On Carpenter Readings

 Carpenter's writings were very interesting, and there are many points that I would like to touch upon. While personally I have never read about gyaku-okuri and jun-okuri, I would love to learn more about them. Carpenter also touches on onomatopoeia, something that while we haven't had many examples of in class, is very much prevalent in modern texts. Carpenter also states that you need to understand the text to translate, which is something that I don't believe many people would disagree with. Having done a fair share of larger text translations, when the question is posed of whether or not I agree with the translator needing to read the text in it's entirety before attempting to translate, I can only agree. To me it is not only necessary to do so, but the only time I as a translator will ever get to enjoy the text to begin with. To be fair, if you were to translate a text blind, from start to finish without having read the text ever before, it's unlikely that you would have any major errors. Very, very often words are just words, they often have analogs in English that you can find with the use of a dictionary. But without reading and at least attempting to understand the text as a whole, what words are important and what phrases are repeated, for example, the translation tends to lose something else entirely. The cohesive text written by an author with explicit intent is replaced with a slightly better machine translation. The freedom of working with plain text is lost.

The freedom of which, inherently does not exist in the same form as translating for subtitles. Subtitles are unlike plain text, bound more strongly by conventions. They need to be under a certain character length and only appear on screen for no more than a set amount of time. What you can do in a plain text translation, as Carpenter mentioned in her interview, such as the addition of explanatory text, is oftentimes not possible in subtitles. On the whole, translators notes, while already frowned upon in professional text translation as they are, are even less utilized in subtitles. There are of course exceptions to this, but the circumstances that would let you add a note are even less frequent when it comes to subtitles. 

 

Steven