Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 2 - Chapter SS1

Bonus Translation Notes: On “English”

One of the weirdest and most paradoxically challenging tasks when translating fiction is when you’re called upon to translate something from one language...into the same language.

This comes up more often than you might think, and in a wider variety of ways than you might expect! Take, for instance, how loanwords can complicate the translation process: in a book I translated recently, I ended up rendering a phrase that would literally translate as “A-5 rank marbled meat from a domestically raised cow” as “A-5 wagyu.” In other words, I translated one Japanese phrase into a totally different Japanese word, because that Japanese word happened to be the most concise and natural means of expressing the concept to an English-speaking audience.

As weird as those instances are, though, they’re not what I’ll be focusing on in this section. Source language to source language translation is a really fascinating subject, but when Andou’s in the picture, target language to target language translation is the much more prominent problem. And by target language to target language, I mean, of course, translating “English” to English.

Now, before I really dig into this issue, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: this is not a case of “the author was bad at English and made a bunch of questionable decisions that had to be corrected.” In fact, it’s exactly the opposite: a lot of the English in Supernatural Battles is pointedly, deliberately bad in ways that are actually quite clever! Take, for instance, Andou’s misunderstanding about how the word “great” works, and how that contributes to Kudou’s misunderstanding (and, by extension, the conflict that drives the first half of this volume). That’s not the sort of joke you can write unless you have both a pretty solid grasp of English grammar and a solid understanding of common mistakes second-language learners make—or, at the very least, it shows the ability to do your research in those areas, and do it well.

The thing is, though, that multilingual jokes that lean on a character being bad at a foreign language can be really awkward when you’re translating the work into the exact same language that the character is supposed to be bad at! Mishandling that sort of content means your translation will read as awkward in the best case, and make no sense at all in the worst. If you just translate the Japanese and leave the English entirely as-is, you’ll almost certainly end up in one of those two areas, even if you do an excellent job on the “translating the Japanese” part.

Further complicating the issue in this particular case is the fact that Andou isn’t actually bad-bad at English. In fact, considering his age and demographic, he’s actually pretty good at it! He wouldn’t have been able to come up with the Route of Origin double meaning if he wasn’t, after all (which, I should note, was not a localization flourish—that English double meaning was explicitly present and noted in the original Japanese text).

It felt important, as such, to make him come across as being decent at English, but prone to the sort of careless mistakes and awkwardness that a high schooler like him would tend to fall into. This is a big part of why we decided to refrain from altering some of the slightly awkward power names and titles. World Creation might sound more natural than World Create, for instance, but World Create’s English isn’t awkward because Kota Nozomi made a mistake—it’s slightly awkward because Andou made a mistake, and as such, it’s a sort of awkwardness that feels worth preserving in its English incarnation.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I go into the particulars of how we’ve been addressing the “English” in Supernatural Battles, I’d like to talk about some of the other techniques that we could’ve gone with but ultimately decided against!

Probably the most immediately obvious technique to deal with a character speaking your target language in the original text, and one of the most common, is to have the character say the same phrase in a totally different language. A character who decides to get all fancy by speaking English could speak in French instead, for example. I’ve used this technique myself in the past, and in many circumstances, it works great!

The thing is, that technique only really works when the important factor is just “this character is speaking in a foreign language.” The moment the specific language they’re speaking becomes important, it all starts falling apart, and that becomes more and more likely the more they speak in it over the course of the story.

This problem is also vastly more dangerous when you’re working with serialized media rather than a full, self-contained work. One volume you’re making a character who likes saying “please” for no apparent reason say “s’il vous plait” instead, the next volume you have to make it so that character lived in France for a year in their backstory instead of America to justify the change, and the volume after that when the characters end up going to America for whatever reason, you’re stuck desperately retconning everything you’ve translated up to that point.

This is the stuff that translators’ nightmares are made of, and I think that all of us have come uncomfortably close to making this sort of mistake at some point in our careers. Or maybe I’m just projecting. Moving on!

A couple other possibilities for handling this issue are sort of polar opposites to each other: glossing over the use of English, and making the use of English very clearly and specifically marked whenever it comes up.

The former would involve finding a functional equivalent for the character speaking English that’s language-agnostic, based around the context of the English’s original use. If the character uses random, gratuitous English because they’re a globetrotting businessperson who likes to show off, for instance, having them use a ton of corporate buzzwords and business-speak could potentially serve as a functional equivalent. The goal is to identify the effect that English being used has on the character’s portrayal and come up with a quirk that has the same effect without requiring them to actually speak in a different language.

In Supernatural Battles’s case, of course, this was never an option. Scenes like Andou discussing his test with Miss Satomi wouldn’t work at all if we took the English factor out entirely, and more importantly, doing so would be a major betrayal of one of the series’ core sources of humor. This technique can work great in some circumstances, but in this instance, it wasn’t on the table to begin with.

The other technique I mentioned above, however—clearly and specifically marking the use of English—is actually very close to what we ultimately settled on! The purest example of this would be coming up with some manner of clearly marking when characters are speaking another language. Enclosing English dialogue in brackets [like this] is a technique I’ve seen used on a number of occasions, and it works really well when the fact that a foreign language is being spoken is plot-relevant!

The one issue with that version of the technique is that it’s, well, a little jarring, in my mind. Not so much when it’s used in rare, isolated cases, but when you get to the point where you have bracketed dialogue every three or four pages, it just feels like a bit much to me.

That, finally, leads me to our solution to the “English” problem in Supernatural Battles: we decided that we would go to great pains to make sure that whenever a character speaks or otherwise uses English, the fact that they’re saying/writing it in English is acknowledged in some capacity without resorting to a specific, recurring mark like the bracket method.

The big benefit to this method is that as the series goes on and conventions are established, we’ll be able to be more and more subtle with our use of it, and as such get closer and closer to the experience of reading the series in the original Japanese. Take Andou and Kiryuu’s power names, for instance. One of our early priorities in volume one was to establish quickly and consistently that the names of all the main characters’ powers are being said in English. By doing so early on and getting the reader used to the idea, we were able to save ourselves a lot of hassle and omit a lot of what would otherwise have been necessary additional exposition during the entire Kudou-misunderstanding-her-power’s-name sequence.

By the time we got to the part where Kiryuu introduces his team’s power names, the convention was so thoroughly established that we didn’t feel the need to add in the specification that they were in English anymore. Our readers know how Andou and Kiryuu behave well enough at that point to make that conclusion themselves. Or at least, that’s the theory—hopefully it worked out for you! Other, less recurring uses of English will still need supporting text, of course, but once the idea that the characters are canonically mostly speaking in Japanese but sometimes dip into English is clearly established, it becomes much easier to note when the English moments occur without having it feel awkward and jarring.

Anyway, I hope that this long, meandering ramble has given you some insight into how translators approach one of the stranger issues that can crop up when working with this sort of media. There are a lot of other ways in which Supernatural Battles plays with English that are worth discussing, but I’m running out of space, and they’ll have to wait for a future TL notes section!

And speaking of TL notes, it’s time for the real meat of this section: the preposterous pile of references peppered throughout the volume! As always, I’ve organized them chronologically and omitted any references that are explained well enough within the text itself. Here we go!