5 ms·
The point you raise is one of the things most people -- professional translators, even -- get very, very wrong when translating (books, movie subtitles, game di
by lampiaio 3y ago
The point you raise is one of the things most people -- professional translators, even -- get very, very wrong when translating (books, movie subtitles, game dialogue, you name it).
"How do you say 'phrase' in [target language]?" is more often than not a much worse approach than "What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?".
- Obscurity4340 3y agoGiven this fact, one of the most amazing things to me is when a song can be translated relatively faithfully and while preserving the rhyme structure. It just blows my mind to listen to a song in another language with English subtitles and have it line up close enough to the English and still rhyming in their seperate tongue.
- haberman 3y agoFor anything remotely poetic (including song lyrics), I like to hear more literal translations, because the creative turns of phrase is is what makes them enjoyable.
- alpinisme 3y agoNot only that but poetic things are more or less by definition things that a native speaker would not say routinely (otherwise they wouldn’t be poetic). Even when they are fairly colloquial (as here), there’s got to be some twist of rhythm or aptness of phrasing that is singular and memorable.
- JohnBooty 3y ago"What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?". It gets even trickier if you are translating fiction. If you are translating, say, Japanese anime/manga with a Japanese setting for an English-speaking audience you don't necessarily want the characters to sound like Americans or Brits or Canadians or what have you. So you may have to use language that Americans understand, but still make them sound Japanese. Somehow.
- sam0x17 3y agoWhat's funny about it though is as an English speaker who knows no Japanese but often enjoys reading subtitles, I'd much rather see the weird literal translation so I know "oh, this is some cool idiom in Japanese" rather than translating it to boring English idioms. Like I get much more out of the meaning when I see the raw original idiom literally translated, and I prefer that. I think we take for granted that idioms from other cultures/languages are incomprehensible... often they make a lot of sense when literally translated even if they aren't a "thing" in the language to which they are being translated.
- hnben 3y ago10 years ago there was a big fight/shift in the anime translator scene about exactly this. More literal translations with long translator notes were common back then, but eventually the less literal translation won as anime became more mainstream.
- naishin 3y agoThere are several translations of Harry Potter books to Russian language. Some translations keep names a is - Longbottom or Ravenclaw. While others translate them to Russian. There is (or rather was) so much love and hate about both options.