Rant Rant Rant
It's been a while since I posted here. Well, I was originally going to post this in their community, but then they told me that I needed to sign up for their forums in order to do that; and I hate signing up for stuff, especially stuff that I'll never again sign back into. So here it is instead. This is either going to get ignored like everything else I put on here, or it's going to make me infamous. Which would be both pretty awesome and awful at the same time. Awesome because you CAN'T SPELL INFAMOUS WITHOUT FAMOUS lol I'm such a geek and awful because it'll probably mean that people will expect to see me post here more often than I do currently.
Anyway. What am I going to rant about? I'm going to rant about a decision made by a scanlation group on a manwha they release that I read from time to time. And before you telling me how I should only read officially released stuff so that the industry gets money, eff-off. Manwha don't get released into English as often as manga do. You can't find those stuff where I live. Heck, most of the manga I like don't get released over here for some reason, despite the fact Canada is a pretty rich country and in close proximation to US. I'm always looking for Case Closed, but I can't find it anywhere! It's a pretty famous manga so I'm sure it gets released to US; is it so hard to ship some over this way, too?
But anyway, back on topic; what they decided to do was that they were going to translate from the Japanese raws. And it wasn't like, "oh, we can't get Korean raws; we can only get Japanese raws. Sorry, folks; but this is the best we can do right now"; no, it was more like "oh, yeah! We were finally able to get someone to give us Japanese raws! Screw Korean raws! We're translating from Japanese!"
I'd understand this if this was manga we're talking about, which is originally written in Japanese. It wouldn't make sense to translate manga from Korean unless that was all there was available. But this is MANWHA. Which is originally written in Korean. It has a Korean author and Korean artist and probably released in Korea first in Korean and then shipped to Japan to be translated into Japanese and then image flipped so they wouldn't have to read the wrong way.
This is like, if someone had picked up the Korean translation of Harry Potter and translated it into French or something, instead of translating from the original English version. Well, maybe not quite so similar since Japanese and Korean are from the same language family; Korean and English are not. But I use this example because I read the first book of Harry Potter in both languages.
And I can tell that the translator is trying hard; but there are still some glaring mistakes in the Korean copy. Like, how uncle Vernon's favourite food is the raisin bread. RAISIN BREAD! It's like, "oh, we can't have an unlikeable character like DOUGHNUTS! It'll cause obesity in Korean children!" Well, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge; who knows? Maybe in the original British version, uncle Vernon likes raisin bread. In which case, I have to rail on the "translators" who translated it from British English to American English. Was that really necessary? We know what raisin breads are. If they were talking about, I don't know; rubber or buggery and such things that has different meaning over there from here (shush those are the only examples I can think of at 6am in the morning!), but raisin bread? Really?
Oh and when Hagrid comes to the Quidditch match. He says in the English version something to the line of:
"Bin watchin from ma hut."
Now it's well known that this character has an accent. Translate that into normal English and we get:
"I've been watching from my hut."
The Korean translator should have translated from the second sentence and added some affect to show that he has an accent. However, they translated from the first version and got:
"Bin is watching from my hut."
As if there's a character named "Bin". So that people who hasn't read the English version is left wondering who this "Bin" is, to flip back pages to figure out who "Bin" is, but never finding out.
And even without these glaring errors, there are some subtleties in tone of the speaker that are lost in the translation, such as irony, sarcasm, and curtness. And as both a linguist and a translator for a scanlation group myself (again, don't start this. manwha aren't released as often as manga. For there to be supply from the official sources, I believe what we need right now is to create demands. For there to be demands, manwha must be known more widely first. I'll quit as a translator once I see that some of the stuff I've translated have hit the shelves where I live. But I'm more likely to quit from boredom than that; WE DON'T EVEN GET CASE CLOSED HERE!), I know that it's often a trade-off from information and readability. If I try to cram as much information into an utterance as I can, you wouldn't be able to read it. It would sound stilted and forced, and it's likely that you wouldn't get the insinuation anyway, due to the culture differences. And even if I were to try to cram everything into an utterance, there's always some subtle things that are lost during the process, as sad as that is. And I'm not a professional translator. I'll admit that. But I do think that this loss of information is not immune to professional translators. I've read about countless cases that disproves that in the course of my study, at any rate.
So why are they translating from another translation? Surely they also can feel that some things are lost within the translation process. Think how much is lost by going through another layer of translation! And going from another perspective; the art. Manwha are read from left to right, like English books and comics. Manga are read from right to left. When manga get translated, either by scanlation groups and official translators, the artists often don't want the pages flipped for the readers because flipping it causes errors in the art that were unnoticeable in the original to become glaringly obvious once flipped. Sort of like how you see more mistakes when you flip your art upside-down. But the Japanese raws they're using already have the images flipped for the Japanese public. This defeats the purpose of not flipping the page to insure the near original quality art! And they don't even try to flip it back the way it was.
So I don't understand this decision. Are manga cheaper than manwha? Do they have more/better translators for Japanese than for Korean? From the way they explained things in their release, it sounded more as if they just liked Japanese better; fair enough, but I still don't understand. If you like Japanese so much, just stick to scanlating manga; let a Korean scanlation group pick this up! Seriously; someone tell me why.
Anyway. What am I going to rant about? I'm going to rant about a decision made by a scanlation group on a manwha they release that I read from time to time. And before you telling me how I should only read officially released stuff so that the industry gets money, eff-off. Manwha don't get released into English as often as manga do. You can't find those stuff where I live. Heck, most of the manga I like don't get released over here for some reason, despite the fact Canada is a pretty rich country and in close proximation to US. I'm always looking for Case Closed, but I can't find it anywhere! It's a pretty famous manga so I'm sure it gets released to US; is it so hard to ship some over this way, too?
But anyway, back on topic; what they decided to do was that they were going to translate from the Japanese raws. And it wasn't like, "oh, we can't get Korean raws; we can only get Japanese raws. Sorry, folks; but this is the best we can do right now"; no, it was more like "oh, yeah! We were finally able to get someone to give us Japanese raws! Screw Korean raws! We're translating from Japanese!"
I'd understand this if this was manga we're talking about, which is originally written in Japanese. It wouldn't make sense to translate manga from Korean unless that was all there was available. But this is MANWHA. Which is originally written in Korean. It has a Korean author and Korean artist and probably released in Korea first in Korean and then shipped to Japan to be translated into Japanese and then image flipped so they wouldn't have to read the wrong way.
This is like, if someone had picked up the Korean translation of Harry Potter and translated it into French or something, instead of translating from the original English version. Well, maybe not quite so similar since Japanese and Korean are from the same language family; Korean and English are not. But I use this example because I read the first book of Harry Potter in both languages.
And I can tell that the translator is trying hard; but there are still some glaring mistakes in the Korean copy. Like, how uncle Vernon's favourite food is the raisin bread. RAISIN BREAD! It's like, "oh, we can't have an unlikeable character like DOUGHNUTS! It'll cause obesity in Korean children!" Well, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge; who knows? Maybe in the original British version, uncle Vernon likes raisin bread. In which case, I have to rail on the "translators" who translated it from British English to American English. Was that really necessary? We know what raisin breads are. If they were talking about, I don't know; rubber or buggery and such things that has different meaning over there from here (shush those are the only examples I can think of at 6am in the morning!), but raisin bread? Really?
Oh and when Hagrid comes to the Quidditch match. He says in the English version something to the line of:
"Bin watchin from ma hut."
Now it's well known that this character has an accent. Translate that into normal English and we get:
"I've been watching from my hut."
The Korean translator should have translated from the second sentence and added some affect to show that he has an accent. However, they translated from the first version and got:
"Bin is watching from my hut."
As if there's a character named "Bin". So that people who hasn't read the English version is left wondering who this "Bin" is, to flip back pages to figure out who "Bin" is, but never finding out.
And even without these glaring errors, there are some subtleties in tone of the speaker that are lost in the translation, such as irony, sarcasm, and curtness. And as both a linguist and a translator for a scanlation group myself (again, don't start this. manwha aren't released as often as manga. For there to be supply from the official sources, I believe what we need right now is to create demands. For there to be demands, manwha must be known more widely first. I'll quit as a translator once I see that some of the stuff I've translated have hit the shelves where I live. But I'm more likely to quit from boredom than that; WE DON'T EVEN GET CASE CLOSED HERE!), I know that it's often a trade-off from information and readability. If I try to cram as much information into an utterance as I can, you wouldn't be able to read it. It would sound stilted and forced, and it's likely that you wouldn't get the insinuation anyway, due to the culture differences. And even if I were to try to cram everything into an utterance, there's always some subtle things that are lost during the process, as sad as that is. And I'm not a professional translator. I'll admit that. But I do think that this loss of information is not immune to professional translators. I've read about countless cases that disproves that in the course of my study, at any rate.
So why are they translating from another translation? Surely they also can feel that some things are lost within the translation process. Think how much is lost by going through another layer of translation! And going from another perspective; the art. Manwha are read from left to right, like English books and comics. Manga are read from right to left. When manga get translated, either by scanlation groups and official translators, the artists often don't want the pages flipped for the readers because flipping it causes errors in the art that were unnoticeable in the original to become glaringly obvious once flipped. Sort of like how you see more mistakes when you flip your art upside-down. But the Japanese raws they're using already have the images flipped for the Japanese public. This defeats the purpose of not flipping the page to insure the near original quality art! And they don't even try to flip it back the way it was.
So I don't understand this decision. Are manga cheaper than manwha? Do they have more/better translators for Japanese than for Korean? From the way they explained things in their release, it sounded more as if they just liked Japanese better; fair enough, but I still don't understand. If you like Japanese so much, just stick to scanlating manga; let a Korean scanlation group pick this up! Seriously; someone tell me why.