Translation

June 2010

Translation is a two step process:

Understand the original material
Recreate it in the target language

Your ability to understand a given work is not (completely) tied to your familiarity with the language it was written in. Being fluent with the source language helps, but it isn’t always enough (or even the most important). Ideally, you should also be familiar with:

The topics that the work discusses (e.g., jargon)
The culture that the work was made in/for
The author’s past work and similar works by other authors

The second step, recreating, is the hard part. Being fluent in the target language is mandatory. Beyond that, you should be a skilled writer with attention to detail. Making a good translation is like making an authentic forgery.

Goals of translation (in order of importance):

Preserve the work’s essence, spirit, and meaning
Make a work understandable to a different audience
Preserve the work’s details and subtleties

It is more important to preserve the spirit of a work than it is to make it understandable. Whenever the two are in conflict, understandability loses out. This has a number of implications:

Don’t dumb it down. Expect a basic knowledge of the work’s cultural context.
Don’t do weird things because “it fits” or “the audience will like it.”
Don’t censor, but preserve any censorship in the original.

Translation notes are a crutch and to be avoided whenever possible. However, there are a few exceptions that arise whenever the language itself becomes a topic in the work:

Don’t try to preserve puns. Translate the primary meaning, and include a note stating the alternate meaning.
Don’t try to preserve accents or dialects. If the accent is familiar in your target language, keep it. Otherwise, drop the accent. If necessary, include a note stating what accent is used.
Don’t try to preserve idioms. Never add new idioms or replace an idiom in the original language with one in the target language. If necessary, include a note stating that the phrase is a common idiom.

General guidelines:

Don’t attempt to copy “professional” translators. They frequently make unnecessary changes.
Be careful about sentence flow. Don’t translate each line in isolation.
Try to preserve tone. Try to maintain the formality level and sentence structure/complexity.
Don’t break sentences up or join them together whenever possible.
Whenever there is a break in the source text, try to keep the key translated terms on the same side of the break as they started on. In comics, avoid reordering the content of speech bubbles whenever possible.
When translating interjections, stay as literal as possible. Don’t take the Lord’s name unless it was used in the original work.
Use consistent translations for repeated phrases and terms. It’s important that readers are able to recognize these.
Prefer unambiguous terms. For example, dogs should say “woof,” since “bow” and “bark” have other meanings. (Of course, small, hyperactive dogs might “yip” instead.)
Don’t plaster your translation credits all over the original work. At most, put your group information somewhere unobtrusive.

Subtitle guidelines:

Use many short subtitles instead of complex long ones. Allow only one line of visible text at a time (except in the case of multiple, simultaneously spoken lines).
A new subtitle should be started after any sort of pause in the speech. Commas should be avoided for this purpose.
Don’t tie subtitles to cuts between shots.
Don’t translate the original credits. They can be looked up online.
Make sure the sentence fragment being spoken matches up fairly well to the subtitle onscreen. Try to avoid reordering clauses.
If there is time, allow subtitles to slightly linger onscreen even after the line is finished being spoken.
No karaoke unless it existed in the original.

Foreign language guidelines (foreign to the work’s original primary language):

Silently correct any mistakes in the original.
Never give two translations of the same line.
If the foreign line was translated in the original, translate the translation. Otherwise, preserve the line in the original foreign language.