(back to translation thoughts)

originally discussed 21 december 2024.

HI. i know exactly which essay you're talking about!! it's a little bit embarrassing to have it brought up bc you can kind of hear the way i was grinding my teeth in frustration like nails on a chalkboard through the tone it's written in, but i do still stand by those feelings.

hearing abt how the spanish translation does it is really neat too, since it takes so wholly to the side of "localize everything so that it feels natural for a native speaker of the target language to read and understand". despite the essay, that's something i actually enjoy doing a lot when writing or translating myself! there's just smth so intellectually enriching abt having to sit back and think abt how the original term's cultural context informs the native audience's impression of its meaning, then compare it to what angle the target audience must be approaching it from and try to match your phrasing in such a way that they see it the same way that the native audience does.

full localization is also the side my (taiwanese) mother is on, and to a much greater extent than i am. this is something i learned a few years ago when i was practicing chinese by translating some of my (white american) father's short stories into chinese and the three of us sat down to review said translation.

while the extent to which i wanted it to be localized was definitely more than what the average weeb would want done to their anime (for example, i wanted to give the characters proper chinese names, reflective of the expectations the reader should have of them as people, instead of just transliterating them as most cn translations of western writing do), i also wanted to maintain the characters' styles of speech, since it's reflective of their characterization. my mother, on the other hand, wanted to localize their speaking styles too, so that instead of speaking in plain vernacular, the characters would all sound like "the well-educated characters a chinese audience would expect from chinese literature proper."

and we got into such a huge argument abt this btw. i can kind of understand my mom's side of things, since she told me that she read a book growing up which had been translated into cn from i think french? but it had apparently used so many foreign words and/or concepts that it was just impossible to parse. but also, if she read that before emigrating to america, then that would have been sometime in the 80s at the latest, which puts the sinosphere in a very different place culturally compared to today…

but anyway, like i said, i think that localizing names and terminology isn't an inherently bad thing! i think that ultimately, my favorite localizations are made with a specific subculture in mind, which is very much a mix of both my asian-ness and my fannish origins in anime/manga/weeb culture, since we weebs obviously have a tradition of leaving some things untranslated or unlocalized and just having the translator's notes kept somewhere.

i've always had the impression that this is done out of a love for the nuances of the original culture, and i think the reason this worked out so well is bc the early animanga subculture was probably heavily shaped by asian diaspora, who'd be able to bridge those cultural gaps more easily than, say, some random white american, purely by nature of similar heritage. (i don't have any sources on that and obviously situations vary bc being diaspora is a very complicated thing so you probs shouldn't cite me or anything lol)

my grievances w/the way early genshin did its english localizations ultimately boils down to the fact that they localized things inconsistently. like, if you're going to leave some things (for lack of a better term) ""untranslated"" to strengthen the audience's impression of that area's cultural origins, then i think the least you could do is be consistent abt what gets echoed in translation n where those cultural echoes come from. very petty of me to say, but i hope whoever localized the barbara hangout and thus canonized her fanclub calling her "barbara-sama" works somewhere else now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

yeah, it definitely makes a lot of sense for translating foreign names to be discouraged, esp when working with real locations. i know that early 2000s anime/manga localizations are infamous for doing that (which is most definitely why "localizing" can feel practically like a swear word in elitist weeb circles), but when working with fiction, i think it can add a lovely layer of depth to have a very carefully thought-out name translation.

i remember a few years ago, when i was first reading the bnha manga, there was an end page from one of the fan translators talking abt the wordplay going into the name of some newly introduced character. i don't even remember that char's jp name anymore, but the pun had something to do with stones, and so the scanlator wrote that their best shot at localizing the name was "chris taal". to sound like "crystal."

i have never stopped thinking about that! esp. as i learned more abt the wordplay that went into all the bnha characters' names!!

addendum 3 june 2025…

okay, i just went through the effort of tracking down the aforementioned fan scanlation of bnha, and boy was that a fun trip down memory lane!!

long story short, the note was in the omakes for bnha volume 16 as scanlated by fallen angel scanlations, and the localization attempt was actually "chris tulls." which i think is slightly lamer, but what honestly still cracks me up is the fact that their localization joke for lock rock's civilian name was fuckin. lochlan keyes. like goddamn it you know what happens when you go seven days without puns you can't do this shit to me c':

fallen angel scans have gone defunct in the last few years, taking with them their download archives of the chapters they scanlated, but through the power of aggregator piracy scraper websites, a number of their releases still exist on the internet, and i downloaded the particular page for everyone's enjoyment here (scrollable for screen real estate):

anyway, neither here nor there, but i remember reading a post on tumblr a number of years ago complaining abt the fallen angel scanlations of bnha leading to a lot of fan misconceptions due to their rather liberal translation style. in particular, the post was calling them out for favoring/misleading kacchakos bc they translated bakugou's nickname for uraraka (literally 'round-face') as… 'angel face'.

you can probably tell from the sole picture i've also included here that they can be very hit-or-miss with their translations.

even now, i find it a lot of fun to imagine what the experience of reading/watching bnha could have been like if that kind of cheesy wordplay had been localized. it would have definitely felt more cartoonish, but that's also what makes it charming to me, since ~i~ grew up watching the infamously bad 4kids anime dubs on tv lol.

i suppose it comes down to a question of audience in this case. if i were producing a translation for people already familiar with anime and manga, i'd go with the footnotes, "yeah this is a pun; here's an approx localization we will not be using to give you an idea of its impact" route without question, since that's what's culturally expected of the community. but if i was making a translation to air on, like, saturday morning cartoons, i'd honestly hesitate on a decision.

localizing character names also invites localizing location names, which inches towards sketchy territory, since i'm pretty sure the locations in bnha are at least loosely real. bc although it is good to expose children to foreign cultures n stuff, localizing things a bit more could be a good way to reinforce their sense of native culture, though whether that reinforcement is necessary (in a place like the united states? most certainly unnecessary lol) is its own can of worms.

localizing the names to be punny in english would be a lot of fun, and i think v fitting for a children's dub, but i don't think i'd want to localize away actual, non-fictional location names… but that would lead to a sense of dissonance btwn the characters' names and their own setting… >_>

tbh i really do like the direction genshin has since taken with keeping names "unlocalized" (in theory, anyway). i grew up around a fair chunk of non-english signage, so i'm not terribly bothered by an inability to immediately read or grasp nuances of place names. yeah, it's a little bit more work to catch the sorts of details you mentioned abt like, fontaine's locations (which is v cool i also wish "fleuve cendre" was a cinderella reference now), but i personally find that sort of digging, once you know where and how to look, to be deeply rewarding bc it forces you to absorb at least a little bit of the original cultural context, which can dramatically alter a person's impression of a translation's meaning depending on how different it is from their native culture n how familiar they already were with the source culture.

these differences can be esp huge btwn cn and en (and thus turn me into a huge jackass in discussions w/people who take their monolingual interp of the english text as the cn writers' intent), so i prefer everyone either being forced to do their own research or listen to discussions run by people familiar with those cultural references lol.

responses composed 4 june 2025.
(dw msg character limit is a killer…)