Nuclear Lunchbox wrote:

SPOILER: Show

The role of a translator is to create a product which can be understood by people who are unable to understand the source language. In the case of Evangelion, the translator's role is to create an English product for people who don't speak Japanese.

Japanese animation attracts people whose knowledge of the Japanese language may be at any level from fluent, to intermediate, to beginner, to none at all. The translator's responsibility is to create a product which can be understood by "all of the above", and this means translating everything, not just the bits and bobs with which an intermediate language learner may not be familiar. You hear it in the crusades against translating "onii-chan" into "big brother", the indignation at the change of "nakama" to "crewmate". But just because someone who has dipped their toes into Japanese understands these words does not mean that the translator is required to cater to their limited knowledge and only translate "the other stuff".

Similarly, it is the responsibility of the film and television translator to create a product that is consumable in the moment, not one which requires a dictionary and additional research to understand. When we're attending a film or watching a TV broadcast, we don't want to whip out our phones to figure out what somebody said. You can't pause a movie for the whole theater while you read a three-sentence translator's note, or stop a live broadcast to figure out what that one untranslated word was.

There are of course always exceptions, times when it may be best to leave a word untranslated as okonomiyaki or trust that certain phrases such as je ne sais quoi have a reasonable expectation of being understood. Translation in the arts is reliant on functional rather than formal equivalence, which is a fancy way of saying "the specific Japanese words used matter less than what the specific Japanese words meant and why they were chosen." But this is left in the hands of the translator and their editors. (Often the end product, be it in a book, comic, or film, is not what the translator wrote but rather what an editor changed it to be. The translator is responsible for what they deliver to an editor, but the editor is responsible for the finished product.)

The subtitles for Shin Evangelion as they appear on Amazon Prime are fine. There are some things I'd do differently, but what exists is perfectly servicable. Translators sometimes make mistakes—heck, during my initial translations of material I made from the ripped subtitles between trips to the theater, my inability to always match what I saw on screen to what the subtitles said led me to accidentally omit portions of nuance which I later had to reinsert. But we do the best we can with the materials we have.

For what it's worth, speaking a language in and of itself is in no way a qualification to translate that language. Someone can speak two languages perfectly well, and have no earthly idea what they are doing when it comes to translation. (This is why most translators either study translation theory in university or find an already-established translator to take them under their wing.) And even then, translation is directional! I can translate from Japanese to English quite well, but have to refuse jobs that go the other way. My command of Japanese pales in comparison to my command of English, and without a native-level understanding of the language into which you are translating, you cannot hope to convey the nuance of your source text. It is far easier to UNDERSTAND the nuance in a foreign language and GENERATE it in your native language than it is to do this the other way around. There's a lot to consider when you're moving something as nebulous as "meaning" from one language to another, and it really helps if someone has taught you how to do it.

Szmitten wrote:It's a dub made in lockdown conditions lol.