The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 3 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translator’s Notes

The Apothecary Diaries Diaries

Vol. 3

Workaday Translation 

Welcome back to the translator’s notes for The Apothecary Diaries. We hope you enjoyed volume 3! Over the past couple installments of these notes, we’ve looked at how to get started on a translation and how to make a fairly substantial imaginative leap in one special case. This time, I’d like to give some perspective on what more “ordinary” translation work looks like. To that end, we’re going to examine a passage that’s fairly straightforward—you won’t see any big cultural or localization issues like we looked at last time, but that means we can concentrate on how the language itself is adapted between the Japanese and English versions.

Before we get to the passage, let’s talk a bit about what translation is and what it isn’t. Translation is often presented as being on a sliding scale from “literal” on one end (conceived of as being closest to the source language) to “dynamic” on the other (conceived of as being on the border with paraphrase, which is to say, abstracting the expression of the original). Sometimes these are given other names, like “word-for-word” versus “thought-for-thought” translation, but the notions are common ones. It’s easy to think that a literal translation must be more faithful to the original—if it’s “closer” to the source language, wouldn’t that inherently make it a better reflection of the source text? It’s an attractive idea, but we have to pause to ask ourselves in what way a literal translation is “literal.”

Here’s a simple Japanese sentence (not from the passage we’re going to study):

猫猫が薬を飲んだ。

Maomao ga kusuri wo nonda.

The natural translation for this sentence would probably be “Maomao took the medicine.” Although this is quite close to the meaning of the Japanese, in the strictest sense, it isn’t really “literal.” An uncompromising reflection of the source text would look something like this:

Maomao (subject marker) medicine (object marker) drank.

This is because Japanese, as many of our readers will know, puts the subject at the beginning of the sentence, any object in the middle, and the verb at the end, a construction that scholars call an “SOV [Subject-Object-Verb] language.” English, by contrast, is an SVO language: the subject (Maomao) comes first, then the verb (took), and finally the object, the thing the verb is affecting (the medicine).

You can see that even in this simple example, the “literal” translation has to make some concessions to the target language. For example, Japanese marks the subject and object of a sentence with special particles, a convention that simply doesn’t exist in English and can be indicated only by cumbersome parenthetical tags. Likewise, kusuri can often be translated as “medicine,” but it might also be rendered “drug”—a very common meaning in the context of The Apothecary Diaries. In English, the two words have both overlapping and distinct meanings, and it’s up to the translator to decide which is the most appropriate in any given situation. Even our literal translation had to prioritize one possible meaning/nuance over the other. (Admittedly, the most appropriate meaning might be more obvious if we had some context rather than a single isolated sentence, but the point stands.)

You’ll also notice that in order to go from the “literal” translation to something that looks remotely like anything an English speaker would say (“Maomao took the medicine”), some further massaging is required. Not only has the order of the words been changed to comply with the normal structure of English, the verb has been translated not as “to drink” (the basic meaning of nomu, which could just as well apply to water as medicine) but as “to take,” simply because this is the verb modern English typically uses to indicate the consumption of a medical drug. (Such common combinations of words are called collocations. We say that “take” collocates with “medicine.”)

My point with this preface is simply this: that the most literal possible rendering of a source-language sentence is rarely the most natural or obvious, and that recognizing this should remind us to be precise about what we mean and what we want when we talk about “literal translation.” The point of translation, in my opinion, is generally to recreate the reading experience of the original in another language. Therefore, if the original reads smoothly, the translation ought to as well. And because Japanese and English readerships may have different ideas about what sounds “smooth,” this might involve rearranging the flow of the text, adding dialogue markers to clarify who’s speaking, or adding small asides to explain cultural matters (as in “She sat down at the kotatsu, a small heated table, in the center of the room”). To me, none of this impugns the “faithfulness” of the translation, and indeed, I might argue that a translation that hews too closely to the structure of the original text (let alone the dictionary definitions of the words within it, which are all too often regarded as somehow sacrosanct) does a disservice to the material.

Keep these things in mind as we look at the following paragraph. This comes from the scene when Maomao enters the former emperor’s painting room and has a look around. Below, I’ve provided the passage in both Japanese and romaji transliteration, followed by a translation which isn’t “literal” (we know the pitfalls of that term now), but where I’ve done the absolute minimum of adaptation.

猫猫は床に半透明の欠片を見つけた。煮詰めた飴のようなそれをまじまじと見る。そして、床にちらほらとある汚れ。必死に取ろうと拭いた跡があるその汚れをじっと見る。ふと、壁に近づくほど汚れが増えているように思えた。

Maomao wa toko ni hantoumei no kakera wo mitsuketa. Nitsumeta ame no you na sore wo maji-maji to miru. Soshite, toko ni chirahora to aru yogore. Hisshi ni torou to fuita ato ga aru sono yogore wo jitto miru. Futo, kabe ni chikazuku hodo yogore ga fuete iru you ni omoeta.

Maomao discovered on the floor semi-translucent shards. She looked hard at the hard-boiled-candy-like shards. Then, stippling-the-floor stains. She looked closely at those stains, which bore traces of having been desperately wiped at in hopes of removing them. Suddenly, it seemed [to her] that the stains were increasing the closer [they got] to the wall.

I want to emphasize again that all of this sounds perfectly ordinary and quite readable in Japanese. My intention in presenting the English in this more direct form is precisely to show that an unadapted translation takes a smooth piece of Japanese narration and turns it into something overtly awkward, if not outright hard to follow.

You might note that even for what I’m calling an “unadapted” translation, I had to make some calls about the language. For example, Japanese nouns don’t show number (whether they’re singular or plural) by default, so it’s not necessarily obvious whether Maomao discovers one shard or several on the floor. (The same is true of the yogore, which could be either stain or stains in isolation, though the fact that they’re said to be “increasing [in number]” makes clear that there must be more than one of them.) I also chose to use the word “discover” to translate mitsukeru (the characters for which “literally” mean “to see and latch onto,” or in a more idiomatic vein, “to catch the eye”), rather than, say, “find” or “spot.” Thus we can already see the translation doesn’t entail a simple one-to-one correspondence between words in the two languages (which is how a dictionary can sometimes make it appear); instead, each word covers a particular range of meanings, and what the translator does is find that same range of meanings in the target language and select a word that conveys the most appropriate one(s). On some level, they’re asking themselves, “If the author had written exactly this same scene, but was a native English speaker, what words would they have used?” The answer will be somewhat subjective, of course, but it’s not completely arbitrary.

Here, then, is my final version of the translation for this passage:

She noticed some small, semi-translucent shards on the floor, like hard candy. She stared at them intently. Then, there: a trail of discolorations on the floor as well. It looked like someone had tried desperately to wipe them away. She studied those, too, and began to think it looked like there were more of them closer to the wall.

You can see that while this reads quite differently from the version above, it’s unmistakably the same passage. I ended up translating mitsukeru as “notice” (in part because I use the word “discover” a little bit later in the same scene, and I didn’t want to repeat the word), and I found some different ways of expressing the idea of looking closely at an object, which comes up a couple of times in this paragraph.

I’d especially like to highlight what’s happened to the sentences themselves. Both the Japanese paragraph and my final version contain five sentences, but the material within them is arranged somewhat differently. For example, the Japanese passage introduces the “semi-translucent shards” in the first sentence, then goes on to a separate sentence describing the shards and using a pronoun (sore, roughly, “that”) to refer to them. In English, this comes across as a bit stunted, maybe even a little redundant. (Repetition is one thing for which Japanese prose seems to have a very high tolerance, but which is far less desirable in English.) Instead, I’ve moved the description of the shards (as being like hard candy) to the moment when they’re first mentioned, which is a more natural way to handle description in English.

In the fourth sentence of the Japanese paragraph, I’ve done exactly the opposite: the yogore (stains or discolorations) are described via a lengthy adjective clause. In Japanese, descriptive clauses typically come before the noun they describe, so that the sentence literally says she looked at “the showing-signs-of-having-been-desperately-wiped-at-in-hopes-of-getting-rid-of-them discolorations.” Once again, this is perfectly normal Japanese grammar, and patently untenable in English. Instead, I let the description of the discolorations occupy one sentence (“It looked like someone had tried desperately to wipe them away”), and split the verb out into the next sentence (“She studied those, too…”)

Look at the third sentence in the Japanese paragraph (“Soshite, toko ni chirahora to aru yogore”). You can see in the first, unadapted translation that this sentence doesn’t actually have a verb. Even this is pretty standard in Japanese. (It’s called taigen-dome, “noun-stop,” or more prosaically, “ending a sentence with a noun.”) As a translator, what I’m thinking about at this point is that the important thing about this usage is the rhetorical effect, the way the discolorations suddenly come to our attention. It’s almost cinematic. In English, of course, we generally need a verb in each sentence, but what if you didn’t use an entire sentence? I ended up using “Then, there” to indicate the shift in Maomao’s attention, taking the reader with her, and a colon to help jump over where we might otherwise need an explicit verb. (I also settled on the word “discolorations” for yogore; although I’ve used “stains” as a stand-in rendering once or twice in this essay, the term covers a range of grime marks. I thought “discolorations” was more general; Maomao might not know exactly where they come from yet, and they might or might not even be stains in the strictest sense. The longer word also gives the sentence a nice rhythm.)

Finally, what’s become of futo at the beginning of the final Japanese sentence? The word means something like “suddenly” or “abruptly.” Japanese has a wide range of words with these meanings, and employs them liberally; to be perfectly honest, sometimes the best thing to do in terms of English style is simply to gloss over them. (In some cases they seem to mean less “XYZ happened suddenly” than simply “XYZ happened next,” a sequence that’s often already implied by the narration itself.) In this case, as I said, I added the verb from the previous Japanese sentence to what becomes the final English sentence, and let the momentum account for the continued shift in Maomao’s attention.

So now you know what goes into translating a relatively straightforward paragraph. (Another point of interest is that it’s the same paragraph in both English and Japanese; often, this isn’t the case. Because the flow of thought and narration is handled so differently in Japanese, creating meaningful paragraphs in English often requires combining what were separate lines/paragraphs in Japanese.) As I’ve said before, it doesn’t take as long to do this in practice as it does to write out all the steps, but there are certainly times when I’ll have to stop and think about the best choice of vocabulary or the best way to structure a sequence of sentences. This is also where the editor comes to the fore: Sasha frequently helps me see where I’ve retained too much of the flow of the Japanese, and could make things smoother in English by rearranging or combining parts of sentences or paragraphs.

Perhaps the most useful thing to learn from this exercise is to see that translation always involves some interpretation (Which synonym should be used for mitsukeru? How exactly should the details given in the original be presented for best effect in English?), but that interpretation isn’t unbounded or unrestrained. The translator is constantly thinking about the original: the vocabulary used, the dramatic or rhetorical effect, the intended meaning. Those considerations then influence the presentation of the material in English.

Hopefully this gives you a better sense of what goes into the translation process, and helps you think more clearly and precisely about what you want from a translation or how you believe it should handle the source text. 

Have fun, read widely, and we’ll see you next volume!