil dialog he or she has ever read in comics or in campy TV programs. I miss working on that manga. (Although School Rumble sometimes allows me to use some of that dialog.)

The tone of xxxHolic seems like it should be pensive and philosophical, but when you consider Watanuki's fencing with Dômeki, that requires some pretty over-the-top dialog, and Yûko's taunting of Watanuki, while not over-the-top, is pretty high-spirited.

One of the advantages of trying to translate tone is that most of it is carried in the images, so even when a translation doesn't live up to it, most readers will get the feel for it anyway. I once saw an official subtitled version of Omoide Poro-Poro (Only Yesterday) where the subtitles were awful at capturing the tone of the movie. At the end of the crowded screening, one man who had obviously seen a better translation stood up and pleaded with the audience to not allow the awful titles to turn them against the film. But listening to the audience talk among themselves as they walked out, most of them were saying that they loved the movie and didn't think the titles were that bad. As a translator, it was disappointing that the audience (a very sophisticated audience at that) couldn't tell a good translation from a bad one, but it did pound into my head just how powerful a good story can be.

That doesn't mean you get to fudge on the tone of your own translations! Read it carefully, and make sure your dialog and captions are appropriate!

Posted by dojosensei at 11:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So you're ready to break into the translation business.

Are you really ready? Well, it doesn't matter so much. You think you're ready, and that means you're going to want to make contact with editors from the companies you will want to work with.

In other parts of the dojo, I've mentioned that you will want go to conventions and try to engage editors from different companies in a short conversation to leave a decent impression of yourself. One of the better ways to get a pleasant conversation is to ask the editor something that the editor can answer. "What do you look for in a good translator," might be a good example. In any case, you leave your card with the editor (nothing more than the card -- samples just create more clutter that the editor will have to lug home), and mail your sample after you get home from the convention.

But just in case the editor's answer wasn't complete, here's what the editor most wants from you:

Minimal level of competence.
Don't make obvious mistakes. Don't mistake one character for another. Make sure you include all translations and sound effects (it's easy to miss small sound effects and asides). Make sure your translation follows the storyline -- which means that if the translation for a balloon seems like it came out of left field, you probably mistranslated it. Make sure your page format is easy to read (learn how to use tabs and script formats effectively).

On-time performance.
Get your work in on or before the deadline, and you will get more work. I'm not kidding. Above the minimal level of competence, the people who get the most work are the people who cause the least amount of trouble. And the most trouble for an editor is a freelancer missing deadlines.

Be reachable.
The greatest worry for an editor is that a freelancer will take the assignment and the materials, flake out, and fall off the edge of the earth. Nothing drives and editor battier than it being a week past the deadline, and the freelancer is not answering the phone. Sure, it seems to the freelancer that phone calls from an editor for an overdue assignment is something akin to a loan-shark banging on your door for the money that you don't have, but it isn't the same. Really! If you underestimated how long it would take you to translate a manga, then you will have to gather up your courage and write that e-mail telling them so. Will the editor be mad? Hell, yes! But the editor won't be wondering whether you've decided to move to a South Pacific island to get away from the pressure. Hiding from the editor is childish, and children don't make very reliable professional freelancers.

Do the things you can do to improve your script.
You'd be amazed at how many scripts come in to an editor without ever having had a spell check run on them. There are a lot of freelancers who have never read Chicago's Manual of Style or Strunk & White. Having these things on hand will make your script so much easier to edit, and if you have an easily editable script, then you will have a friend as an editor.

Where possible, help the editor out.
Quite often, an editor will have an emergency translation or article that they need done in a hurry. If they are calling you, then it means that the editor is willing to rely on you in a pinch. This is a good thing. You don't have to do these emergency jobs for free, but unless your entire schedule will fall apart, take the job.

I'm sure I'm forgetting other tips that would help you get in good with your editor, but the main point is this: You are in a service industry and your client is the editor. If you impress your editor with your abilities and professionalism, it's more likely that the editor will request that you do his/her next assignment. When the editor does that, probably four times out of five, you will be assigned. You don't need to schmooze, but if you are easy to work with, everyone will want to work with you.

Posted by dojosensei at 09:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When you're about to translate dialog, there are many things that can prepare you for it. You can do some acting, improv, write your own stories, listen closely to others for differences in accent or word choice, read a lot, and probably many, many others.

Nothing prepares you to translate sound effects (SFX). Really. Nobody starts out prepared for this part of the task, not even long-time comic-book people (when you start from the blank slate of your own story, then any sound effect you come up with is correct, but in translation, you can get it wrong). The only thing you can do is get creative and dive in.

But that doesn't mean you can't develop a vocabulary of your own for sound effects. It can come from yourself or you can steal from others. I do a lot of both. But when it comes to those fight scenes and the effects are almost as big as the action, that's when it's time to break out the multiple consonants and come up with the original stuff.

The nice thing about English as opposed to Japanese is that we can use multiple consonants without having to stick vowels in the middle. That makes our roman letters somewhat more expressive than the Japanese characters. Use that. Write out a sound effect that sounds to you what the action would actually sound like. I can't tell you what to write since that's between you and your brain, but my advice on these SFX is don't be shy.

Below are some sound effects that I use. These are all personal choices, and if you don't think they sound like what they're representing, come up with (or steal) a sound that you do like.

ZUKIN = ZHAAN
Zukin is the sound for pain. To me, pain sounds like Zhaan. I don't know why, it just does. So I use it in my translations.

DOKI DOKI = B-BMP B-BMP
Doki-doki is the sound of a heart beat. This is used all over any manga with a romantic element. I used to be married to ba-dump as a standard SFX for this sound (see early Video Girl Ai manga), but I stole b-bmp from Gerard Jones after a while of seeing how it worked in manga I edited. It takes up less space (which is nice for the letterers) and conveys the sound as well or better.

NIKO NIKO, NIKKORI, HE-N = GRIN GRIN, SMILE, or HEHN
Niko-niko and the others are the sounds for smiles. In comedic moments the English Grin-grin or Smile can work in manga although I generally try not to use real English words for sound effects (I have plenty of exceptions). Hehn was another steal from Gerard Jones' SFX vocabulary since it works so well with a villainous smile.

ZAWA ZAWA = CHATTER CHATTER
For years I made up dialog to go into the background to represent the chatter going on, then it struck me that the word chatter sounded very much like an onomatopoeia in itself. I always felt a little odd about adding actual phrasing with meaning for background chatter since it wasn't in the Japanese, so when I hit upon the idea of chatter-chatter, it not only saved time, it came out even closer to the Japanese. When the chatter is subdued I use murmur-murmur. But I still have a problem with anybody but grade-school-age kids saying Wai-wai. I still haven't figured out the best translation for that situation.

SHIIIIIIIIN = HUSSSSSSH
This is the famous sound of silence that is found in manga. I, again, stole this translation from Gerard Jones since it works very well, especially when it is an uncomfortable silence.

PEKO PEKO = NOD NOD
Peko-peko is the sound of bowing, and in this situation as well, I found that using the English word works very well for the situation. I will sometimes use bow-bow, but I'm hesitant to use it since the old-time sound for a dog was bow-wow.

DO DO DO, GO GO GO = DM DM DM, GM GM GM
This was a quick substitution for very loud sounds such as a roaring river, racing engine, earthquake, and many others. Like Zhaan, I don't know if you would think that these sound like the original sound, but they do to me.

DOON = DOOM
Doon or Don is the sound of a dramatic entrance. With the English sound effect, not only do we get the use of image of the dramatic entrance to help out the effect, but the English sound effect is very close to the Japanese, and doom is also a synonym for fate!

In the next installment, I'll include more tips for usage and more of my standard effects.

Posted by dojosensei at 09:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As a translator, I like to work at a good pace. Having the pages turn along at a certain clip not only makes you money quicker (since translation is often paid per page of manga or per running minute of anime), but it also gives you a sense of accomplishment.

But not everything in translation is a Japanese sentence going into the mind, and an English sentence almost immediately coming out the other side. Certain things can slow that steady pace down to a crawl, and this is what eats up the time of translators.

The first and most common thing that slows a translation down is a word you don't know. The solution is simple, to look it up in the dictionary, but it's more than just plugging in a new word. Your brain recognizes English words from long experience with usage. When there's a Japanese word you don't know, it isn't simply that you don't know the meaning, but you've also (probably) never heard it used before. Which means it takes more time than just looking the thing up, you have to consider it within the context of the sentence. It's more like puzzle solving. I'm not talking hours here, just a few extra minutes per word, but the less Japanese you know to begin with, the more words you have to look up, and that can make a translation stretch into forever.

The second most common is for anime scripts and seinen, josei, and salaryman manga -- kanji you don't know. This is a little more difficult since the method for looking up kanji is far more complicated and time intensive than looking up words by alphabet or kana. It involves knowing the "radical" of the kanji (a small portion by which all similar kanji are referenced), counting the number of strokes used, then looking it up in Nelson's (or some other kanji dictionary). If you know one of the pronunciations for the kanji, then the work is easier, but even then it takes longer than a normal dictionary lookup. If you don't know the pronunciation, don't know the radical, and (usually because the kanji is hand-written) can't figure out the number of strokes in the character, then you're in for a long, long search. Up to twenty minutes on a single kanji, and sometimes even longer. That's a lot of effort for one single word.

Idioms are a constant source of headaches since I haven't found a good, quick dictionary for them. My Wordtank G50 has a way to list idioms that use particular words, but no dictionary, not even the Green Goddess, notes all the idioms. The number of idioms that use the word ki (for spirit or personal energy) are legion. This is a good time for that Japanese friend I mentioned in the Apprentice part of the dojo.

Katakana words. I'll talk about these in more depth in another post, but the basic problem is that the Japanese often take western words and modify the meanings. So not only do you have a foreign word that is in none but the very latest dictionaries, but it often has a different meaning than the word it comes from.

Cultural references can take up a chunk of time. As an example while doing an early volume of Here is Greenwood, (Nasu is notorious for difficult '80s cultural references) two of the main characters had an exchange where one makes a statement, the other replies with "Funôru no ryû?" (Funôru's dragon/lizard?) and the first responds with, "Are ha kansu!" (That's kansu!) (Please forgive my faulty memory, I had to return the Greenwood books to the publisher so I don't have the Japanese original to check.) So I had to figure out what this "Funôru" and "Kansu" were. Dictionaries turned up nothing. I tried a battery of friends, but none of them had any clue. Then at one point, deep into the teens or twenties of the Google lists, there was a website that wrote Funôru in its official English letters, "F'nor." F'nor?! Where had I heard that before? Then it came crashing into place -- it had been more than a dozen years since I had read Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Rider's of Pern series, but thinking it over, F'nor's dragon was named Canth. It had taken probably four or more hours to figure out that one throwaway pun, but at least I was able to. (There were several Nasu references that I was never able to figure out.)

Then there are phone calls, e-mail, and the normal day-to-day activities of one's life. It's a wonder anything gets translated.

Posted by dojosensei at 10:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As I mentioned in other areas of the Dojo, the translator's main dictionaries are the Green Goddess (Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionaries), Nelson's (Japanese-English Character Dictionary published by Tuttle), The Wordtank electronic dictionary by Canon, and some on-line sources.

Here are some of the ones that I don't use quite so often, but can save your neck at times. Note that most of these were bought quite a long while ago. There may be new editions or some might have gone out of print. The ISBNs are the ones on the back of my books. I wish you the best of luck finding them.

Sanseido puts out a set of four Japanese-Japanese dictionaries that can be immensely helpful at times.

Concise Nihon Jinmei Jiten (The Concise Japanese Names Dictionary) which lists historical Japanese names.
ISBN 4-385-15804-5

Concise Nihon Chimei Jiten (The Concise Japanese Place Names Dictionary) which lists all sorts of places in Japan.
ISBN 4-385-15328-0

Concise Gaikoku Jinmei Jiten (The Concise Foreign Names Dictionary) which lists the katakana spellings (kanji for the Chinese people) and a short bio of famous people throughout the world.
ISBN 4-385-15325-6

Concise Gaikoku Chimei Jiten (The Concise Foreign Places Dictionary) which lists the katakana spellings (kanji for China) for countries, towns, rivers, etc.
ISBN 4-385-15335-3

Then there are:
Concise Katakana-go Jiten (Concise Katakana Dictionary) is a Japanese-Japanese dictionary for katakana words, but since the Wordtank just about replaces this, I hardly use it anymore.
ISBN 4-385-13477-4

You need a good standard Japanese-Japanese dictionary because they contain words that the Japanese-English dictionaries don't have. I have Sanseido's Shinmeikai Kokugo Jiten (New Lucid Japanese Dictionary)
ISBN 4-385-13069-5

It doesn't hurt to have a kana-based Japanese-English dictionary. I still own the one I picked up during my college days. Kenkyusha's New Collegiate Japanese-English Dictionary.
ISBN 4-7674-2056-3

The companion English-Japanese dictionary is the only E-J dictionary you will ever need (once you get good enough with kanji to read the entries). Kenkyusha's New Collegiate English-Japanese Dictionary.
ISBN 4-7674-1076-2

This is one I hardly use since Nelson's is so much better, but when I can't figure out how to look up the first kanji in a compound, this one gives you the option of looking up the second or third kanji in the compound. So in that particular case, it's a great fall-back dictionary. Japanese Character Dictionary by Nichigai Associates.
ISBN 4-8169-0828-5

This dictionary is a pain to look anything up in, but it helps when getting into technical names for commonly used items since it also has pictures for every item and they're grouped by specialty (Farming equipment on one page, shipping on another, etc.) The Oxford-Duden Pictorial Japanese-English Dictionary.
ISBN 0-19-864327-6

Since there is no help for Japanese names -- even native Japanese speakers can't be 100% sure of the pronunciation of a name written in kanji -- this dictionary is almost useless. But I did say almost. If you have no choice, and you need the pronunciation of a name, this is the only one that has a chance of giving it to you. Japanese Names by P.G. O'Neill published by Weatherhill.
ISBN 0-8348-0225-2

There's a slightly out-of-date dictionary of Japanese manga creator's names with short bios that's helped me any number of times. Mine was published in 1997. I'll have to see if there is an updated release. Mangaka Anime Sakka Jinmei Jiten (Dictionary of the Names of Manga and Anime Creators).
ISBN 4-8169-1423-4

I was lurking on a forum when I heard about this sound effects dictionary. It's Japanese-Japanese, but it can be very helpful when that weird sound effect that you haven't learned yet comes up. Gendai Giongo Gitaigo Yôhô Jiten (Modern Sound Effects and Onomatopoeia Usage Dictionary)
ISBN 4-490-10610-6

Shogakukan puts out (past tense, maybe?) a dictionary of movie, song, and other media titles. This includes the Japanese titles of foreign movies which are often quite different from literal translations or transliterations of the original titles. Like most media-oriented dictionaries, it's only good up to its publishing date (1997 for mine), but it has often helped when a shôjo author starts talking about that foreign movie that so inspired her. Eeiwa Waei Title Jôhô Jiten (English Title: Shogakukan Companion to Artistic Works).
ISBN 4-09-510192-X

Oh! And be sure to get Kodansha's bilingual maps of Tokyo, Osaka, and all of Japan. They've saved my butt plenty of times.

Of course they aren't all of my dictionaries. I have some completely useless ones (a small medical dictionary hasn't given me one word that wasn't better documented in the Green Goddess in the 10+ years of hopefully looking things up) and others that have been replaced by better dictionaries above. But you have to be something of a dictionary junkie to be in this business.

If you know some useful dictionaries that I haven't mentioned, get onto the Contact Sensei page and let me know about them! Now, dammit!

Posted by dojosensei at 10:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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!!"

Posted by dojosensei at 09:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Another quick reminiscence with a handy point at the end.

I was at the Word Fantasy Convention which is held every year somewhere close to Halloween in various cities around North America. It is (or maybe "was," since this story is from quite a long time back) an interesting convention since the attendance was limited to 750 people which insured that nearly half were professionals. For a person trying to break into the publishing industry, that's an incredibly good ratio of pros to not-yet-pros.

I went with a friend, and we paid a little extra to get into the awards ceremony. We got in a little early and chose an empty table (they were the large-size round tables that sat perhaps 10 people per table). Then a large group came in and sat down at our table. I was surprised to learn that the man sitting next to me was Clive Barker, the famous author of horror fiction, and the group accompanying him were some of the most powerful publishers and editors in the industry. Since it was rather hard to be hold a private conversation, we conversed along with the rest of the table. At one point in during the ceremony, Clive Barker won an award.

It seemed like a perfect opportunity to promote myself and get my foot in the door, but it wasn't. It was that "other door." The one that leads to a brick wall. An interesting experience that will not determine your future, and will just go down as a story you might tell at a social engagement or in a blog. In fact, these moments leading nowhere for your career will greatly outnumber the moments that will lead to a better future for yourself.

Now here's the point: Enjoy them! This isn't all about getting ahead in life. You might have a nice conversation with a professional or with a fellow fan who can turn into a new friend. Don't go approaching every encounter as if it will be the moment you're to be discovered. That just leads to long awkward silences where you stand there grinning in the expectation that your conversation partner will ask if he/she can help you break in, and your conversation partner will be thinking very hard about what excuse he/she can make to get the hell out of there.

The rule is to not expect anything out of such chance encounters. If you react as if bumping into bestselling authors and powerful execs happens to you all of the time, you will find life a lot more enjoyable. If something happens, take advantage of it, but it's more than likely that nothing will, so just relax.

Posted by dojosensei at 07:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm going to reminisce for a moment, but there's a point to this, I promise.

I was still in my apprenticeship doing really old-style fan subs (VHS to VHS recordings with my ex-roommate's computer in the middle running a self-programmed subtitling program, and making them only for personal friends -- that's all we had time to make) and really old style scanslations (using a hand scanner and showing them to practically nobody), when my ex-roommate said he was going to Tacoma for a convention. I, somehow, had the money to tag along, so I did.

While there, I had time on my hands at one point, so I went into a panel on women science-fiction authors discussing what it takes to get into and stay in the industry. There was an aspiring author in the audience who basically hijacked the panel asking questions regarding the problems she had breaking into the business, then asking never-ending followup questions before they could turn to other subjects. After this went on for about ten minutes, I got bored and raised my hand to ask a leading question that would get the panel back onto their advertised subject (sorry, I forget the question, but it doesn't really matter).

After the panel was over, one of the panelists, Kathlyn Starbuck (a really nice woman), came over and thanked me for the question, and we struck up a conversation. During it, I mentioned that I was a translator trying to break into the business, and I wondered if she had any advice. She had some suggestions, and we parted cordially -- but it was hours later when she happened on me again, telling me that her husband had a suggestion for me. It turns out her husband was Raymond E. Feist, author of the bestselling Riftwar fantasy series among many other books, and from his membership in SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America), he knew Toren Smith who had, a year or two before, set up the packaging/translation studio, Studio Proteus. (Mr. Feist is also a really great guy.)

After the convention, I went home and threw into a package one of the fan-sub tapes that I had translated on my own, some scanslated manga pages along with their Japanese equivalents, and a professional-looking cover letter that mentioned that Mr. Feist had referred me, and I shipped the whole thing out to Studio Proteus.

As it turns out, Toren didn't have work for me at the time, but someone who couldn't afford Toren's rates had asked him for suggestions of other, less expensive translators. My package of translated materials was there on Toren's desk at the time, so he suggested me.

Suddenly I was a professional translator working in the business.

Here's the point.

It all happened because I asked a nice question in a completely unrelated panel. That's how people break into the industry. It usually starts out with pure luck, and you being ready to take advantage of that luck. The door leading to professional work opens a crack, and you have to be prepared to go through it. Fortunately for me, I had translated materials that were ready to send, but part of that was me making sure I had it before anything ever happened. I was ready to take advantage of the opportunity if it arose.

It's a fickle door that leads to professional work. Some of the gatekeepers (overworked editors, mostly) are determined to keep it closed so that their lives are made easier, but there are things that open it. It happens rarely, and it may only happen to you once. So be ready to jam your foot into the door even if it opens just a crack.

Posted by dojosensei at 08:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Before I dive into the problems of subtitle translations, let's lay a few ground rules out for subtitles.

In my experience, the shortest subtitle should be a 1-syllable, commonly-used word, and it should be on-screen for at least 20 frames (2/3rds of a second). A words like, "Yes," or, "No," or "Wait!" are the kind of words I'm talking about.

The longest subtitle should be about 64 characters (32 on the top line and 32 on the bottom line) and needs about 5-6 seconds to read. The number of characters is variable since in most fonts the widths of characters are different. A "w" is very wide whereas an "i" or "l" is nice and thin and a lot of thin letters will allow for a few extra letters on the line. I personally think that the word "ill" (as opposed to "sick") was a gift from the gods to subtitle translator's everywhere. Still, 32 per line is the standard, and translators should not go over that limit unless they can see the subtitles in front of them.

One of the main goals of subtitle translating is: Although DVDs come equipped with pause buttons, your translation shouldn't force the viewer to use it. The director and editor spend a long time in the editing room trying to perfect the pacing of the show, and the translator shouldn't be the one to ruin it.

So you want to eliminate anything that slows down reading where possible. Characterization trumps this rule, so if there is a short word that the character would not say and a long, hard-to-recognize-quickly word that the character would say, then the long word wins.

But in every other way, pare down the sentence so that it is as short and easy-to-read as possible while containing the same information. (There are exceptions to this last rule. Polite Japanese says a little with a lot of words. Having a short subtitle while the character goes on and on will make the viewer think that something is being left out. In these cases, it's permissible to expand, "Thanks," to something like, "I'd like to express my most sincere gratitude.")

If you are faced with a multiple-subtitle sentence, you should break the subtitle at natural phrase breaks. In other words, try not to break the subtitle between the subject and verb, or between verb and object. Aim for breaking between the main sentence and prepositional phrases or subordinate clauses.

In a nutshell, generally speaking the rules are, short is better than long; simple is better than complicated; and since people tend to read words as a unit rather than letter-by-letter, whenever possible, do not hyphenate.

But there are a lot of sentences where long words appear right in the middle of the sentence, and that's where the translator's trick of inverting the sentence comes in.

Take this sentence:
In the king's problems with insurgency, will many heads roll?

That's 61 characters, so it should fit into a single, two-line subtitle just fine. The problem is that when you break it without hyphenating, you get:
In the king's problems with
insurgency, will many heads roll?

The top line is 27 characters but the bottom line is 33. (We lost a "space" character when we broke the line.) 33 characters is too long, so let's try it the other way.
In the king's problems with insurgency,
will many heads roll?

Now the top line has 39 characters.
In both cases we're still over the limit. So now the trick of inverting the sentence.
Will many heads roll in the
king's problems with insurgency?

And magically, the bottom, longer line drops to 32 characters, and is now within the limit. Of course it doesn't always work, but it's a tool in the bag for subtitle translators.

(The same trick can work in manga where you want to get long words to the middle of the sentence.)

Posted by dojosensei at 08:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of the technical aspects of translation is the space in which those translations have to be placed.For most anime and manga translations, how much space you have to do the translation is a very important consideration.

Here's my favorite (that is to say, most frustrating) Japanese phrases.

"Da to."

It translates out to "That's what he/she said." Or, "See what he/she said?" In fact, the Japanese phrase can be reduced to "To." It isn't even a long vowel! Now how can a person get a four-word sentence into the space it takes to write a single Japanese kana character?! Or in anime, I'll give odds the director had the person saying, "To," on screen for exactly the 1/3rd of a second that it took to say it, then he cut away some someone else's dialog. No way a four word subtitle could be read in that amount of time.

The reason why that's so frustrating is that there is no good way out. But there are things you can do for longer sentences.

For manga the thing a translator has to remember is that the word balloons are thin, and wherever possible, you need to use short words. That isn't to say that long words are out of the question -- there's always hyphenation -- but hyphenation can lead to misreading, and sometimes the reader has to pause on a balloon to parse out exactly what word is being said. So it's best to avoid long words wherever possible. I've had sentences that looked like hyphen stepladders after they were lettered. For example:
The
forti-
fied
emplace-
ment ap-
pears im-
possible
to sur-
mount.

Hyphens everywhere!!!

Since Japanese balloons are ovals, the middle part will be widest, and it's always easier to fit your big words in the middle. Also if you start your sentence with two or three small words, the reader has a chance to get the rhythm of the sentence, and will be much more able to parse the sentence when the hyphens do come along. For example:
We
can't
over-
run a
position
that's so
well
defend-
ed.

A few hyphens, but they parse much easier, right?

So the rule is: Start a sentence with two or three short words, long words in the middle of a sentence, and if possible end it with short words too.

Subtitles have a different problem, and I'll get into that next entry.

Posted by dojosensei at 08:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Every apprentice (and some uninformed journeymen) tries to attach an accent to manga dialog. The inevitable Osaka-dialect speaking character comes along, and the translator doesn't know how to handle it. Nearly all of them try a southern accent, and it just comes out sounding like something out of Pogo or Li'l Abner (I just let everyone know how old I am, didn't I?). "Ahm goin' t' th' waterin' hole…" etc. They usually get over it by the time another human being sees the translation. Sometime they even get over it when they themselves see how bad it is.

Of course the accents I'm talking about are regional accents. Japan has as many regional accents as it has regions. Yes, even Nagoya has an accent -- you don't often hear it, but it's there. The reason that substituting Japanese regional dialects for American (or other English-speaking country's) accents doesn't work is because the moment you hear a regional accent, you think the character is from that region. In other words, if Ukyo of Ranma 1/2 starts speaking like a southern belle (an otherwise reasonable substitution), you'd think she was from the United States southeast. But you know she's a Japanese character, so her using regionally distinct language takes you directly out of the spell of the story. It makes you say, "Hey, that's not right."

But here's how you do it. Class-based dialects are fair game for manga. As long as you don't dip too far into self-parody, you can use dialects that show the level of education or social class. A person in any North American region might say, "Are you messin' with me?" But the use of words will give an approximate class level to the person saying it. A person who wants to display more education might say, "Are you trying to intimidate me?" Or, if the character is a little over-the-top, you might even go as far as, "Is that aggression that I detect?" When a character sports an Osaka accent, it's fine to use the less educated, more everyday words that anyone could use. And when you're translating the evil politician, pull out that thesaurus and make him sound as haughty as you can.

But apprentices and journeymen should remember that even in Japan, it's the villains who are intelligent; the heroes are clever. What's the difference? Intelligence is the quality of displaying your big brain overtly with long words rather than the more common words. Cleverness is talking like a "regular guy" but coming up with great ideas. Even very intelligent readers will side with the clever guy. So when you write hero dialog, don't go too deep into the thesaurus. But when you do a manga with a real over-the-top evil villain, that's your chance to whip out those seven-syllable words that you've always wanted to use!

Posted by dojosensei at 11:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I noticed on one of the message boards a person asking if the rumors he's heard of a certain manga (not mine, thankfully) being badly translated are true.

Most rumors of a bad translation are false.

First, let me define a bad translation. It's what you first think of when you hear the words "bad translation." That there are major mistakes in the information that is put across. That the information contained within the English words are significantly different than the information contained in the Japanese words. This is not about stilted dialog and not about characterization that doesn't meet your expectations. This is about mistakes. The reason why I say that is when most people hear the words "bad translation" they take from it the idea that the information is wrong -- not simply that one critic disliked the style.

The main problem with taking the "bad translation" judgement at face value is that not even some professional translators can distinguish between an actual mistake and a difference of interpretation. It takes one going through the "Greatest Translator in the World" stage (see the previous entry -- Journeyman/Black Belt 2nd degree) to really give other translators the benefit of the doubt. Before that, even professional translators are so insecure about their own interpretations that they see other interpretations as a attack on their view. That generates an emotional response that causes even some professionals (and nearly all amateurs) to proclaim that any interpretation other than their own is wrong.

Let me see if I can explain the difference between a different interpretation and a mistake. There are two ways to look at differences between your translation and someone else's translation. One would be seeing the other translator making a mistake that you can understand as a mistake. For example mistaking "sore wo shi na" (do that) with "sore wo suru na" (don't do that). That's a mistake -- and a translator can understand how the mistake was made (the original translator mistook one use of "na" for another).

But if someone took the phrase "shikata ga nai," which normally translates out as "there's nothing that can be done," and translated it to "I'm screwed," then it may not be the way I'd translate it, but it has the meaning of not being able to do anything about the situation and is therefore not a mistake. It's a difference in interpretation. It's a "legal" translation, and by whatever unwritten rules of translation I've been able to figure out, it's can't count as a "bad translation." Any translator who has yet to go through the humbling process that ends the "Greatest Translator in the World" phase will probably consider the "I'm screwed" translation as a mistake -- and write a column on the net saying the book is a bad translation. Fans hear it and spread the rumor. And since translation is all about reputation, the translator, who's only fault is to be read by the wrong person, might not get his or her next job.

So until a person has been translating professionally for three or four years, that person is really not qualified to judge whether something is a good translation or not. (And really, by that time translators are so busy with their own work that they don't go around judging other people's translations.) What that means is that very few of the "bad translation" rumors are being spread by people who are qualified to judge.

A mistake is a mistake, and those should never happen in a translation. But they do. The more experience a translator gets, the less mistakes you'll find -- but there still are mistakes. I've been translating for more than 15 years, and some of my translations still contain mistakes (please don't go looking for them). They'll be tiny mistakes and won't affect the way the story plays out, but humans are mistake making machines, and the last time I checked, I'm still very human.

If a translation has enough mistakes to change the tone of the story or change the way a character seems to the reader, then it may be considered a "bad translation," and I'm sure there are bad translations out there, but who is making that judgement? And just how qualified are they to make it?

Posted by dojosensei at 07:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)