SPIT AND POLISH

Translator versus polisher on anime scripts.

If I said Japanese writers were not as good as Western ones, I'd be a fool; nationality is no barometer of talent, as I once told a TV producer who rejected my work because I was English. Not because I wasn't any good, but because I had the wrong passport. And yet, Japan's anime scriptwriters are getting the same treatment nearly all the time; a cotorie of "transliterators" and "adapters" who "transpose" and "versionize" see themselves as arbiters of good writing and wade into perfectly decent scripts with hamfisted blue pencils and a desire to see their name on the credits.

In order to get a good dub or sub script, you need a translator who can write as well as translate, and that's a rare bird indeed in this business, with only a few who can really pull off the magic and most of them are out of the price range of Western anime companies. Alternatively, you can find a good translator with no talent for writing and turn their work over to a polisher, a scriptwriter who can turn fractured Japlish into flowing, natural English and fold phrases like "very cold sleeping room" into "cryogenic suspension chamber". It's not an easy process, and many who try, fail. Some companies have rewriters who can only handle one 'voice', who can't change thematic gears to fit the tone of a given show; someone who can manage perfectly when crafting contemporary cop-show American slang but falls flat on his face with laughable takes on high-fantasy ye olde English.

Some companies try to fit translators to projects, but this is usually the exception and not the rule. Sadly, a lot of companies won't even engage the services of a rewriter, let alone a decent translator, and that leaves viewers with scenes of supposedly-unfathomable, inhuman aliens spouting phrases like "My Goodness!" and unintelligable, clunky sentences spilling out of spotting lists (prepared for use in dialogue checks) instead of actual scripts. Many consider a script polish to be a superflous expense, and then wonder why audiences laugh at unintentional culture-clash gags during scenes of serious drama. The real problem with polishing is that it's a good thing often done badly, and that it's so open to abuse.

It takes a dedicated writer to look at a joke that's funny in Japanese but not English and not try to 'fix' it; it takes a better writer to polish that same gag so it's funny in both languages. If the joke is about a Japanese politician, do you make it a joke about an American politician, and if you do, will anybody get it when you market the tape in Europe? If you're unscrupulous, you'll shoehorn in your own gags, and your own ideas about how the characters should talk, and so on until you're practically constructing your own script from the ground up; writers that 'build up their part' like this are short-changing the audience, who, unless they speak Japanese, will never know it. I'm not against polishing; a lot of scriptwriters make a lot of money doing it in the real movie business...check out the uncredited job Quentin Tarantino did on Crimson Tide's dialogue, for example.

Better still, bad or inaccurate translations can be saved by a good rewrite; the much- maligned Robotech scripts took three disparate shows and spliced them together into a cohesive whole that worked, despite the fact that the resemblence to the originals was strained, to say the least. The true habitat for the anime script polisher is the transparent realm inhabited by his spirtual superior, the translator-writer, a place where both can render the Japanese origins of a story invisible and so allow the viewer to concentrate on the plot; but there are a lot more writers who can polish bad translations than can read the raw Japanese, and only a few of them have the humilty to remember that the story isn't theirs...they're just borrowing it for a while. In the end, the job of rewriting isn't about stamping your own name on someone else's script; it's about guiding a foreign work into the hands of a new audience in as close a form to the original as is humanly possible. Anything else is leeching off the originator's talent, and as any writer will tell you, that is a spit in the eye.

(This article was originally written for Manga Max magazine.) © J. Swallow 1999, 2001

MAIN PAGE / SHINY & NEW / BACKSTORY / WORKLOAD / WRITING / BUY MY STUFF! / BIBLIOGRAPHY / LINK-O-RAMA