Why study translation when you’re on a blog about anime and manga?

People sometimes have weird reactions to the fact I did a degree in translation. “Oh, you must be so smart!” “You must be able to speak Japanese so fluently!”

I always have a “yeah, but…” for those. (The former is subjective and regarding the latter, the JLPT doesn’t focus on speaking, so my speaking skills have probably deteriorated as I continue to work on other skills.)

Certainly, my love for anime and manga got me here, but why did I pick such an arduous road?

A Peek Behind the Scenes

Learning how to translate gives you the chance to understand the mental process of someone else and sympathise with them. Even if you’re in a completely different language pair – where differences in techniques can be quite large – there is a body of techniques which are independent of any language and used by all languages. That’s what governs translation studies.

Even without that, digging into what words exist in the original text can reveal if a certain nuance was missed. Missing a nuance can lead to the butterfly effect coming to kick a translator in the butt when it becomes plot relevant – for example, when a call back to an earlier event occurs.

Fans Sometimes Don’t Get It Right

Fans of anime and manga are known for coming out of the woodwork specifically to diss translation choices – typically they’re in favour of the fan translation, because that’s what they saw first. This is one reason why part of translation studies is specifically about defending choices once they’re made – the reason translators study their languages so hard is because then no translation is made without awareness of substitutes or alternative approaches.

Love of Language

Translation, in practice, can seem pretty boring to those who haven’t tried it. It’s just the conversion of one language to another, right?

Well, that’s losing a significant chunk of nuance to the process. Making choices with the words means getting to be creative to fit the demands of the text, even if you have to overhaul what is being said to do it, and that means a skilful translator will write – and read – as much as a skilful writer will.

Furthermore, despite people’s heavy reliance on machine translation (think Google Translate) in this day and age, there is an entire industry of human translators who use machine translation to speed up their work using software with fancy names like “Trados Studio” and “OmegaT” and with processes known as “pre-editing” and “post-editing” (post-editing, in particular, is rather lucrative). For them, the rise of AI is something to work with, not against.

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Well, that’s all for now. I have a separate post coming out in early September with more about this topic though (if you’re arriving from the future, you can try this link to access it).