One of the real tricks of subtitling, professional or otherwise, is knowing how much confidence you can have in your translator. How do you know when the translator has perfectly captured a turn of phrase, when they've got the right idea but are missing a good metaphor, when they're stumbling along too literally, or when they're just talking out of their ass? All of this, mind you, in a subject where they are by definition more of an authority than you... except that you're the one that has to deliver a workable script, in a language you probably speak better than them. It's a touchy topic, too, because most translators don't take it well when you tell them "look, you're just plain wrong here" (or worse, "I rewrote half your script because you can't write worth a damn.")

A big part of building that confidence lies in getting the easy stuff correct. My Japanese skills aren't that great, obviously; I'm no translator. But I've done this for long enough to know a few things about the language, and if you get something blatantly wrong that I can spot myself, I'm going to feel a lot better about rewriting around the rest of it too; the chance I'm damaging something that's well-crafted goes down precipitously, while the chance that I'm salvaging what I can from a wreck goes up.

At ADV, of course, I just cheated and had a translator come watch when I was done with a script. Usually, this was Shoko, so no fears about introducing errors after the fact on that score. I learned a great deal in our discussions about why a particular line needed to be changed (or shouldn't have been changed, and that happened too.) While that's definitely the best way to do it, it's rather impractical as a freelancer, so I can't take the easy way out these days.

So what brought this on? Well, working on Nanoha A's, there's a certain amount of German used by the antagonists and their weapons. I know practically no German whatsoever, of course... but that's almost certainly the case for the translator as well, especially if they're working from a script with the German poorly converted into romaji (and listening to it being read by VAs who don't know German either, and even that is assuming that the Japanese writer didn't blow it in the first place, which happens a lot too.)

But "practically no" isn't "no". I do know "Jawohl!" when I hear it. And if I hear it, and that's not what it is in the script I'm looking at, this means I can't really rely on any of the rest of the German being correct, now can I? Which means that I need to track down German speakers who are also Nanoha fans and see how much I can dredge out of it. Ironically, I know a couple of them already, it's just getting the time zones right to let them know I need the back-up...

There's a little part of me that says "this is the kind of detail that nobody cares about, or at least nobody will be paying you to attend to, or even really understand why you care whether it's right or not." This would be the part that got laid off in favor of people who, well, don't worry about this kind of detail. But there you go - if I'm not this picky, who else is going to be?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 10:13 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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