Localisation is weird, man.

 After watching the latest episode of Go for it, Nakamura! I became ridiculously hyperaware of the tiny differences between what's being said and what's written in the subtitles. It's not to say I haven't noticed this before, Lord knows every Nu: Carnival H scene that releases has me questioning word choice (how many times can you put ants into a metaphor before someone accuses you of having perverse feelings about them? It's getting to the point where I'm feeling the need to.) But there was a scene that really drove home how interesting of a concept localisation is.

 

Cough, sorry for the quality. I compressed it for Discord, and I deleted the original screen recording. As dedicated as a I am to this blog, I don't feel like going and finding it again.

They don't say much in this clip. There's only 6 words, and they're not particularly complex. Here's the translation I wrote out for it when I was talking about it to my friends:

N: Hirose?!

H: (I can't tell if he said omae so i'm just gonna omit it) You like candy?

N: (stammering) U.. uh.. Y-yeah..

But if you watch the clip again, you'll notice that that's not exactly what was said. The thing that flagged it for me at first was that they added a couple more words that weren't being said, "Hirose?!" becomes "Hirose's here!" and "You like candy?" turns into "Got some candy, want some?". 

Localisation is never about direct translation. It tends to attempt to portray the idea that's being spoken about, rather than word for word what's being said. That's fine, it's interesting, it helps create fluency for the readers and gives them a better understanding of the text through their own context. 

Within this scene, I assume the thought process of the writers is "Well it's kind of weird for Hirose to just come up and ask Nakamura if he likes candy out of the blue, so we should establish that Hirose has candy to give Nakamura, and that he'd like to share it." But then it seems weird if Nakamura just accepts, so they add in him asking "Why?". That addition of "Why?" is never resolved, though, so it just seems like Hirose straight up aired him.

There's a couple other moments within this episode where I really noticed the localisation, but honestly that was the most prominent one. This isn't a critique, by any means, I just find it really interesting. 

Localisation is a really specific niche anyways, because you have to have a really solid understanding of both languages to convey the point well, though oftentimes you sacrifice some of what's being said to portray it more fluently to your audience, so there's some upsides and downsides to it. When people talk about the translations of yaoi, for example, a lot of it is fan-made, and when you compare the fan-made text to the official one, you'll see a lot of discrepancies. 

That being said, direct translations usually give you a better idea of what's actually being said rather than just an interpretation of the words, since there's no abrupt changes in context. Also, translators often leave notes (Keikaku means plan), which explains the context of what's being said, though it tends to take you out of the fictional world as it does so. 

But when you really look at the differences side by side, it becomes a lot more obvious as to why one is favoured over the other.. 

All of this stuff makes my head spin, but it also really intrigues me.. at one point I wanted to take up translating as a hobby, but my language skills lie in Korean, not Japanese, and I don't like any manhwa enough to put a dedicated effort into it.. Oh well, might as well leave it to the professionals! Even if they are.. weirdly obsessed with ants.