I don't think it's terribly relevant as Kidoguchi knows Shimizu is gay, right?
He doesn't know for sure. Shimizu has only come out to Maekawa. So even if Kidoguchi suspects it, I don't think someone who is not certain of someone else being gay or how comfortable they feel openly talking about it, would use a female pronoun.
Not trying to argue, just my two cents. Seems like "they" would be more appropriate here, considering the fact that he doesn't directly use a female pronoun in Japanese as well.
So, there are no gendered pronouns in Japanese, but in English, gendered pronouns are so common that people consider it conspicuously out of your way to use they/their/them. This adds a complicated subtext to a lot of manga, especially queer-genre manga, because you can give the impression that someone is guarding their sexuality when they're actually speaking frankly, or you can give the impression that someone has been "tipped off" to things they're already supposed to know, or any number of other little mischaracterizations.
I believe it's generally suggested here and from past conversations that Shimizu doesn't really have any secrets from Kidoguchi. He almost certainly knows she's a yuri fan, and that she ships girls constantly. We also know that they broke up -and- they're still good friends, which suggests comfort and honesty. He may or may not be explicitly aware that she's gay, but he probably has at least suspicions, and this is supposed to be a scene where she's bearing her soul to her most trusted friend. It changes the dynamic if the translator writes it as if she's in the closet with him.
All in all, I think it's a complicated question with no easy answer. I suspect it's immaterial anyway. He probably knew anyway and there's a good chance he recognizes that it's Maekawa. (Now, anyway)
This one of the reasons why I've recently started contemplating a different approach to Japanese-to-English translation of manga that's partly inspired by a novel approach used by the translator group of Samayoeru Tensei-sha-tachi no Relive Game (Psycho Play) to tackle the problem of the MC (originally male but magically transformed to female in Chapter 1) repeatedly switching between male and female pronouns within the same speech bubble in early chapters. Psycho Play's solution is to simply translate both as "I", but gloss each one with the appropriate gender symbol in a surprisingly non-obtrusive manner (here is an example from Chapter 3).
My hypothetical approach is to translate normally until we hit situations where gender ambiguity is crucial, in which case we immediately switch to gender-neutral pronouns that are glossed with gendered signs where appropriate based on either pre-established facts (e.g. we know X has a mistaken assumption about Y's actual sex, while Z does not) or the most plausible expectations (e.g. we know X's actual sex is not known to the surrounding crowd, while the present Y knows it). Yes, that may very well make the dialogue look weird and "unnatural" to a native English speaker... and that's perfectly fine. You want to know why?
Because the characters aren't talking in English, but in Japanese, which operates by a very different set of rules and conventions. Localization may be an important part of the translation process (the degree of importance is arguable, but it's undeniable that finding the closest equivalents in meaning is vital for creating a coherent, intelligible and easily "digestible" result for the average reader), but it should never be the overriding priority. The obsession with the idea that JTE requires forcing the narration and dialogue into the mold of "natural" English (which is a subjective label varying from one country to another, and even within the same country in some cases, sometimes to drastic degrees of divergence) at the expense of any natural ambiguities and the like from the source, all in the name of localization, is something that pisses me off about a lot of translators.
Speaking for myself, I may have initially found the results of the "accuracy is more important than localization" paradigm confusing, but AFAIR it didn't take me that long to get used it and even start to kinda-unconsciously see it as just another "Japanese variety" of English. God knows how some real-life varieties (whether you choose to call them "dialects", "accents", or some other term) of English are borderline if not outright unintelligible to speakers of more "popular" varieities (e.g. American and British) that aren't used to such exotic varieties.
To put that last paragraph another way: I believe that a translator not only has no obligation to coddle a potential reader by tailoring his "product" to their whims. They should be helping them grow and learn, broaden their horizons in terms of knowledge about the foreign cultures from which the translated work comes from whenever such culture pops up in said work. If the reader isn't willing to grow and learn, then that's their loss, not the translator's, who should just move on and forget about those who have chosen to willfully wallow in their own ignorance (which is sometimes driven by such despicable motivations as xenophobia and ethnic/cultural/national chauvinism).
last edited at Sep 10, 2019 9:30PM
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