Interview with a Translator: Edogawa, Language 1

Kate: There are a number of colloquialisms scattered throughout the text. Were colloquialisms such as “still as stone” or “cards up my sleeves” your choice or Edogawa’s? Was there a place where you substituted a Japanese colloquialism with an English colloquialism?

Eugene: Most colloquialisms don’t survive a literal translation. I’m always delighted when one comes close (enough) because of linguistic convergent evolution or because of shared cognates.

The expression I translated as “cards up my sleeve” has dictionary translations of “secret skill” and “trump card.” A more literal rendering might be, “Don’t you know I’ve got trump cards I can produce at any time?” So it comes down to what I imagine that character would say in English.

Ultimately, all language arises out of the colloquial and cannot be separated from the constantly evolving culture, which is why the “definition” of a colloquial expression is usually going to be another colloquial expression.

Star Trek: TNG did a cute episode on the subject though it was flat wrong about the linguistics (it’d make sense if everybody was speaking different dialects of the same language). It’s the same mistake that tries to turn kanji into ideograms with transcendent “meanings.” Kanji are logograms. I would go so far as to argue that kanji in practical use are graphically little different than written English words and morphemes.

Which means that if I think about it long enough, I can probably come up with a better version. But translators, especially in manga, anime, and light novels, rarely have enough time. I see now that I used that expression twice (“ace up my sleeve”), so I changed the first one to, “Time for my last-ditch measure. This one will teach you a lesson!”

A running joke in My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU is Hachiman mistaking Saika for a girl (speaking of beautiful boys). In one scene, Hachiman quips, “Would you make miso soup for me every morning?” It’s an old school marriage proposal, but translated literally (as it is in the anime), it will sound strange if you don’t know the cultural background.

Kate: Likewise, there are several places where Edogawa is clearly playing with language. How did you solve a problem like “ash” for both “embers” and “tree”? Where else did you have to solve such a problem? How do word-plays complicate translator’s lives?

Eugene: I’ll pat myself on the back for that one. Edogawa uses the homophones hai (ash) and hae (fly). They sound almost identical, but “ash” and “ash” are identical!

Wordplay is the bane of a translator’s existence. Unless you are truly fluent in both languages, you’re going to miss stuff. The same goes for cultural references. This is one area when traditional literary analysis really helps. Unless somebody points stuff out, you’re stuck at the surface level and whatever you’ve picked up on your own.

Kate: I notice a construction in The Space Alien that I see in many other light novels. An event will occur. Then a character will respond as if from the beginning of the event. For example: 

One, two, three, four, five of them, flat and round and shining with a silver light, shot over Ginza Avenue and flew off toward the west. Ichiro wasn’t imagining things. His father could see them as well.

Is this a typical construction in Japanese novels? Description followed by summary or reaction?

Eugene: This is a construction in Japanese fiction that others have taken note of, that is, flipping the usual sequence of objective description and subjective reaction. I see this “out of order” style with dialogue tags too (which I usually “fix” to avoid confusing the reader). Dialogue can be “self-tagged” by the use of pronouns and conjugations that indicate who is speaking, something that doesn’t work well in English.

In western narrative fiction, an unattributed observation is attached to the POV character or to an omniscient authorial voice. It’d be interesting to study whether anything profound can be concluded about writing styles that link (and how tightly) or separate the observation and the observer.

An article by Chiyuki Kumakura, “History and Narrative in Japanese,” presents a fascinating analysis of the paradox of who exactly is doing the talking in Japanese narrative fiction and when (grammatically) the act of recollection actually takes place. Indeed, I often encounter a mix of past and present “tense” in Japanese prose that in English would be written all in the past tense or all in the present tense.

Kumakura’s explanation is that

The Japanese verb system functions not in terms of “person” like European languages but in terms of the ways phenomena are perceived by the speaker. For this reason, Japanese time consciousness is focused only at the moment of perception or recognition, and therefore, there is only one moment, and one moment only, namely the present time that is crucial in Japanese.

In the original Japanese, the passage cited above contains two descriptive sentences in the present and present progressive tenses and two “reactions” in the past tense. Here is a more grammatically literal translation.

“It [= 'the strange spectacle'] is flat and round and shining with a silver light. One, two, three, four, five of them are flying at tremendous speed over Ginza Avenue and off toward the west.” And then back to the past tense for the reaction of the POV character: “Ichiro wasn’t imagining things. His father could see them too.”