So Where do Translations go Wrong?
Actually, in many places. There are a number of things that a translator has to keep in mind, and try to avoid at all cost:
- Idiomatic constructions should not be translated literally
- Sentences should not be translated "per bubble", since the bubbles work for how Japanese sentences are chopped up, not how English sentences are chopped up.
- Words that are already entailed by translated words in a sentence should be left out.
- Verb mood, tense and even polarity may need to be changed to express the same grammatical construction.
Japanese and English are two different languages. This sounds elementary, but all too often people do not seem to realise this
when they translate every word in a Japanese sentence and consider the translation done, even though this leaves the English translation with too many words; a sentence such as "even if by doing so we succeed, it will become difficult" is not an unsual sentence in a translated manga, even if it's not an English sentence at all.
This might sound weird to some people. Even if you don't read Edited Mangas at all, you might be wondering how that statement could be true - after all, it uses English words, and you can figure out what it means.
However -- and this is a big however -- proper English does not need "figuring out". Real, natural English sentences are understood exactly because they are natural language. They don't have to be figured out before you know what they mean, because the way the words are arranged immediately reveals how you should interpret them. Arranging them differently, because the original phrase was not in English, just makes for unnatural and potentially highly convoluted sentences; the entire book "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer (2002) used the idea of writing out a non-English speaker's thoughts and sayings using English words and it was a mind-splitting pain to read.