Twelve Kingdoms, Interview with the Translator, Wordplay

The point of Teal'c's joke is he is the only one who laughs.

Kate:  In the Japanology Plus episode on shrines, Peter Barakan comments that the Japanese like word play—using the similarities between words to draw analogies and make points.

How do you strive to retain word choice--related terms of either definition or sound?

Eugene: I'm always pleasantly surprised when I can come up with a close English equivalent for a Japanese expression (some, like "Two birds with one stone," are the same). The problem is the more subtle usages I'm missing. Short of being truly bilingual, this is where working with a native-speaking editor would be necessary for a truly faithful translation.

Another curious problem is translating a phrase into English that seems (to me, at least) to make sense and then wondering if anybody actually utters those words in English and googling it and getting no relevant hits. One of the fascinating aspects of generative linguistics is how easy it is to form comprehensible phrases that no one has ever uttered before.

I end up doing the opposite more often, that is, asking myself what I would write if I were writing the original copy in English. While literal translations have their uses, you do want a translation to stand on its own as a literary work. Hence Neil Gaiman being hired to rewrite the English script for Princess Mononoke.

Japanese also uses far more onomatopoeia than English. In those cases, I hope to find a similar alliteration. But then I'll take any excuse to toss in an alliteration if one occurs to me.