Sinnesspiel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sinnesspiel) wrote2015-05-14 09:22 pm
sinnesspiel) wrote2015-05-14 09:22 pm
Entry tags:
Death Note Translation Issues
Someone wants to make me eat my hat for declaring I didn't think the English translations of DN were too terrible. I spoke from a place of ignorance, not having actually SEEN much of DN in any form of English--I've only seen bits of the dub and decided that was more than enough of that, I watch the anime raw or kind of nab whatever the first set of subs are that come up on a streaming site when watching with friends and thus don't really know what most of the subs go with, and I read the Japanese manga. But I hadn't heard any retarded fandom statements aside from some dub jokes about Light's name that I know weren't in the original. The series isn't culturally steeped in complex Japanese nuances. How much could they screw up?
So speaking of eating my hat, let's get my other mistake out of the way first.
大学時代の彼女は、カモフラージュを含め五、六人います。 でも彼は女子を好きになることはないでしょう。
Viz: During college he had about five or six girlfriends, some being merely camouglage. He's likely not capable of loving a woman.
Scanslation: At university, Light had a total of 5-6 girlfriends, but he didn't like them, right?
My original translation: "He had in total about five or six girlfriends as camouflage during his college years. But he’s probably never fallen for a girl before."
My updated translation: "During college he had, counting camouflage, five or six girlfriends. But he's probably never fallen for a girl before."
Upon closer inspection, I did make an error! The error was not relating to the hotly debated "suki ni naru koto wa nai" portion but the first potion, which I'll clear up here. The original translation I gave implies all of them are camouflage, and while I fully believe that to be true (including Misa in a sense) that is not what it grammatically says. The better translation would be: "During college he had, counting camouflage, five or six girlfriends."
The Viz translation ("some being merely camouflage") implies some were not. The translation I believe to be best doesn't exclude that possibility but nor does it force it, which is consistent with the Japanese text's grammatical ambiguity. It doesn't make it impossible that he dated a girl or two just because he wanted to as he apparently did with Yuri. I think Viz did their best but since they're putting out a paid product and by licensing it (in theory) keep anyone else from publishing a competing translation I'll hold their ass to the fire a little harder for a mistake. That said, how could any translator possibly anticipate the neuroticism of fandom, particularly the Death Note fandom, and on top of that shippers?
The scanslation translation cut the camouflage element altogether. Note that this is done by unpaid non-professionals doing what I have no reason to believe is anything less than their earnest best at an honest translation.
Now to address the point people actually care about: does it say Light isn't capable of or that he doesn't like girls? The answer is no.
Some angles taken, either in an earnest misunderstanding or in an attempt at the desired translation, have included pointing out that the nominalized verb ("naru" or in this case 'fall') is not past tense, declaring that the nominalizer (koto) doesn't mean anything, and that if it is nominalized that nominalized statements are at times used in Japanese to make generalized statements. I'll try to address these briefly and as simply as possible as it's my understanding that many in the discussion are not native English speakers nor fluent in Japanese.
First I should point out that I think that the blatantly incorrect Viz translation is still a true fact: I don't think he is capable of falling for a woman. Or for anyone or anything, short of perhaps through the magic of the Death Note: "Yagami Light falls deeply in love with Amane Misa and they spend twenty days together in romantic bliss before dying happily in each other's arms." I still enjoy yaoi pairings involving the character, including the occasional Light x L.
My only interest here is as a linguist and translator in what is being said grammatically. One could grammatically say "That's beautiful," and actually mean and be implying "That's retarded." The implications of anything not grammatically present is up to the audience to detect.
Past and Present Tense
On the first issue, "suki ni naru" and "nai" are in the non-past tense, which is used for present and future tenses in Japanese. So is the entirety of the passage and the majority of the Q&As in HTR13. This is not remotely unusual, and I address the Japanese uses of past and non-past in more detail regarding narrator speech here, for interested parties.
Translating it into the present tense would require translating the rest of the passage into present tense which would give us:
"During college he has, counting camouflage, five or six girlfriends. But he's probably never falling for a girl (before)."
We'll say for the sake of argument that nominalization doesn't already place the topic within a timeframe, since the next section will address nominalization.
You'll notice this translation seems a bit awkward and as English speakers we want to adjust the sentence to something more natural, such as the desired: "He probably doesn't fall for girls." This is still a bit awkward so we want to switch it to the more natural: "He probably doesn't like girls." The problem is that this adjustment does change what's grammatically been said, it is not just "correcting" the grammar---the issue is that English grammar does not have the verb tense to express the former, more awkward one.
The difference between "You are stupid" and "You are being stupid" is that in the first "are" or state of being will continue indefinitely. To say one is being stupid is to specifically imply a non-durative state--it doesn't mean one isn't stupid necessarily, just that the grammar is referring to the present moment. Being is not a stative verb.
"Like" in the phrase "likes girls" is stative; they express a state rather than action or change. We do not generally express stative verbs in the progressive tense in English. If we do, there is a change in meaning. When stative verbs are used in the progressive tense it is because in that case the verb has become active; the apple tastes good vs. Ryuk is tasting the apple. It will never be "The apple is tasting good."
Likewise, the state of liking (or not liking) girls is stative cannot be expressed in English as having limited duration, taking place at the present time. That does not mean the concept of liking being a state that changes doesn't exist. It does, it's what's being translated--it just doesn't work well in present tense without taking it to the present perfect tense, which looks like past tense to those who don't do linguistics and didn't have to learn tenses in grammar school. Sometimes he likes Ryuk, sometimes he doesn't like Ryuk. Right now he (doesn't) like Ryuk. Instead of saying he is liking Ryuk, we use "right now" to set it in time, similar to using "before" to set Light's situation in time. The only other way to express that a changeable state has been in a state of time is to use the perfect tense, which uses auxiliary verbs such as had or has: "He has not liked girls."
To those not very familiar with linguistics and grammar, those who speak English without necessarily having to dissect it, that may seem like a wordier variant of the plain old past tense, when it is the English language way of expressing a present tense relevance of past tense or current but non-indefinite actions. "He is presently right here and now in the state of not having liked a girl (before)."
English tends to default past tense translations in narrative description of fiction, so we can express this in the same tense as the rest of the passage without anything becoming awkward, not that the perfect verb forms are awkward, but their past tense auxiliaries can confuse people who want to see something badly enough.
Fortunately if you still have doubts, the Japanese text goes so far as to put "not liking" into a nominative state via koto.
Nominals
I'm going to borrow from linguist Robert Langcacker to explain what a nominal is. The verb is explode, the nominal is explosion: explode is a process, explosion is the abstraction of that process. Abstraction is a very common modality in Japanese--I'll refer you again to my essay on tense based modality, which discusses modal markers such as da, no da, (no) mono da, (no) koto da, (na, no) wake da. They offer explanation or evaluation from the writer, and set the abstracted, nominalized topic as something known and being commented upon rather than an action taking place and due focus as an action. Darou further abstracts it as something being thought on or commented on by the speaker, a removed idea presented for thought.
Not all verbs have a convenient noun-abstraction like explode does with explosion or fossilize does with fossilization. Abstraction with like is "the experience of liking" quite the same way that explosion is, if you'll excuse the borderline recursive definition, "the experience of exploding."
To focus back around to our topic, then the "wa nai" that comes after it of course means that the experience doesn't exist. Japanese doesn't have a perfect tense, so blessedly this part's a lot more simple to hash over.
Japanese discourse is particularly fond of this. In linguist Senko Maynard's writings on Japanese nominalization there is a comparison of the first 500 sentences of English and Japanese novels, nominalization occurred in 32.6% of sentences in Tanin no Kao and only %2.60 of in the native English Dangling Man sentences had comparable abstraction. Meanwhile, when Dangling Man was translated into Japanese, %15.12 of sentences in the translation had these modality markers--and her research does not even use all of the modality markers suggested by other linguists in the link provided.
Sometimes koto wa nai is translated into never!
With as often as nominalization and abstraction is favored in Japanese, as demonstrated, it's doubtful anybody who's been exposed to Japanese has not met with the phrase "koto wa nai." They've probably also seen it translated as never.
English does not abstract as often. Why this is so is a matter for developmental linguists. When it basically conveys the same sentiment, English is prone to translating out the abstraction because a translation will seek fluency to the target language, and a translator must balance that with accuracy. Often times translating out the abstraction loses absolutely nothing of value. "Yasashi-sugiru koto wa nai." Yasashi is kind, sugiru is the verb for passing or exceeding or being too much of something. Being too kind is abstracted with koto and then that abstraction is said not to exist. This could be translated perfectly well into "You can never be too nice" even if "There's no such thing as too nice" is more literal.
Obviously the abstracted naru (suki ni naru) is not a case of a "liking does not exist." It may not exist for him, and that is what it's saying, but the problems with inferring from that that it cannot or will not exist will be explained after the next paragraph. First let me cover the other type of sentence where koto can lead to never.
Trying to keep the same form where the abstraction is a thing that has happened or not or an experience had or not had rather than a thing that does or does not exist, we can have "Kono kyoushitsu wa shizuka ni naru koto wa nai darou."
Literally: This class room become quiet is (probably) not happen.
Koto marks the quietness of the classroom as an abstraction while darou highlights that it's being commented upon. It's being commented on in regards to how it has been and may be expected to be because of that; "It's never been quiet in this classroom." is, in most cases, negligibly different from "It's never quiet in this class room." Thus you may often see it translated as the latter.
And you may want to say that the original sentence about Light is inferring on his future behavior, however there are several problems with that. We'll start with the strictly grammatical rather than the contextual. Grammatically there IS a difference between "He has never liked girls" and "He doesn't like girls." It's not a matter of tense, it's a matter of what is being said; return to the section above if you're confused about tense again. Also, there's the grammatically linking "but" at the beginning of the sentence, contextualizing the author's commentary on the abstraction. This leads us to discuss that context: the writer goes on to describe Light's experiences of not having liked, further highlighting it as not a stative matter but a condition of the action in the next sentences (specifically, not interacting equally, and looking down on people--either in general, or the girls themselves).
My Japanese friend says...
Are you sure your Japanese friend isn't also saying your desired interpretation could be had from the text? I have Japanese friends too. The sentence alone got the 'doesn't' translation, the sentence in context got something similar to mine. It'll end up a "my Dad can beat up your Dad" debate on this level. I mean I guess we could try to somehow limit a poll to JP only IPs and try... or we could take the well explained Japanese linguists whom I've cited's words on it.
In conclusion:
If you still want to say that the sentence is contextually implying that he doesn't like girls based on never having done so, then you can draw that implication from the accurate translation. The bonus is that the accurate translation does not necessarily force an implication that is not grammatically present--if the implication is present, it is contextual, and none of the context is missing. Context is missing however when you force your implications into the text. Sometimes people do this without thinking; what they take away from it is so strongly assumed that another party seeing it another way doesn't occur to them.
Sometimes it's in not so good faith.
I have my doubts Viz is TRYING to cater to yaoi fans or any such. In fact I'm wagering they didn't even think of how that line would be taken.
I have been privy to translations that have been in very bad faith. That's why it's important to me to emphasize a translation's accuracy even when I'd be very happy if the inaccurate one were true, and should therefore in theory be happy if swarths of fandom accepted it as true; that could seem to, if I were delusional, elevate my desires to something nearer to canon if it were a very, very, very popularly held misconception.
So speaking of eating my hat, let's get my other mistake out of the way first.
大学時代の彼女は、カモフラージュを含め五、六人います。 でも彼は女子を好きになることはないでしょう。
Viz: During college he had about five or six girlfriends, some being merely camouglage. He's likely not capable of loving a woman.
Scanslation: At university, Light had a total of 5-6 girlfriends, but he didn't like them, right?
My original translation: "He had in total about five or six girlfriends as camouflage during his college years. But he’s probably never fallen for a girl before."
My updated translation: "During college he had, counting camouflage, five or six girlfriends. But he's probably never fallen for a girl before."
Upon closer inspection, I did make an error! The error was not relating to the hotly debated "suki ni naru koto wa nai" portion but the first potion, which I'll clear up here. The original translation I gave implies all of them are camouflage, and while I fully believe that to be true (including Misa in a sense) that is not what it grammatically says. The better translation would be: "During college he had, counting camouflage, five or six girlfriends."
The Viz translation ("some being merely camouflage") implies some were not. The translation I believe to be best doesn't exclude that possibility but nor does it force it, which is consistent with the Japanese text's grammatical ambiguity. It doesn't make it impossible that he dated a girl or two just because he wanted to as he apparently did with Yuri. I think Viz did their best but since they're putting out a paid product and by licensing it (in theory) keep anyone else from publishing a competing translation I'll hold their ass to the fire a little harder for a mistake. That said, how could any translator possibly anticipate the neuroticism of fandom, particularly the Death Note fandom, and on top of that shippers?
The scanslation translation cut the camouflage element altogether. Note that this is done by unpaid non-professionals doing what I have no reason to believe is anything less than their earnest best at an honest translation.
Now to address the point people actually care about: does it say Light isn't capable of or that he doesn't like girls? The answer is no.
Some angles taken, either in an earnest misunderstanding or in an attempt at the desired translation, have included pointing out that the nominalized verb ("naru" or in this case 'fall') is not past tense, declaring that the nominalizer (koto) doesn't mean anything, and that if it is nominalized that nominalized statements are at times used in Japanese to make generalized statements. I'll try to address these briefly and as simply as possible as it's my understanding that many in the discussion are not native English speakers nor fluent in Japanese.
First I should point out that I think that the blatantly incorrect Viz translation is still a true fact: I don't think he is capable of falling for a woman. Or for anyone or anything, short of perhaps through the magic of the Death Note: "Yagami Light falls deeply in love with Amane Misa and they spend twenty days together in romantic bliss before dying happily in each other's arms." I still enjoy yaoi pairings involving the character, including the occasional Light x L.
My only interest here is as a linguist and translator in what is being said grammatically. One could grammatically say "That's beautiful," and actually mean and be implying "That's retarded." The implications of anything not grammatically present is up to the audience to detect.
Past and Present Tense
On the first issue, "suki ni naru" and "nai" are in the non-past tense, which is used for present and future tenses in Japanese. So is the entirety of the passage and the majority of the Q&As in HTR13. This is not remotely unusual, and I address the Japanese uses of past and non-past in more detail regarding narrator speech here, for interested parties.
Translating it into the present tense would require translating the rest of the passage into present tense which would give us:
"During college he has, counting camouflage, five or six girlfriends. But he's probably never falling for a girl (before)."
We'll say for the sake of argument that nominalization doesn't already place the topic within a timeframe, since the next section will address nominalization.
You'll notice this translation seems a bit awkward and as English speakers we want to adjust the sentence to something more natural, such as the desired: "He probably doesn't fall for girls." This is still a bit awkward so we want to switch it to the more natural: "He probably doesn't like girls." The problem is that this adjustment does change what's grammatically been said, it is not just "correcting" the grammar---the issue is that English grammar does not have the verb tense to express the former, more awkward one.
The difference between "You are stupid" and "You are being stupid" is that in the first "are" or state of being will continue indefinitely. To say one is being stupid is to specifically imply a non-durative state--it doesn't mean one isn't stupid necessarily, just that the grammar is referring to the present moment. Being is not a stative verb.
"Like" in the phrase "likes girls" is stative; they express a state rather than action or change. We do not generally express stative verbs in the progressive tense in English. If we do, there is a change in meaning. When stative verbs are used in the progressive tense it is because in that case the verb has become active; the apple tastes good vs. Ryuk is tasting the apple. It will never be "The apple is tasting good."
Likewise, the state of liking (or not liking) girls is stative cannot be expressed in English as having limited duration, taking place at the present time. That does not mean the concept of liking being a state that changes doesn't exist. It does, it's what's being translated--it just doesn't work well in present tense without taking it to the present perfect tense, which looks like past tense to those who don't do linguistics and didn't have to learn tenses in grammar school. Sometimes he likes Ryuk, sometimes he doesn't like Ryuk. Right now he (doesn't) like Ryuk. Instead of saying he is liking Ryuk, we use "right now" to set it in time, similar to using "before" to set Light's situation in time. The only other way to express that a changeable state has been in a state of time is to use the perfect tense, which uses auxiliary verbs such as had or has: "He has not liked girls."
To those not very familiar with linguistics and grammar, those who speak English without necessarily having to dissect it, that may seem like a wordier variant of the plain old past tense, when it is the English language way of expressing a present tense relevance of past tense or current but non-indefinite actions. "He is presently right here and now in the state of not having liked a girl (before)."
English tends to default past tense translations in narrative description of fiction, so we can express this in the same tense as the rest of the passage without anything becoming awkward, not that the perfect verb forms are awkward, but their past tense auxiliaries can confuse people who want to see something badly enough.
Fortunately if you still have doubts, the Japanese text goes so far as to put "not liking" into a nominative state via koto.
Nominals
I'm going to borrow from linguist Robert Langcacker to explain what a nominal is. The verb is explode, the nominal is explosion: explode is a process, explosion is the abstraction of that process. Abstraction is a very common modality in Japanese--I'll refer you again to my essay on tense based modality, which discusses modal markers such as da, no da, (no) mono da, (no) koto da, (na, no) wake da. They offer explanation or evaluation from the writer, and set the abstracted, nominalized topic as something known and being commented upon rather than an action taking place and due focus as an action. Darou further abstracts it as something being thought on or commented on by the speaker, a removed idea presented for thought.
Not all verbs have a convenient noun-abstraction like explode does with explosion or fossilize does with fossilization. Abstraction with like is "the experience of liking" quite the same way that explosion is, if you'll excuse the borderline recursive definition, "the experience of exploding."
To focus back around to our topic, then the "wa nai" that comes after it of course means that the experience doesn't exist. Japanese doesn't have a perfect tense, so blessedly this part's a lot more simple to hash over.
Japanese discourse is particularly fond of this. In linguist Senko Maynard's writings on Japanese nominalization there is a comparison of the first 500 sentences of English and Japanese novels, nominalization occurred in 32.6% of sentences in Tanin no Kao and only %2.60 of in the native English Dangling Man sentences had comparable abstraction. Meanwhile, when Dangling Man was translated into Japanese, %15.12 of sentences in the translation had these modality markers--and her research does not even use all of the modality markers suggested by other linguists in the link provided.
Sometimes koto wa nai is translated into never!
With as often as nominalization and abstraction is favored in Japanese, as demonstrated, it's doubtful anybody who's been exposed to Japanese has not met with the phrase "koto wa nai." They've probably also seen it translated as never.
English does not abstract as often. Why this is so is a matter for developmental linguists. When it basically conveys the same sentiment, English is prone to translating out the abstraction because a translation will seek fluency to the target language, and a translator must balance that with accuracy. Often times translating out the abstraction loses absolutely nothing of value. "Yasashi-sugiru koto wa nai." Yasashi is kind, sugiru is the verb for passing or exceeding or being too much of something. Being too kind is abstracted with koto and then that abstraction is said not to exist. This could be translated perfectly well into "You can never be too nice" even if "There's no such thing as too nice" is more literal.
Obviously the abstracted naru (suki ni naru) is not a case of a "liking does not exist." It may not exist for him, and that is what it's saying, but the problems with inferring from that that it cannot or will not exist will be explained after the next paragraph. First let me cover the other type of sentence where koto can lead to never.
Trying to keep the same form where the abstraction is a thing that has happened or not or an experience had or not had rather than a thing that does or does not exist, we can have "Kono kyoushitsu wa shizuka ni naru koto wa nai darou."
Literally: This class room become quiet is (probably) not happen.
Koto marks the quietness of the classroom as an abstraction while darou highlights that it's being commented upon. It's being commented on in regards to how it has been and may be expected to be because of that; "It's never been quiet in this classroom." is, in most cases, negligibly different from "It's never quiet in this class room." Thus you may often see it translated as the latter.
And you may want to say that the original sentence about Light is inferring on his future behavior, however there are several problems with that. We'll start with the strictly grammatical rather than the contextual. Grammatically there IS a difference between "He has never liked girls" and "He doesn't like girls." It's not a matter of tense, it's a matter of what is being said; return to the section above if you're confused about tense again. Also, there's the grammatically linking "but" at the beginning of the sentence, contextualizing the author's commentary on the abstraction. This leads us to discuss that context: the writer goes on to describe Light's experiences of not having liked, further highlighting it as not a stative matter but a condition of the action in the next sentences (specifically, not interacting equally, and looking down on people--either in general, or the girls themselves).
My Japanese friend says...
Are you sure your Japanese friend isn't also saying your desired interpretation could be had from the text? I have Japanese friends too. The sentence alone got the 'doesn't' translation, the sentence in context got something similar to mine. It'll end up a "my Dad can beat up your Dad" debate on this level. I mean I guess we could try to somehow limit a poll to JP only IPs and try... or we could take the well explained Japanese linguists whom I've cited's words on it.
In conclusion:
If you still want to say that the sentence is contextually implying that he doesn't like girls based on never having done so, then you can draw that implication from the accurate translation. The bonus is that the accurate translation does not necessarily force an implication that is not grammatically present--if the implication is present, it is contextual, and none of the context is missing. Context is missing however when you force your implications into the text. Sometimes people do this without thinking; what they take away from it is so strongly assumed that another party seeing it another way doesn't occur to them.
Sometimes it's in not so good faith.
I have my doubts Viz is TRYING to cater to yaoi fans or any such. In fact I'm wagering they didn't even think of how that line would be taken.
I have been privy to translations that have been in very bad faith. That's why it's important to me to emphasize a translation's accuracy even when I'd be very happy if the inaccurate one were true, and should therefore in theory be happy if swarths of fandom accepted it as true; that could seem to, if I were delusional, elevate my desires to something nearer to canon if it were a very, very, very popularly held misconception.