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narcasseA few days ago I came across an odd turn of phrase or rather a common phrase that had been somewhat mangled. The phrase ought to have been “without further ado” but had instead been rendered as “without further adieu”. One implies that without further fuss the writer will get to the point while the other is a hybrid phrase that implies that without further goodbyes there’ll apparently be a departure. At first I laughed as I’m want to do but after some consideration I supposed that there could have been one of two honest mistakes that had contributed to the misstep. The first possibility would of course be that the writer being a student of the French language or a Francophone themselves had French dictionaries enabled so that when they ran a spellcheck on their piece having already made a typo with ‘ado’ it was automatically corrected to the French ‘adieu’. The second possibility would be that the writer had never seen the phrase in print and half-remembering the phrase which they knew the meaning of but not the spelling tried to sound it out phonetically and either reached for the nearest word that they knew how to spell or was prompted to by their spellcheck. So while the mistake was worth a little humour it wasn’t particularly indicative of anything. And then I came across said mangled phrase again… in a published piece.
The published novel I found the phrase in wasn’t even originally French or a loose translation or even something that a lazy ESL-speaker had produced: it was an American translated one. Translated from the Japanese in really simple English. I am of course talking about ROM 3 which gives me several synonyms that I don’t want to use instead of ‘muscular’ and goes on about the size of Süleyman’s teeth to the point where I get the feeling that there’s some sort of implication that I’m missing. Large teeth: small feet? Large teeth: you can tell he eats too much pie? Large teeth: large hands, there’s never going to be any wastage? The way the phrase is used doesn’t even allow for any excuses: this isn’t a character speaking because with Ion’s tenuous command of Italian I could imagine his making that sort of mistake. All it would need would be his trying to reach for an Italian word and accidentally substituting a French one because of some last minute ‘languages from the Outer’ lessons where he’s retained plenty of vocabulary but it’s all jumbled together because of the rush and he’s still not entirely sure how to string it all together. If that were the case it would be a nice illustrative point showing that while Ion isn’t necessarily stupid and actually has a pretty good memory, perhaps his lessons weren’t structured quite well enough so that he didn’t have much by way of conversational practice before he left for the Outer unlike Radu who’s had lots of conversational practice but whose vocabulary consists mostly of swears.
Sadly, instead of being something useful the phrase is actually part of the narrative line and runs to the tune of:
“Without further adieu the Empress resettled into the ranks of her entourage”. (p.171)
It’s obvious in the context that the phrase that should be present is ‘without further ado’. Both ‘adieu’ and ‘ado’ may sound out similarly from the Japanese but that’s not the issue: the translator’s job is to translate, literally for the most part. A translator in this situation is just rendering the Japanese into English without concern for how that sounds in English because it’s not their job to do the editing as well. Certainly, Japanese does rather well on that point so that you can generally cut off some vowels and get a fair idea of what the phrase should be and then rearrange it into, in this case, English. In fact it’s entirely possible that the Japanese phrase doesn’t translate as ‘without further ado’ and instead follows a Japanese idiom or phrasing that simply wouldn’t convey the same meaning if translated literally into English This sort of inability to retain meaning isn’t a problem since it’s the editor’s job to make something of it by rearranging the English, substituting a suitable English idiom or just replacing the phrase with an English language sentence that will retain the original meaning. To use a Burmese example, you wouldn’t call someone ‘a type of fruit that you don’t want to eat’ but you might say that they’re not your type. The fruit part of the sentence isn’t entirely relevant, it’s funny but it’s a Burmese idiom that in translation wouldn’t be relevant to the point you’re trying to make. Likewise by way of similar example, there’s a word in Burmese that literally translated isn’t offensive and is just a proper noun but on the lips of a Burmese person can be a pretty high insult. The problem is that you need to know the cultural context and some pre-WWII history to really understand it.
If the contentious phrase does translate as ‘much ado’ then the translator has obviously tried to sound it out which can be fairly difficult especially if the translator isn’t a native Japanese speaker and I suspect that they’re not. A native Japanese speaker would recognise the phrase and not have to sound it out phonetically and if they didn’t know how to phrase it exactly in English you’d think that their understanding English well enough to hold down a translation job in a major English speaking country would be indication that they’d be smart enough to go look up the relevant Shakespeare title to see how it was translated into their native tongue. In fact, Google gives me ‘karasawagi’ as the relevant Romanisation and since Much Ado About Nothing became ‘Much Ado About Love’ or Koi no Karasawagi in Japanese where ‘karasawagi’ is ‘a fuss’ just like the English there’s no excuse. Thus the farcical phrase produced really was an issue of poor translation and editing since the translator ought to have caught the standard Japanese phrase and the editor ought to have shown some moderate command of English. After all, if I can parse Hagane no Renkinjutsushi as ‘Alchemist of Steel’ reading that from right to left, or more correctly as ‘Steel Alchemist’ and my command of the language is so poor that beyond text recognition I wouldn’t even be able to order myself a beer in Japanese then a supposed professional has no excuse.
Funnily enough TokyoPop seemed to do reasonably well when it comes to translating manga possibly because there are fewer words involved. The Trinity Blood novels on the other hand are a lesson in how to fail at your own language if you’re an Anglophone or how people who think they can understand your language tend to fail badly if you’re a native Japanese-speaker. Then again TokyoPop can’t even spell ‘Yeniçeri’ correctly which speaks to me of not just an inability to comprehend language but also a crippling fear of Google, research and inadvertent learning. They also appear to be afraid of umlauts and sadly my 'Sü' joke doesn't work without them.
The published novel I found the phrase in wasn’t even originally French or a loose translation or even something that a lazy ESL-speaker had produced: it was an American translated one. Translated from the Japanese in really simple English. I am of course talking about ROM 3 which gives me several synonyms that I don’t want to use instead of ‘muscular’ and goes on about the size of Süleyman’s teeth to the point where I get the feeling that there’s some sort of implication that I’m missing. Large teeth: small feet? Large teeth: you can tell he eats too much pie? Large teeth: large hands, there’s never going to be any wastage? The way the phrase is used doesn’t even allow for any excuses: this isn’t a character speaking because with Ion’s tenuous command of Italian I could imagine his making that sort of mistake. All it would need would be his trying to reach for an Italian word and accidentally substituting a French one because of some last minute ‘languages from the Outer’ lessons where he’s retained plenty of vocabulary but it’s all jumbled together because of the rush and he’s still not entirely sure how to string it all together. If that were the case it would be a nice illustrative point showing that while Ion isn’t necessarily stupid and actually has a pretty good memory, perhaps his lessons weren’t structured quite well enough so that he didn’t have much by way of conversational practice before he left for the Outer unlike Radu who’s had lots of conversational practice but whose vocabulary consists mostly of swears.
Sadly, instead of being something useful the phrase is actually part of the narrative line and runs to the tune of:
“Without further adieu the Empress resettled into the ranks of her entourage”. (p.171)
It’s obvious in the context that the phrase that should be present is ‘without further ado’. Both ‘adieu’ and ‘ado’ may sound out similarly from the Japanese but that’s not the issue: the translator’s job is to translate, literally for the most part. A translator in this situation is just rendering the Japanese into English without concern for how that sounds in English because it’s not their job to do the editing as well. Certainly, Japanese does rather well on that point so that you can generally cut off some vowels and get a fair idea of what the phrase should be and then rearrange it into, in this case, English. In fact it’s entirely possible that the Japanese phrase doesn’t translate as ‘without further ado’ and instead follows a Japanese idiom or phrasing that simply wouldn’t convey the same meaning if translated literally into English This sort of inability to retain meaning isn’t a problem since it’s the editor’s job to make something of it by rearranging the English, substituting a suitable English idiom or just replacing the phrase with an English language sentence that will retain the original meaning. To use a Burmese example, you wouldn’t call someone ‘a type of fruit that you don’t want to eat’ but you might say that they’re not your type. The fruit part of the sentence isn’t entirely relevant, it’s funny but it’s a Burmese idiom that in translation wouldn’t be relevant to the point you’re trying to make. Likewise by way of similar example, there’s a word in Burmese that literally translated isn’t offensive and is just a proper noun but on the lips of a Burmese person can be a pretty high insult. The problem is that you need to know the cultural context and some pre-WWII history to really understand it.
If the contentious phrase does translate as ‘much ado’ then the translator has obviously tried to sound it out which can be fairly difficult especially if the translator isn’t a native Japanese speaker and I suspect that they’re not. A native Japanese speaker would recognise the phrase and not have to sound it out phonetically and if they didn’t know how to phrase it exactly in English you’d think that their understanding English well enough to hold down a translation job in a major English speaking country would be indication that they’d be smart enough to go look up the relevant Shakespeare title to see how it was translated into their native tongue. In fact, Google gives me ‘karasawagi’ as the relevant Romanisation and since Much Ado About Nothing became ‘Much Ado About Love’ or Koi no Karasawagi in Japanese where ‘karasawagi’ is ‘a fuss’ just like the English there’s no excuse. Thus the farcical phrase produced really was an issue of poor translation and editing since the translator ought to have caught the standard Japanese phrase and the editor ought to have shown some moderate command of English. After all, if I can parse Hagane no Renkinjutsushi as ‘Alchemist of Steel’ reading that from right to left, or more correctly as ‘Steel Alchemist’ and my command of the language is so poor that beyond text recognition I wouldn’t even be able to order myself a beer in Japanese then a supposed professional has no excuse.
Funnily enough TokyoPop seemed to do reasonably well when it comes to translating manga possibly because there are fewer words involved. The Trinity Blood novels on the other hand are a lesson in how to fail at your own language if you’re an Anglophone or how people who think they can understand your language tend to fail badly if you’re a native Japanese-speaker. Then again TokyoPop can’t even spell ‘Yeniçeri’ correctly which speaks to me of not just an inability to comprehend language but also a crippling fear of Google, research and inadvertent learning. They also appear to be afraid of umlauts and sadly my 'Sü' joke doesn't work without them.
