The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 9 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translator’s Notes

The Apothecary Diaries Diaries

Vol. 9

A Steady Hand

Welcome to volume 9—or perhaps at this point I should say, thanks for reading volume 9! Your friendly neighborhood translator is here with another peek behind the scenes. We’ve talked a lot in these essays about the kinds of decisions that go into creating an English translation. Today I’d like to talk a bit about the actual process by which a translation gets into your hands (or the digital equivalent thereof).

When I sit down to translate, I start with a blank Word document and the physical Japanese book open in front of me. Then I simply start translating. I do a chunk of pages from the book each day until I’ve hit the page specified for the end of that part (or another stopping point that seems more suitable; these things are fluid).

This is, of course, a first draft. Before I let anyone see it, I read it over to look for any glaring errors and anywhere I’d like to revise the phrasing or make other improvements. I also leave a bunch of comments. They might give more literal translations, some background on a word or phrase, or a web link that shows where I got, say, the name of a particular mushroom.

They might also be questions. They might say things like “I’ve used this word three times now. Can we come up with some synonyms?” or “I know I haven’t worded this very well. Let’s talk about how to phrase it clearly.”

Who are all these comments and questions directed at? That would be our editor, Sasha McGlynn. When I’m done with my first revision pass, which hopefully results in a translation that’s in at least a presentable state, I hand it over to Sasha so that she can have a crack at it. In practice, what this means is that I upload it to Google Docs, where we can both see and work on it. Then I forget about the draft for a few days. (Usually I move right on to translating the next part of the book.) Sasha, meanwhile, is hard at work editing the fresh part.

What does it mean to edit? In broad publishing terms, this can encompass a range of different stages of development and refinement of the text. At a traditional publishing house, there may be several editors responsible for the various stages a book goes through, but an editor in this industry is likely to wear several different hats. Some of Sasha’s corrections are mechanical; for example, when I have flagrantly ignored the house style guide by leaving commas before “too” or “either” at the end of a sentence. (“Maomao picked the other mushroom, too.” 🡪 “Maomao picked the other mushroom too.”) If there are misspelled words or if I’ve picked the wrong homonym (if I wrote council when I should have said counsel, for example), she’ll fix those as well.

In many cases, though, Sasha’s contributions go beyond making sure I’ve observed style and grammar rules, and help shape the text itself. This sits on an interesting part of the editing spectrum that doesn’t quite correspond to anything in publishing an original (rather than a derivative) work. Because the original already exists (in Japanese), the translation team obviously doesn’t have the leeway or the authority to make major changes to the plot or presentation. The team does, however, want to make the text as impactful as it can be in the target language, and this is where a good editor is invaluable.

Let’s take a look at a specific passage from this volume to see what an editor like Sasha does and how the back-and-forth between us helps create the final form of the text. Here’s my initial draft, after my first-pass revision but before Sasha got to look at it:

When they got back to the ship, they found it awfully quiet. Maybe everyone had gone out. The sailors were making sure everything was shipshape, while the cleaners took trash out of the rooms and swept the deck. The cleaners were a group of middle-aged women dressed in men’s clothing and industriously polishing every surface on the ship. Most of them seemed to be family members of the sailors; they also made the travelers’ meals.

If you have an editor’s eye, you’ll notice a few things right away. For example, the phrase “the cleaners” appears twice, and there are three sentences dealing with them for a total of four major clauses describing them. (The last one has a semicolon.) Sasha saw this as something that could be smoothed out, and she rearranged some of the material and changed the way other parts of it were connected so that it would flow better. Here’s the paragraph again, with strikeouts indicating where text was changed and brackets indicating Sasha’s changes:

When they got back to the ship, they found it awfully quiet. Maybe everyone had gone out. The sailors were making sure everything was shipshape, while the cleaners[, a group of middle-aged women dressed in men’s clothing, removed] took trash out of [from] the rooms[,] and swept the deck.[,] The cleaners were a group of middle-aged women dressed in men’s clothing and industriously polishing[ed] every surface on the ship. Most of them [the cleaners] seemed to be family members of the sailors [and]; they also made the travelers’ meals.

For clarity’s sake, here’s the full paragraph with Sasha’s changes:

When they got back to the ship, they found it awfully quiet. Maybe everyone had gone out. The sailors were making sure everything was shipshape, while the cleaners, a group of middle-aged women dressed in men’s clothing, removed trash from the rooms, swept the deck, and industriously polished every surface on the ship. Most of the cleaners seemed to be family members of the sailors and also made the travelers’ meals.

Sasha’s made a number of canny edits here, most notably moving the description of the cleaners to accompany the first mention of them, which is a more natural place to put the description in English. That, plus the way she’s combined the actions in the middle part of the description, eliminate the need for one of the references to the cleaners, making the prose flow better and feel less stilted. Likewise, she’s replaced the progressive (“-ing”) form polishing with the simple past tense polished.

Once Sasha has done her editing pass on a part, I take another look and either accept or question her changes. In general, I accept the majority of her edits (either immediately or after talking them over with her). In our example paragraph, I took all of her changes except one: I questioned the line “most of the cleaners seemed to be family members of the sailors and also made the travelers’ meals.” I felt that “most seemed” reasonably described the cleaners’ status as family members of the sailors (a condition that doesn’t apply to all of them and is one Maomao can only speculate about), but not necessarily their making of the meals (which may involve all of them and which Maomao might know from seeing them work). Therefore, to me, the sentence felt a bit awkward and potentially confusing.

Sasha had a quick and simple solution: flip the ideas around. We ended up rendering this sentence as “The cleaners also made the travelers’ meals, and most of them seemed to be family members of the sailors.” This way, “most of them” is in the least confusing place, and the sentence as a whole flows better.

After all this, the final paragraph reads:

When they got back to the ship, they found it awfully quiet. Maybe everyone had gone out. The sailors were making sure everything was shipshape, while the cleaners, a group of middle-aged women dressed in men’s clothing, removed trash from the rooms, swept the deck, and industriously polished every surface on the ship. The cleaners also made the travelers’ meals, and most of them seemed to be family members of the sailors.

The fact that Sasha and I get to talk this over is somewhat unusual for a light-novel translation project. Typically in the light novel industry, a translator prepares a draft, sends it to the client (the publisher), and doesn’t hear anything about it again until it’s published. Translators and editors rarely get to work closely with each other, a fact that has as much to do with editors’ frequently crushing workloads as anything; they’re often too busy to engage with translators even if they would like to. J-Novel Club both allows and expects their translation teams to work together closely, which is one of the perks of working on their projects.

I’m a firm believer that the translator’s perspective and expertise are valuable throughout the translation process. For example, an editor or a translator might easily fall into a language trap—a false cognate, for example—and it helps if they can check each other’s understanding. On the other hand, sometimes I’ll come up with a really strange piece of English—maybe I was being too literal, or maybe I was just having one of those days—and it’s both more efficient and better for the text if Sasha can ask me what I meant, instead of sitting there trying to puzzle out what on earth I was thinking. Having both of us there all the way through the production of the final draft is nearly always a positive for the quality of the text.

This is also an excellent time to point out that although Sasha and I are the ones who produce the English parts week in, week out, we aren’t the only ones with a role to play in the final draft. Once an entire book is complete, it goes to the Quality Assurance team for a series of final checks. This involves having at least two different additional readers read the complete text of the book. In general, QA isn’t about making substantial changes, but about making sure that all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed—sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. QA readers check for any mechanical issues that Sasha and I missed during the prepub phase (oops—there are two periods there! Uh-oh! Merriam-Webster says that word should be hyphenated!) and anything else they think might be a potential issue. After each QA read, the book comes back to me and Sasha to review the QA edits and decide what to do about any outstanding issues. Only after all that is the final version released as an e-book.

The work of editors like Sasha and our QA team is, ideally, invisible—you’ll rarely if ever be able to look at a finished manuscript and say, “Ah, the translator did that line, but the editor clearly touched up this other part!” In the same way that the translator tries to be a transparent window on the work of the original author, the editor tries to inconspicuously make sure the translator’s work is serving the text in the most effective way. Yet whether or not you realize what they’ve done, editors are indispensable to a polished final product. The next time you have a smooth reading experience with a book, you have an editor to thank somewhere along the line!

I hope you enjoyed this look at a sometimes underappreciated aspect of the translation process. Have fun, read widely (and be grateful to those editors), and we’ll see you for the next volume!