"Literary culture vs anime culture" at the core of "translation vs localization" discussion?

[onorub]

Just a thought that ocurred to me, but the whole "translation vs localization" discussion made me recall one thing: whenever a book has lots of foreign expressions, the publisher just deals with it by slapping a glossary at the last pages, in a way that anyone going the extra mile by actually localizing the dialogue looks foolish. With anime and JRPGs however, there is a certain fear of the dialogue not flowing well with the voices or to the faster spectator reading, so the dialogue is actually localized.

Without getting in whether translations or localizations are the correct direction, my thought is that maybe the very idea of localization in visual novels is ingrained in publishing companies due to JRPGs/anime and translators are treating VNs as anime or games rather than books, perhaps without even realizing it. Does that make sense?

[Zakamutt]

>whenever a book has lots of foreign expressions, the publisher just deals with it by slapping a glossary at the last pages
you sure about this one fam? maybe in 'fine literature' where the publisher wishes to maintain some illusory purity, but I doubt it in the middle and lowbrow categories.

EDIT: This is not to say they might not use somewhat more intrusive techniques on occasion (but likely not TL notes), but so do VN translations sometimes. A lot of the time you might not even have noticed those techniques being used if you're not paying attention. Translation textbooks tend to include descriptions of a variety of methods, see for example Judy Wakabayashi's Japanese-English Translation: an advanced guide p. 5-10. Note how the "glossary" method is not emphasized but the mention-but-likely-explain-first-time method (transcription/load word) is:

 

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[novurdim]

On 5/11/2022 at 5:05 PM, Zakamutt said:

you sure about this one fam? maybe in 'fine literature' where the publisher wishes to maintain some illusory purity, but I doubt it in the middle and lowbrow categories

Dunno, in my slavic country in the official tls of Soji Shimada, Riku Onda and Natsuhiko Kyogoku novels they do use a glossary and quite a lot of footnotes, highly doubt those can be classified as "fine literature" by a sane person. All three are done by different pubs and translators but the style of translation is still largely the same.

And I honestly love these editions, the prose flows well while you never get that weird feeling of "oh boy, that totally looks out of place" you often catch in a more adapted work. Because of that I always find it odd that I constantly see an obsessive need to localise stuff in a niche otaku media of all things but maybe it's just more of an american thing.

Edited July 11, 2022 by novurdim