#basically my stance is just as long as you're always making an earnest effort to accurately represent another person's work

[pricechecktranslations]

hi there! I just wanted to ask a question since I've been getting into song translation recently and I respect your translations a lot. take this more as a curiosity than anything :)

I notice how many different translators have their own "style" of translation, so i wanted to ask, what's your opinion in creative liberties in translations? I know obviously when dealing with something like Evillious where the little details matter you'd probably want to be as accurate to the source material as possible, but like, sometimes being literal can make something even less clear even when not dealing with idioms (something I feel like I remember you talking about before) and there are also plenty of songs that aren't as story heavy and are more about meaning. so I was just wondering if you have any thoughts on like, your philosophy with how much translators should stray in the name of keeping the same meaning/intent rather than the literal translation?

like, i was working on a translation where I write the line "また言いたいことを殺す" as "I'm holding my tongue again", because I feel like given the context of the song that conveys the same meaning as "I'm killing what I want to say again" in a more concise way, even though there are probably more direct ways to say "I'm holding my tongue" in Japanese. It does lose some of the nuance (言いたいことを殺す definitely sounds more visceral) but the actual meaning and intent conveyed (the singer has given up on saying something she wants to) is more immediately registered to an English speaker, and I've been wondering to myself how I should weigh those two.

Hazuki no Yume's translation of Iiya/118 is another translation that takes a lot of these types of creative liberties to convey intent I feel like. I honestly really enjoy their translation of that song, it's one of my favorites, but I get that some might prefer a more direct translation that only changes things when completely necessary. Personally I know there is a limit for me because I dislike when people add unnecessary extra words that were never present either in the actual text or through context just to add flavor, but I'm not the best at judging these things.

Obviously I know every translator is different, and I'm the type to make a ton of translator notes anyways so I'll probably include the more literal meaning in there regardless. I was just curious about your own thoughts and I thought it'd make an interesting question :)

My thought on that is…it's really a case by case basis. There's no right answer (though there's certainly a wrong answer, that being "I just made something up because I don't care about the original work"), because ultimately translation is a frankenstein craft that requires as much creative writing skills as it does language knowledge. It varies by work, and it varies by person. So, I can share my opinion, and how I personally do things, but as long as no one is outright misrepresenting another's work, either intentionally or through lack of skill, I try not to quibble too much.

Personally, I trend more towards the literal. There's two different attitudes that I think people go into translations with--to make something as appealing a creative work in English, or to just report what the Japanese means for others to understand. I see myself as doing the second one. I'll take liberties sometimes, especially when translating novels, but these are done mostly to keep the reading experience from being obtrusive or distracting. If I were an official translator, I think I would be more comfortable with doing more "localization" type things (like changing character titles, using more colorful language, for example), but because everything I'm doing is unofficial, without permission, I've thought of my role as a translator to be more like a language patch than someone making an "English version" of the works I translate.

There's also the fact that I often enjoy the way the Japanese text phrases things, so I like to share it with other people. And, my cultural knowledge can be a little lacking at times, so there are instances where I'm not confident I understand the sensibilities behind it enough to make a "localization" without misconstruing the words.

So, to discuss your example, I would not choose to change the wording that way. However, I can't call you wrong for doing so because every translator has their own view of what makes an accurate translation of tone and intent, and what you've done preserves the meaning with that in mind. I'm reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about Japanese author Natsume Souseki, who supposedly encouraged an English student to translate "I love you" as the phrase "The moon is beautiful tonight, isn't it?", because he felt a direct translation into Japanese was not in line with Meiji cultural norms (where open declarations of affection are pretty much unheard of). This is not something I would have ever come up with, nor would I do so myself, but he also had a perfectly valid point that the phrase would not at all have the same tone and intention in Japanese that it did in English.

To try and put my stance in brief--cultural translation is definitely a valid approach, but because I am working unofficially, and because I often enjoy the way things are phrased in the original work, I personally prefer not to do it unless I feel it will cause a significant amount of confusion/disruption for the reader otherwise (such as in the case of idioms, metaphors, common phrases that aren't common in English, etc).

There's a song called Slow Motion that has a popular translation by wingarea. I do not like this translation, not because I think it's bad (it's a perfectly fine translation), but because I would have chosen to stick more closely to the original wording choices. Meanwhile, there's a translation of Delusion Girl by damesukekun that I think snips out a lot of the evocative tone of the song in how bluntly it's translated. So--again. Case by case.