Copeland, Roundtable comments

I actually do hear, well not hear as in hallucinate, voices when I translate. It usually depends on the particular type of text I'm working on, but as I was working on the next part of Kagi, I heard Professor Elliot's voice in my head telling me that I was forgetting something. I couldn't figure out what I forgot, but I'm sure it was something important. When I do work for commercials, I usually hear voices from old commercials that I saw on TV. I suppose in my case it isn't always the way that Copeland describes, but it's more of the text bringing back relevant memories, which sometimes can help, but sometimes just get in the way. A lot of times the voices or the things you associate with the text can be helpful, but they sometimes make it difficult to bring yourself to cut something out that you can't bring with you, for example, or make changes. Which in a way, answers how I feel about deletion. Especially when your language pairs are as far separated as Japanese and English, deletion is something that you'll eventually have to face. There are too many differences between the structure of the language and the audiences the original text is for and who the translated text will aim to reach, that eventually, by your decision or someone else's, eventually deletion will happen. I've sort of made my peace with it, but there are occasionally times where I will try me best to keep something that I can't keep. 

For the roundtable, I was personally hoping that Hibbert would on the choices he made in translating Kagi, but unfortunately he passed the question onto someone else. Like Alex touched upon in the questions, it was very interesting to hear (read?) so many opinions on what to do regarding accents. While I don't think that there is a good solution for what to do with an accent, partially because there are no exact equivalents, especially how you consider how much information an accent gives you about a character, I do agree that with the person from Osaka, contractions would have suited Osaka-ben better than they would have the other. 

Steven