Zormau posted:
There is no perfect equivalency in translation. Even simply carrying over the honorifics will, in many cases, not be perfectly equivalent. Not only because they're an alien element in English, but also because the audience will not have a uniform concept of what those words entail. Sure, they'll have a rough concept and there will be a lot of overlap and they'll generally get the gist... but don't they also get that from a localisation like the one we got? I think they do.
No, they don't, because the context has been completely changed and it doesn't match the essence of original. So no, they do not get the gist of it, because here, the nuance has been removed and butchered.
As for the target text becoming foreign to both cultures... I don't really see why I should care whether the localised text is now alien to the original language community... They are absolutely not the target audience.
And this really proves my point of you not understanding the issue. My point is now it doesn't represent either. It's not true how things are in country of targeted audience, but now also doesn't represent the actual culture of original work, so it neither work as work grounded in target audience culture, nor as learning experience for original culture and completely failing to capture the essence of original in the process.
Yes, indeed, sometimes things just go horribly wrong. But then again, I think it's apples to oranges.
It's not. It would be if it was localization done right, but it isn't. We aren't arguing about doing localization or not. We're arguing whatever that localization was done well or not. And choice between well done localization and poorly done one is not "apples and oranges". As BugDevil said, it's pretty clearly case of you simply liking it and defending it despite its flaws.
Making the way hierarchy is expressed less specifically Japanese is a far cry from actually hard-changing the setting to another continent...
And yet in your posts you repeatedly treated both kind of changes as pretty much equal, as long as they serve target audience. Like now for example. It's Japanese story. The way hierarchy is expressed there is important. In fact, I'm surprised I didn't comment about it, but just because we are more used to using names over last names, it does not mean changing characters to use first names when translating Japanese work, is even remotely being "similar" or "approximation". Japanese put much more weight on first name usage. Changing everyone to call each other using first names, because it's the way it's done here, is nowhere the same thing as everyone using last names in Japan. The second they decided to do it, they already decided to ignore trying to make it anywhere near equivalent experience for their target audience.
Zormau posted:
This means that I am more willing than you to take a step back from the setting being as specifically Japanese as possible. That's the big difference I see between our perspectives. I don't need the story to be as specifically Japanese as possible. I don't think it loses anything substantial in this case, as the hierarchies, while less explicit, are still well-represented.
That's pretty much the entire reason we disagree. Because you don't care about Japanese culture and are more than willing to remove it from the work. You're ignoring that even if you perfectly follow sociolinguistic rules of the target language, the story still takes place specifically in Japan, so you can't change the norms to fit target audience and then hand wave the fact, they don't match anymore to what was presented in original story. No matter how much you want it to, it doesn't reflect original context anymore.
We simply expect different things from and value different aspects in our entertainment products.
Yes. I expect to get experience as close to original as possible. You just want to read something that flows well and don't care if original story had to be changed in the process.
It's a lot more work
I really dislike the implication that "normal" translation is easier. Sure, just translating something can be easy, but properly expressing the intent of author and keeping the essence of original, while making it understandable to people speaking different language. Now, that is hard work. The only reason localization is more work and is riskier is because, they decided to give themselves more work, they didn't really need to. Especially nowadays, when we live in connected world and different cultures are mixing together, I find the need to obscure them and making translation as user friendly as possible, insulting to a degree. But you do you. It's clear nothing we tell you, will ever change your mind. It's a bit scary that you or people like you might be working on some localizations in the future.
Zormau posted:
I can very easily accept Maki and Doujima being referred to by their surname as a consequence of them being pretty much the only boys around. Makes sense to me.
You definitely need to stretch a little in a different direction to resolve cognitive dissonance regarding Doujima's remark. It can be done: Doujima, Maki and Yuu are the three first years of the StuCo, yet only one of them is referred to by their first name. That being the case it seems plausible (to me) that Doujima was under the assumption that the elders would refer to their underclassmen by family name. He is presented as a bit of an occasional airhead, so it's plausible that he just hadn't realized this before.
Now that is rich. You first preach how translation should do all work for reader/watcher and make it as in line with sociolinguistic rules of the target audience as possible, but now when said translation fucked up something, you're backpedaling and saying the audience should figure out how to make sense of it? And no, nothing you wrote here make any sense. Using last names for boys is not how the "target audience" is using their language. In fact, them addressing only boys by last names would be ultra weird and worth commenting on. There's no rule that elders refer to their underclassmen by family name, which would be very confusing for target audience. And the best, now you're saying target audience is supposed to infer a character trait based on something that didn't exist in original and wasn't a problem? And you're trying to convince us, original work isn't misinterpreted? Also, you're saying audience is expected to figure all that, while watching without pausing, when goal of that supposedly superior localization was to remove need for such things?
I just wanted to make a proper reply, since I didn't have time last time. I pretty much agree with Blaastar's summary and Gudetamago probably explained what I was getting at much better than I did.
Anyway. I'm going to do something else now, so would Yuu excuse me...
I had to.
last edited at Sep 7, 2019 2:44PM
