Regarding the Ancient Magus’ Bride translation.

As a translator, I gotta put my 2 cents into the ring…

What about politics?

Much like Godwin’s law for the internet, you can’t have two people talk without politics creeping in, one way or another. If translation is a series of choices being made by a human, human biases and attempts to be funny will creep in. Sometimes, those choices just happen to be politically tinged. If that human translator is AI-assisted or even just using an online dictionary, that doesn’t remove the chance for political content to seep in.

It’s not always the translator’s fault.

Some of the things you think are weird quirks are actually introduced as a style guide. For example, use of honorifics is sometimes out of the translator’s hands and that’s how you get, say, Mr. Villain’s Day Off out of Kyuujitsu no Warumono-san. (If you’re wondering what the difference is, the latter doesn’t indicate the villain’s gender, but English doesn’t really have a good workaround for this.)

It’s also possible some of these translation choices single vocal fans don’t like – such as the inclusion of memes – are matters of personal preference, which is why translators and fans alike get defensive when people don’t like the translation. Localisation also includes rewriting whatever’s necessary to make sure the creator’s intent comes across and Japanese is a very “read between the lines” culture. That said, memes are probably the subject of fans’ ire because they do sometimes fit the cultural context, but it’s also possible to insert them when no memes exist in the source (i.e. original untranslated) text. I’m not immune, as a person who finds meme inclusion funny, but…all I can do to that is say “there’s a time and place for everything”, because it does depend on the situation.

On top of that, what people call a “correct translation” is actually what translation calls “fidelity” – that is; it conveys meaning accurately, but also nuance correctly so that nothing is lost between audiences. To break this down a bit more, if you have meaning but not nuance, you have a literal translation (e.g. a machine translation is usually literal). If you have nuance but not meaning (e.g. the inclusion of memes, as said before), you have a loose translation.

By the way, machine translations are literal because they work on the premise that one word/phrase in the source language (usually Japanese in the case of what is being talked about here) matches one word/phrase in the target language (usually English in the case here). However, while it can get the meaning across in some instances, that’s not true for everything.

As for the rise of AI?

In terms of anime and manga translations in particular, these days translations are a lot looser than they used to be. It was only…what? 20 years ago? where the rule of thumb was to be overly literal. (Sometimes maybe too much so.) It only becomes more ubiquitous as people refine their glossaries and train their AI better, while on the other hand, people hunger for content outside of their own language and so become more reliant on said machines.

Going back to fidelity, AI isn’t good at that because it tends to miss intertextual things (like references to other works) and nuance. It’s why I particularly try to work on these things – it gives me the edge over the machines while being entertaining.

Of course, as both a fan of the products of the system and a direct beneficiary of the system, I want translators to be paid well, but I know my job isn’t under threat – I just need to beat the curve and learn how to work with the machines, not against them (admittedly, this is basically what I was trying to do before I started becoming a translator – getting into cybersecurity to learn how to do fancy computer things).

Sidenote: Customer service on the other hand…is probably going to get automated with no space left for me and the only reason anyone would hire a human for a place like this is “the regulars love the human touch of a bartender they can bounce comments off while they get food and drink”.

In Summary: Don’t Hate the Process

People dislike localisation because they remember instances of “bad translation”, particularly during the 2000s and 2010s. Those translations might have been completely fine to the editor and/or the translator and the more content in translation you consume, the more likely you’ll come across a translation you won’t like or that otherwise rubs you the wrong way.

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