Okay, so you've gone through your apprenticeship, and now you've managed to get your first professionally translated book published nationally. Congratulations. You have a decision to make.

Is this your profession or your hobby? If it's your hobby, that's great. That means your day job isn't so much a day job as a career, and translating manga and anime is something you do to supplement your income. And when meeting more "mundane" people than your standard anime and manga fan, it will be an interesting way so strike up a conversation. Making money while reading "them comical books" is far more acceptable to the non-fannish world than just reading them.

But if you want to make translation your profession, then you will eventually have to give up your anime and manga hobby, and, for sanity's sake, get yourself a new hobby or two.

It won't happen at first. In the beginning, you will be doing translations on the manga that's assigned to you, and spending your off hours engrossed in the latest book from the company you work for or a competitor's. Or sitting in a darkened room watching the latest anime to come off of Japanese television. But eventually, you will go to one of those "mundane" parties, and after exploring the conversational possibilities of a person who works on odd foreign entertainment, somebody will ask, "So, what do you do for fun?" The glib answer, "With work as fun as this, any other fun would be a letdown," will probably serve to set your conversation partners into polite chuckles, but that doesn't mean you can dodge the question yourself.

If you're doing full-time manga and anime, you need something else. Anything else will do. Most of my hobbies (and I have quite a few) came from things I did with family and friends while growing up or during my college days. For example, I was plenty fannish already when I took up hiking with friends.

The main point is this: when you have to work on your hobby, it's no longer the best hobby in the world for you. Hobbies are meant for relaxation -- taking your mind off of your daily stresses -- and if your hobby includes your daily stress, then it's time to find something else.

There's one other place where a non-anime/manga-related hobby comes in handy. A standard introduction to a Japanese person will usually include the question, "What's your hobby." If you know golf, then you're home free, but if, like me, the links never quite linked to you, then it's best to have another answer ready. Popular hobbies in Japan are sports such as tennis or skiing, studies such as learning a second (third or more?) language, movies, books, or music. But the question is supposed to be a conversation starter, so if your hobby is the same as your conversation partner's, be prepared with a good knowledge of the trivia involved in your stated hobby. And having your hobby be the same as your profession will cut off the conversation pretty quickly.

My suggestion for hobbies is anything that gets you away from your computer. Something that has to deal with the outdoors is probably best, but any change of scenery will help you separate you from the hours you spend with dictionaries and computer files.

Posted by dojosensei at 09:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The translator, rewriter and editor have a few things to think about with regard to the sound effects before sending the script on to the letterer. Much of it depends on how the sound effects are being treated by the publisher, but with all formats, there are things to consider.

No SFX translation for the sound effects:
Even when there are is supposedly no translation or touch up for sound effects, there are still considerations. Some sound effects (and outside-the-bubble asides) can be considered dialog, others have linguistic properties, and others have a meaning that pertain directly to the flow of the story. I have never worked for a company that doesn't in some way translate the sound effects, so I can't advise on this case, but some consideration should be given to sound effects that move the story along. The click of a door when someone enters the room for example. I've seen that click appear on a white background with no other image or indication of what happened in the story. If the reader can't read the click, then the reader won't know how the new character suddenly appeared.

Glossary-style sound effects translation.
Time to own up to this. The glossary-style sound effects at Viz were partially (if not mostly) my fault. It was in response to certain pressures put on during the changeover from flipped to unflipped and from $16 graphic novels to $10 graphic novels. I figured a glossary was a way to both allow for not retouching the sound effects while still giving the reader the information. And once the contracts were signed, there was no going back -- all stories that had started that way had to be finished that way. I had thought that it would be used like Del Rey's translators notes are used today. One would read through it, and if there was something confusing, one could always flip to the back to figure out that particular problem, then go back reading and ignoring the sound effects. It was a way for the reader to get what they were getting anyway from companies like TokyoPop and CMX, and still have the translation if they wanted it. (It was an awful pain for the editors -- I know since I edited quite a few myself.) But many readers resented it. They felt they had to flip back and forth to the glossary. And they would rather not have the option of a glossary at all. As far as I can see, all of Viz's recent acquisitions have been full touch-up, so aside from grandfathered, contractually-bound series, the technique has been put to rest. It was an experiment that failed. Sorry to those who hated it, and to those few readers who liked it, I'm sorry that it didn't do as well as I hoped.

As a pretty-much dead style, I won't comment except to say that it was a situation where one could be as free with the effects' sounds as the translator wanted to be. But it was, as I noted above, an awful lot of extra work.

Subtitle-style sound effects:
To tell you the truth, I'm still getting used to this. I've been doing them for more than two years now, and I still find myself doing the sound effects as if they were full touch-up effects. But I have converted in a few areas. I've found that for subtitle-style SFX, one can use real words easier than one can for full touch-up. Words like "smile" and "chatter" work better in subtitle-style than they do in full touch-up SFX.

The translator for subtitle-style has a lot of leeway as to how to translate a sound since the subtitle can be placed on one side of a broken sound effect (a broken sound effect is an effect that has image information between letters of the effect. For example, on a dramatic entrance, the effect may start on the left of the entering character with a "do" sound and finish on the right of the character with the "n" sound), so the translator doesn't have to be creative on how to break up the single-syllable SFX. (For the above example, a sound effect of DOOM can be subtitled under the left-hand SFX portion with nothing by the right-hand side.)

But a possible difficulty in subtitle-style translation there is always the possibility that a bilingual is reading your translation, so it's best to keep the English sounds closer to the Japanese sounds than one would need to in a full touch-up situation.

Full Touch-Up effects:
One of the biggest concerns for translating in a full-touch-up-SFX situation is the background. You know that some poor letterer is going to have to take out the Japanese SFX and replace them with what you write. If the original Japanese sound effect is black letters on a white background, then the letterer will find it easy to white out the original effect and put in nearly any combination of letters in its place. Similarly white effects on a black background is easy. Effects on line drawings are more difficult for the letterer, but still doable. But effects on complicated images or (shudder) screen tone are the worst for a letterer. The translator should look at the background and make allowances for what is there.

If the background is screentone or complicated images, the translator (or rewriter and editor) should come up with a sound effect that will take up approximately the same space as the original effect. Also the English SFX should be letters that do a good job of covering the area. If it's on a screen tone, don't use dashes for example. An effect like ZLI---IP leaves an awful lot of background that needs to be touched up. If ZLOOP were used instead, then the letterer can get away with covering up most of the original sound effect with the letters, leaving only the edges to touch up.

If it's a broken sound effect (see the paragraph above), then one should match the broken effect. For a dramatic entrance example above, one would want the left hand portion to say DOO, and the right-hand side to finish it up with OM or OOM.

The other thing to be careful of is that unlike subtitle sound effects, real-world words don't look as good. It's usually best to add an extra letter as in HUGG for an embrace; change to other similar-sounding consonants such as CLICK being changed to KLIK; or remove vowels such as SLIP being changed to SLP, or SLLLP. (Of course, it's always better to be creative, but...)

In touch-up effects, many multiple letters help the letterer when he/she is working on an effect. For example, if one has an effect like DONNNNNNG, the letterer has the option to remove "N"s or add them to make the English SFX fit the space needed.

There are other considerations that I'm not thinking of right now, but I'll see if I can cover those in a future installment.

Posted by dojosensei at 10:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You've been working on a fun series with killer artwork for a number of volumes, and the publisher comes to you with a request to translate a companion book. (An art book, or the guide book to the anime, or the trivia book, or some such). They offer you a fee that's better than you would usually get paid for translating a normal graphic novel and ask you for an estimate on how long it will take you. You look at it (assuming it's an art book) and see big pages with nothing but pictures (and perhaps a little descriptive paragraph). Sure, there's that section in back where they go into detailed description of the characters and have an extended interview with the author, but just think of all those pages with those very big pictures! And after a cursory reading of the text -- it doesn't look all that hard! So you give them an estimate that allows a little more time than a normal graphic novel. They accept. And you get to work.

The huge picture-only pages go breezing by. You spend a little extra time on the descriptive text because they're supposed to sound poetic, so you overwork your Thesaurus to be sure you get it right. Life is going swimmingly.

Then you hit that back section, and you're in a translation from hell. Your entire world bogs down in the quagmire of words. Yes, WWII fans, you have just plowed through Poland, and you're suddenly confronted with Russia. The words aren't that difficult, it's just like there's so many of them. Whereas you went through dozens of "big picture" pages in a day, your first "lotsa text" page takes the entire day, and you still aren't finished with it.

Suddenly the descriptions use words you didn't notice in the cursory reading. Words that are of some odd dialect of which you are unfamiliar. You ask the Japanese friend who sometimes helps you out on your worst translation problems. "Oh, that's a dialect they use up near Sendai," your friend informs you. The research university library should have a dictionary of that dialect, but it's nowhere to be found (it's in the card catalog, dammit!). You turn the page, and there, waiting for you, are more words.

The deadline comes and goes, and you've only made it through five pages of the 20-page section. And facing you are even more words! The words have surrounded you like brain-hungry zombies, and they want to eat you alive! (Or at least, eat up your time.)

The weird thing is, these TFHs are usually very helpful when you go back to translating the series. You often learn great things in the interview section, or pick up details you might have overlooked in the descriptions that the Japanese editors write. When I translated the Patlabor movies (for the initial Manga Entertainment release), every line of dialog was either very informative and made the story better, or very funny, but there were so many lines! It took me a full day to get through only 5 running minutes of dialog. (I could do an entire Dancougar episode in less than 3 hours.)

But you have to accept the assignment. You're the translator on the series, and nobody (but some of the fans) knows the series better than you do. Fortunately, they don't come along too often, but they'll come along, and you just have to put in some long nights to get it done as quickly as you can. Slog through it, and you'll have a story to tell to other translators later on.

Posted by dojosensei at 05:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, a while back (maybe a year or two), you broke into the industry. One of the anime or manga companies paid you for a translation and after you finished, they gave you more work. Then your work was nationally distributed, and you can go into any mall in the country and find the thing you did on the shelf. You should remember that day fondly because it was the day you turned in your apprentice brown belt and exchanged it for a journeyman's black belt (1st degree).

That was, as I said, one or two years back, and now a new event is upon you! The company you do translations for has just offered you... (wait for it) ...an A-list title!!! Yes, a jury of the most powerful editors in the industry has promoted you to the level of "a great translator" with the duty and responsibility of working on their most sacred titles. (This is subjective reality, obviously. What really happened is the Editor-in-Chief probably went to the managing editor and talked about how this new title needed staff, and was there anybody free? The managing editor, for whatever reason, thought of you, hadn't heard any major complaints about you yet, and suggested that you got your work generally in on time, and that you had an opening in your schedule. With that the Editor-in-Chief replied, "Never heard of 'em, but whatever you want." You wouldn't believe how many assignments got chosen that way. The ones where they assign project based on talent are only for those freelancers who have worked for the company for more than 5 years and still haven't flaked out in some way.) But, as I was saying at the beginning of that digression, you believe that it was their studied approval of your fabulous work that prompted them to bestow on you the honor of this important A-list title.

And with that, your head gets larger than the world it exists in. Yes, you know the right translation! You can argue with translators who have five times the experience you have because you are an A-list translator! You know that the sound effect the other guy translated wasn't SLISS but SLITCH! You know that the character Itou-san cannot possibly be spelled Itoh-san no matter that it says Itoh on his shirt in the story. It's just wrong! You have stepped up to become the GREATEST TRANSLATOR IN THE WORLD! All of your translations are right. Every other person's translation has mistakes that you would never have made!

Okay, as you may have guessed, I was in this mindset for a little while, and worse, I've had to deal with people in this mindset. One of my early editors -- a frustrated translator turned editor -- would send me a list of what he considered "mistakes" in my translation (nearly all of them were interpretation choices, but he was convinced they were mistakes). Another I went up to at a convention to shake hands with him because he was working on an anime version of a work I had did previously, and his attitude was that I had "ruined" the work by naming the character in a way he didn't like. (The "Itoh" example above was based on this guy.) I was a little surprised that a courtesy handshake would result in a criticism of my translation. Still I calmly tried to explain what went into the decision-making process, but he would hear none of it. He told me that maybe some people (meaning me) didn't care about the work, but he certainly did. I wasn't surprised to learn that the anime was his first big professional translation.

I'm sure that eventually just surviving in the industry will bring translators to the other side of this period, but for me, it was one distinct moment in time. I was assigned a project that was way over my head. I watched the anime and couldn't follow it (lots of political jargon). At the same time, I was dressed down by a client for turning in a work with a couple of obvious mistakes. I had seen names of minor characters and used a name dictionary to find probable pronunciations for them. It turned out that they were historical names (which matched with the theme of the work), and I should have done research on them. So my self confidence crashed, and I went looking for a Japanese translation partner to help me out. That was the best move I ever made. It also got me to my 3rd degree black belt where you start to learn when you "don't know what the Japanese means." Knowing that you don't know is one of the most valuable skills for a translator, and it has to be learned the hard way.

Well, this entry went on longer than I expected, but... Nobody's reading this blog yet anyway.

Posted by dojosensei at 12:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)