A minor point

There is a minor point in Hibbert’s talk that I want to address. Hibbert gives a bad example of translation: translating from another translation.

 

Back when I was translating Japanese videos regularly, I found that the Russian community had in turn translated my English subtitles into Russian ones. I thought it was funny because all the bad and ugly traits in my translation were preserved in their subtitles, which were subsequently far from authentic! Why didn’t they just use machine translation to convert between Japanese and Russian?

 

At first, I concluded that it was because the community did not understand any Japanese and had to feed my English text into Google Translate. Later, I read an interview with a Russian bookstore that specialized in manga. (I read it in machine-translated English... wasn’t that poetic?) It turned out that most manga were translated by fans into Russian from Chinese scripts, which were also translated by fans from the original. The bookstore also explained that censorship made it difficult to legally purchase manga in Russia.

 

Going back to Hibbert, I think translating from translation rarely occurs as a result of bad attempt by an amateur translator; it instead shows the demand of translation amid the lack of access to original texts and their legitimately translated counterparts. Hibbert observed this phenomenon from the postwar era of America. Perhaps we would never see this kind of struggle in America again, but my concern lies elsewhere. When Hibbert mentions translating into a translator’s native language, I realized that I have been running away from the issue of translation in Chinese-speaking area. I was born in a place with heavy influence from Japan but barely any knowledge of the language. I studied Japanese hoping to help others decode Japanese culture without having to learn the language, but I never went back to do what I thought I would do. Hibbert praised the freedom of choice a translator has with what they want to translate, but it is also a curse that draws me away from translating what I want to translate.

 

-Marcus