Quote:
Originally Posted by Wild Goose
Regards translations, I'm reminded of Matt Thorn, a translator who noted that when translating Japanese, you must have an ear for voice. All too often, translators translate without quite understanding the character's voice, which is probably why LNs sound so bland. It's like someone taking a British TV series, with all the accents and social strata, and dubbing it into French and everyone sounds the same.
tl;dr, LN translators on the whole translate the words, but don't really capture the voice of the characters. |
Even though this is a bit of a side-topic, I have to agree with this, though I would also add that this "voice" aspect applies just as much if not more so to the narration. I have to admit that I have a hard time reading most light novel fan translations. The intent of these translations often seems to be conveying the intent of the plot (i.e. so that everyone can understand "what happened"), but there's little apparent thought given to either the voice of the author or the voice of the characters. But this is perhaps fairly obvious, because most fan translators are not "authors"; they act more like "converters" (like hopefully-smarter versions of Google Translate). That makes sense; you get what you pay for, and a novel is a much larger investment than anime or manga. I'm not blaming anyone involved. Fan translations are feeding an audience who just wants to know what happens as soon as possible, and chomp at the bit for spoilers and summaries until the moment the fan translation is out. But I do wonder a bit if this further biases the perception of the literary value of the medium (independent from aohige's argument that most of the medium isn't all that great in the first place). If the idea is to put English readers on an "even playing field", there's more to the story than just "being able to understand the plot".
(But to aohige's point that the Light Novel industry inherited a lot of its themes and writing elements/styles from the eroge/galge industry, it may be worth pointing out that the decline in the eroge industry over the last many years has been attributed in no small part to increased competition (for fan time) from light novels. It's probably no surprise that they use many of the same character designers as well. Light novels are much cheaper than galge/eroge, both to produce and to buy, and can still be popular without requiring a 18+ rating (and, consequently, it's harder to sell all-ages galge because people could just read light novels instead). So while I'm not condemning the material, I do think the overall point does seem to follow logically.)