sctoagn
Posted on 2012-10-11 00:17:42 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)    (Report as spam)
TL Notes:

Note Box 1: What an impossible bitch to translate this literally into English and carry over the meaning. -_-; I said screw it and went for a culturally equivalent reading instead of the literal. The literal is "Whaaaaaaat['re]? These cloooothes?" It doesn't make any grammatical sense in English since that isn't how we talk yet it makes *perfect* sense in Japanese.

Note Box 2: Again, a translation which strives for literal accuracy is just asking for trouble here. This is because of the combined forces of させて and 貰います which, if you want me to translate it for you literally, would read in English as "I will receive from you [the permission] to let me" or "I will have you allow me." But in English this sounds to any native speaker like incredibly authoritarian speech. (I know it does to my ears anyway.) But that's night-and-day different from the tone in Japanese. It isn't authoritarian: quite the contrary, it's incredibly politely-worded and borderline servile. It's the sort of dialogue you'd (SURPRISE SURPRISE) expect to hear from a tailor checking your clothes for you as you try them on in his shop. Which is pretty much what we have here. So, once again, I opted to provide a translation which aimed for cultural accuracy over grammatical literalness.

Note Box 3: Oh good lord! >_< Now I remember why I never bothered translating this gem for you guys back when I uploaded it! SO MUCH STUFF THAT DOESN'T TRANSLATE WELL INTO ENGLISH! The original first sentence is "This is an equipment with an ancient [...]", not "This equipment has an ancient [...]". But I opted to go with the latter because saying "This is an equipment" just sounds so ... I dunno, so fictional. The second clause introduces the classic Japanese habit of <s>telepathy</s> asking the intelligent reader to fill in the gaps of what's being said based on context. In this case, the かと indicates to us that the preceding text was a question (か) that the speaker put to himself (と思った, with the 思った conveniently missing but the と cluing us in that it goes there). Obviously when translating into English I can't very well omit verbs, especially since our grammar is SVO order instead of SOV order. So I gave you the verb. Finally, we have 賢者様 kenja-sama. I know people love their honorifics left alone so I went ahead and left it, silly as it sounds, as "Sage-sama." If I were translating for an English publisher, I'd probably translate this as "Miss" since the culturally equivalent meaning for what's being expressed here is that these two "tailors" are really sucking up to the sage and it reminds one of Victorian-era tailors in the West who use incredibly polite language when dealing with the customer. "Oh, Miss simply looks divine in that outfit!" That sort of talk. But ... since I know people love their honorifics :p , I left it alone. If someone is driven nuts by that and wants to change it from "Sage-sama" to "Miss" or similar, be my guest.

Behold! The timeless phrase "lost in translation" hard at work proving itself true! -.-;

Mindwipe
Posted on 2012-10-11 00:40:31 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)    (Report as spam)
You pretty accurately described why I HATE literal translations.

Thanks for translating these (and other) pics, by the way.

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