The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 4 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translator’s Notes

The Apothecary Diaries Diaries

Vol. 4

Two Heads Are Better...

In the notes in the last couple of volumes, we’ve looked at how a translation takes shape. But completing a draft translation is only one step in the process. The translator has an oft unsung partner in creating the English version of the book: the editor.

At J-Novel Club, books are released as weekly parts, and the translation process follows a rolling cycle of translate-edit-translate. Once I, the translator, finish my first-draft rendering of the English for a given part, the next thing I do is read it back over. This allows me to catch any glaring typos, adjust the flow of the text, and generally make sure it’s in a presentable state before I hand it off to Sasha, our editor. At this point the week’s part of the book goes from the MS Word document I use to do the drafting to a Google doc that we can both see and edit. I get on with starting the translation of the next part and forget about the current one for a couple of days while Sasha goes to work on it.

What kinds of things does an English light novel editor look for? Because we’re dealing with an English text, some of them are the same things that the editor of any book in English would look for: words that don’t quite mean what you intend them to mean, sentences that don’t flow, or passages where the logic is confusing. The author—or in this case, the translator—often has an issue with being too close to the text; as the one who created it, he or she usually knows what it’s supposed to mean. Part of the editor’s job is to point out where a reader would stop and say, “Wait, what?”

With a translation, this can take some unique forms. As a translator, it’s easy to get hung up on the exact wording, order, or phraseology of the original. An editor can help find synonyms when a word isn’t quite right, or highlight an idiom that’s been mindlessly retained from Japanese, or just outright tell the translator, “Hey, we don’t say that in English.” (A translator who’s alert to these kinds of problems can often fix many of them in the first-revision pass I mentioned above, but it’s surprising how often they slip by, or how often I find myself saying to Sasha, “Are you sure that’s not normal English?”)

After Sasha has read through and revised the week’s part, I look at her changes and we decide what to keep and what to discuss. Sometimes we have slightly different ideas of how a passage should sound in English, or different ideas of how to reach the intended tone. Sometimes she wants to know: did I really mean for the translation to say such and such? Then we either try to make the English clearer, or I go back to the Japanese to see if I missed anything. 

This might sound a bit adversarial, but in fact it’s a collaborative process. Both of us want the same thing: for the translation to be as accurate as possible and to sound as good as it can in English. So while we may go back and forth about a specific word or passage, we virtually always end up with something we both find acceptable. (Truth be told, I accept most of Sasha’s changes without further discussion—it’s usually obvious that she’s right to make a change.) And, yes, in The Apothecary Diaries, our discussions sometimes involve putting our heads together to riddle out the series’s mysteries and make sure the translation conveys the same clues and ambiguities as the original.

As the translator, I love being a part of the editing process for a number of reasons. On one level, it’s a quality thing: the two of us together produce a better text than either of us could doing our bits in isolation. Similarly, if there’s an issue with the translation itself—if, say, I’ve inadvertently made the English ambiguous when it’s not meant to be—it’s better for Sasha to be able to talk to me and ask me what I was going for than for her to take a guess at what was intended.

But on another level, being part of the editing process also contributes to my growth. I get to see how another person evaluates my translation as an English text and learn where I could make my language stronger or more precise, or where I’m unwittingly sticking too close to the structure or language of the Japanese. Paying attention to my editor can also help me see quirks in my own English usage—every translator, like every writer of English, has their own voice, and as much as they may earnestly try to act as nothing more than a ventriloquist’s dummy for the original author, their own habits of language are likely to crop up.

Translators don’t produce a final translation on their own. Ideally, they’re part of a cooperative process that helps focus and polish both the meaning and language of the translation so that the final published version can convey not just the story but the feeling of the original Japanese. The editor is an integral part of that process, a steady hand on the tiller of the language.

Thanks for joining us for this volume! Have fun, read widely (appreciating the work of those who polished the text as you go!), and we’ll see you next time.