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Ghost Car posted:There sure are some, uh, interesting translation choices here, though. Like, why do we need to be given everyone's name in kanji upon their introduction? I'd assume most of the intended audience for the English translation doesn't read Japanese, so it's just so many meaningless scribbles. At least with the Ushiromiya family and their Western-name-written-in-kanji schtick it's at least sort of relevant (though as a translator I'd still go with "My/his/her name is written with the characters for X, Y, and Z" over just dumping the kanji in there), but why do that for the servants? Seacats is a game of mysteries, and some of those mysteries involve riddles. Without getting too much into spoiler territory, all I can say is that the exact wording of things eventually becomes extremely important, and solving some of the mysteries may require knowledge of how everyone's names are written in the original Japanese. (Or, they may not, red herrings abound.) Granted, I know the next logical argument in response to that is "That's stupid, a good translation would rework the original mystery/riddle so that it could be solved by English-speaking audiences." Ordinarily I would agree with that, but Umineko is a special case for several reasons. For one thing, requiring knowledge of a foreign language is not unique to the English translation; from what I can tell, even the original Japanese expected its audiences to understand some English in order to solve some of the same mysteries by themselves. It's not an exact parallel in terms of relative difficulty, but it's still there. Second, it becomes clear later on--and I believe the authors of the story have also stated this directly--that this novel is set up to be a game that can be solved by its readers with all the clues provided. As in, that is the main purpose of the novel, what it was planned and written to be. If the translators messed with TOO much of the original writing, they would basically be changing the rules of the game, presenting an effectively different game than the original authors intended players to solve. Not to mention, eventually the mysteries increase in complexity to the extent where it wouldn't be enough to simply swap out a Japanese pun for an English one. I know one of the major goals of translation is to make things as accessible as possible to new audiences, but that goal has to be balanced with preserving the author's original intent, and given the nature of this particular novel, there really wasn't any way to accomplish that without a more direct translation than usual. Hopefully, this will become more apparent later on. Third, even if the translators were good enough to craft full-English equivalents of the mysteries presented by the original, the story doesn't actually provide solutions to every single mystery it presents to the reader. A lot of stuff gets left open to interpretation. In my opinion, that's one of the story's major charms, to make it so that there's always something left to ponder over. However, it's also yet another factor that makes it impossible to translate into English in a way that leaves it looking perfectly clean. Given how important wording is in this story, we're never really going to know how much rewording the translators could get away with without accidentally removing valuable contextual clues that would've worked towards solving some of the unsolved mysteries. There might not even BE a way, but they did the best they could, and some of what they did as a part of that was leaving in those translation notes. ...I probably didn't need to list ALL of those things in response to your comment, since not every point is fully relevant. (To preserve the mystery, I will not say which ones.) But I think it's worth bringing up all this now anyway, since this is probably not the only time people are going to raise questions about the overly-direct translation. I love Umineko, and I'm glad it's being LPed. Once the story really gets off the ground, it starts raising new questions with practically every new line of dialogue. Solving the mysteries is MEANT to be a group effort, and I gave up on solving them by myself sometime in the middle of the second episode (you will see why), so I'd like to see what happens once you actually get multiple minds working on it. Taking it piece by piece like this should be a great way to help everyone break things down.
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Aug 13, 2012 15:22
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Shiny777 posted:I'm not sure if this is a Ryukishi thing in general, as I'm not very familiar with his other stuff, but it's definitely a When They Cry thing that no one is allowed to have a non-terrible family. Ryukishi07 may not have had the best childhood. I'm not far into Rose Guns Days yet, but so far it just seems to be about a bunch of total badasses being total badasses together. Everyone certainly faces problems, but it has more to do with terrible economy and the ensuing high crime rates rather than being in an unloving environment. I'm not even to the end of the first season yet, though, so I fully expect a turnaround at some point. (Also it's worth pointing out that possibly the reason no one seems to be having family problems is because everyone's families have been wiped out by tornadoes.) *At the hands of students, teachers, and ghosts.
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Jul 5, 2014 02:09
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