Eight Ways To Say You – Cheryl

The seemingly contradictory tension between the need for a translator to be humble and arrogant in their line of work stood out to me. In some of our other classes we have been talking about the 'invisibility' of a translator and the role of translator as a 'pure conduit' of the original text for readers in a new language—in most cases, a translator steps out of the limelight and strives to speak with the voice of the author instead of their own. I can agree that this definitely requires some amount of humility.

There is, meanwhile, also the power that a translator yields in the right they are granted to speak for someone else and as Hirano explains, there are many situations where creative license should and need to be taken and the translator has the freedom to make these choices to the best of their judgment. There can be any number of ways to approach the same issues and you need to have the self-confidence, if not arrogance, to stand by your decisions once you have made them.

I was especially struck by the extent to which conversations might be altered, exposition expanded and details changed entirely, in order for the desired impact to be had on a new audience in a different context. For a long time I've had a sense that readers should be thrown in the deep end of foreign cultural references and if they drown they drown, lest we end up with embarrassing and patronising localisations (I think of the famous scene in an episode of the Pokemon anime where they refer to onigiri as 'jelly donuts'). 

But more recently, and with this reading to bolster my new conclusions, it would be much kinder of the translator to ease a foreign reader to a new culture and that there are ways that this can be done with skill and sensitivity as Hirano has in her translation of 'The Friends'.