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Dr. Ten - Fanlations

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Gaminette with some cleaning assistance from Ookami Kasumi have gifted us with this hysterical Dr. Ten version of Gary Larson (of Farside fame)'s infamous "What we say to dogs and What they hear" cartoon. Enjoy! And put down the water glass first.

Nano Consumption

Gaminette's sense of humour shines through once more!

Lost in Translation

by Ookami Kasumi

I'm a scanlation copyeditor / cleaner.
-- That means, I use Photoshop to take out all the Japanese from the individually scanned manga pages (ALL the Japanese - SFX & text,) and recover the art beneath it in such a way that there is no sign that the Japanese was ever there to begin with. After that, I replace the Japanese text with English text from a provided transcript.

Which brings me to this issue:

Translation Accuracy verses Readability.

My teamates work very hard to make their translations as readable as humanly possible. NOT an easy thing considering that the Japanese language is radically different from English:

• - The Japanese emphasis on speaking in the third person ? so as not to be rude
• - Never using direct references ? for ANYTHING
• - The verb / subject switch in sentence structure
• - The lack of adjectives
• - The strong disparity between female (uke) speech as opposed to male (seme) speech
• - Referencing people by their title /position / family name -- rather than their personal name

Without doubt, every scanlation team is doing their very best to keep their works as close as close to the original Japanese as possible. However, it seems that too many of them take this translation accuracy thing just a little too far.

(Can I have a translation for this translation?)

Then there are those that go overboard into pure American slang.

Great for us Americans, but American’s aren’t the only one’s reading these. More often than not, English ISN’T the reader’s first language.

A happy medium CAN be found.

-- Yes, some restructuring often has to occur to allow for the English sentence structure ? and English Punctuation.

(Ahem, ellipses are supposed to be used in place of MISSING TEXT such as an UNFINISHED Sentence -- NOT in place of a Period, a Question mark, or a Comma. Just because the Japanese commit Engrish doesn’t mean we English speakers should too. They have an excuse ? we Don’t. )

Accuracy is all well and fine, but one mustn’t forget that scanlations are read for PLEASURE. Trying to wrap your brain around a direct word-for-word translation does NOT make for pleasurable reading.

As long as the Meaning is accurate, where’s the harm in making the darn thing read smoothly like any other professionally published work?

Commentary on Translations Continued

This had started as a joke elsewhere during a discussion of effective translation. Ookami had mentioned that as long as the translations didn't read along the lines of All your base are belong to us, then it would be deemed reasonably acceptable (I'm paraphrasing). Well, I couldn't resist...

So I had to find the PERFECT image...

Then Ookami proceeded to chuckle over the presence of Yoda-Speak in scanlations.

Once again I could not resist the challenge...

Ookami was kind enough to provide a few more... examples...

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