Bonus Translation Notes: On Voice
Out of all the many, many potential tidbits one could take away from this volume, one stands out above all else when it comes to subjects worth writing a TL note section about: the fact that if a character suddenly starts speaking in something other than their usual, previously defined voice, it can be really, really jarring! Convincing Chifuyu to go back to her usual, non-Disney-ified tone and register was a onetime deal for Andou, but for a translator, keeping dialogue constantly on point and in character is more or less a never-ending struggle. Considering that this volume touches on that topic, that the volume themes itself so strongly around the theater, and that this means I won’t have to touch certain other topics this volume uses as themes, I think this is the perfect opportunity to talk a little about how establishing and maintaining individual characters’ voices works from a localization perspective!
To start, I figure I should probably explain a little more clearly what I actually mean when I refer to a character’s “voice”! I’m not talking about audible voices, obviously—rather, I’m referring to how a character’s dialogue comes across to the reader and informs their perspective regarding that character’s, well, character. Or, to put it differently, how that character’s voice should sound in a reader’s head as they read their dialogue! Tons of different factors play a role in determining how a character’s voice comes across, and all of them have to be carefully and deliberately considered while translating.
With that established, a question naturally follows: how does one go about determining how a character’s voice should sound in translation? The answer to that question is where things start getting complicated, because really, there is no single answer. Figuring out what sort of voices to give the characters in a story, and how to portray those voices once you have them determined, can be one of the hardest parts of picking up a new project in this field (or at least, it is for me, anyway!).
The starting point, at least, is pretty simple: you just read the text and get a feel for how the character sounds in their original language. It goes without saying that Japanese is just as capable of portraying character voice as any other language, and to an extent, carrying over aspects of a character’s voice from the original text directly into the translated version is often possible and desirable! If, say, a character consistently speaks in rhyme in the original text (not as out-there as you might think), then that’s almost certainly an aspect of their voice that you’ll want to carry through in your translated rendition. One of my personal favorite examples of this sort of thing is Final Fantasy VIII’s Fujin, who speaks exclusively in short, nongrammatical kanji compounds in Japanese, which the translators chose to render as her speaking in single-word, fully capitalized phrases (“怒！”, for instance, becoming “RAGE!”). Unfortunately, however, it’s not always quite that simple.
Two ways in which a character could make determining their English voice harder come immediately to mind: when a character’s Japanese voice features a quirk or characteristic that either doesn’t have an English equivalent or would come across entirely differently if used directly; or when a character simply doesn’t have any super distinctive, standout quirks and mostly just talks like a regular person. A good example of the former would be when characters habitually speak in the third person, a trait that (broadly) comes across as childlike in Japanese but makes characters sound either conceited, unhinged, or possibly both in English. The latter feels fairly self-explanatory—when there are no clear or major distinguishing factors you can carry over from a character’s Japanese voice, you have to really start digging into the subtleties of said voice instead.
That, incidentally, is more or less the solution to those potential pitfalls: when you need to portray a character’s voice but the original language doesn’t provide an immediately usable means to do so, you have to start probing the subtleties of that character’s character and come to an understanding of how they would speak, if they happened to be an English speaker! Take, for instance, the third-person example again: if it’s clear that the trait is intended to come across as childish, then the most faithful way to portray it would be to ensure that other aspects of the character’s speech carry that same connotation.
As for characters who speak fairly normally, all you have to do is figure out how a fairly normal person who shares that character’s traits would speak, then write them accordingly! Of course, that “all you have to do” is carrying a lot of weight—it’s much easier said than done, especially when you have multiple characters who all speak like fairly normal people but all need to have distinctive voices. Supernatural Battles happens to be a series that poses that precise problem, so I figure we might as well use it to provide some examples! Conveniently enough, this volume marks a very handy milestone for that purpose: it’s the first volume to feature a sequence written from Chifuyu’s perspective, meaning it’s also the first opportunity we have to discuss the narrative voices that we used for the full core cast of the series!
To start in the most obvious place, let’s talk about the voice of our first and most prominent narrator: Andou. Andou, in a phrase, contains multitudes. On the one hand you have his almost manic, chuuni-riffic persona, constantly ready and willing to crack a quip or drop a reference, but on the other hand you have those (actually fairly frequent) moments where he gets really introspective and serious, stripping away his usual layers of pretense and betraying a lot more careful consideration than he usually lets on. One of the most important factors in feeling out Andou’s voice for us was making sure that it would remain consistent through those two distinct modes—it had to still feel like Andou in any given moment, whether he was being ridiculous-edgy or actually-pretty-serious-edgy.
What, then, could distinguish Andou’s voice in a way that could carry throughout all his moods and persona shifts? To start, a trait that we’ve adapted from one of Andou’s distinctive traits in Japanese: his tendency to use unnecessarily complicated and obscure kanji to write otherwise very simple words! That habit is one hundred percent a manifestation of his chuuni tendencies, and we chose to render it—and in doing so distinguish his voice—by making him occasionally use vocabulary that’s flowery to a comically unnecessary degree. The same for his phrasings, really—the goal was to make sure that you could always tell that Andou was in charge of narration duties because he’s just so extra about it. Other aspects of Andou’s voice include him being mostly casual with his speech, aside from circumstances that call for formality, and him being relatively low on the likely-to-casually-swear spectrum.
Next up: the Sagami-endorsed main heroine, Tomoyo! Out of all the literary club girls, Tomoyo’s character voice comes the closest to resembling Andou’s in a fair number of ways, which is both inconvenient since it makes distinguishing the two of them harder, but is also only logical from a storytelling perspective considering their shared interests and (however much Tomoyo would deny it) shared personality traits. Although the fundamentals of their voices are rather similar—a tendency to lean toward casual phrasings and a tendency to talk in memes and media references, for instance—Tomoyo’s carries a note of exasperation that you don’t really see so much in Andou’s. She’s a little more blunt—even harsh, at times—with her phrasings, and is much more likely to swear than Andou, on the whole. She’s also a little more direct and less flowery with her narration, though she does occasionally slip back into old habits and ham it up chuuni-style on occasion as well.
Moving on to the heroine of volume 2, Hatoko is far and away the most normal member of the main cast, both in terms of personality and character voice. That’s not necessarily the most helpful guideline when it comes to making a character talk in a distinctive manner, but the fact that the rest of the club members have such big personalities means that, to an extent, Hatoko’s relative lack of major quirks makes her quirky in her own right. She’s both the resident normie and also the most consistently nice and polite member of the main cast, though notably she’s not polite in a formal sort of way, and she speaks just as casually as Andou and Tomoyo, albeit in a distinctly different tone.
Fourth on the docket is Sayumi, who has been perhaps the easiest member of the main cast to establish a distinctive voice for. Essentially, if Hatoko is supposed to come across as polite but not formal, then Sayumi is meant to come across as formal but not polite. Her speech and narration both have a distinctive stiffness to them that none of the other literary members come even close to touching—she’s very unlikely to use slang or casual phrasings unless in a very deliberate capacity, and her vocabulary is elevated in a way that (hopefully!) makes her come across as erudite (rather than as a pretentious tryhard like Andou). In contrast to her formality, Sayumi is also downright scathing, and coming up with phrasings that let her verbally eviscerate Andou without ever dropping her elevated, formal demeanor makes her speech and narration especially fun for me to work on.
Last but not least, our newest and in many ways most distinctive narrator: Chifuyu! Some aspects of Chifuyu’s voice—such as her somewhat fragmented sentence structure and general brevity—are very easy to carry over, while others—such as her use of the third person (yeah, that aside wasn’t even remotely hypothetical)—take a lot more effort to convey in English. Chifuyu’s voice should ideally come across as simultaneously childlike and extremely precocious, which we’ve tried to represent by having her largely use direct, simple phrasings and childish expressions (“housewifeyness” being a good example), but at the same time not shy away from dropping big words or elaborate ideas when the moment calls for them (as it does at several times during her description of her quest for the ultimate bed).
And, I think that’s about all the space we have for this section! We’ve put plenty of thought into the voices of the B-cast as well, from how Kudou’s brand of formality contrasts with Sayumi’s to the varying degrees of roughness and rudeness among the members of Fallen Black, but I think you more or less get the core idea that I’m trying to convey: that portraying a character’s voice in translation is, at its core, all about knowing the character as well as you possibly can and making them speak in the manner they would speak in under any given circumstance, while simultaneously maintaining constant faithfulness to the original text. If that sounds a little esoteric and vague...well, it kinda is! That’s just one of the many reasons why media translation is more of an art than a science, and why there are very few translation challenges that have singular, objectively correct solutions. That’s what makes it such a fascinating field, in my view—though, I mean, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Anyway, it’s time for a whooole buncha pop culture references in need of contextualization! Let’s jump right in!
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