One of the things I always find overwhelming as a translator is the amount of power I have to twist the meanings of words and phrases. The people I translate for are getting work translated precisely because they don’t understand the source text well enough to gain meaning from it. And in steps a translator, some stranger, to save the day. Often the reader gains meaning entirely from the translated version, rather than the source text (I know I do!). This potentially gives me a lot of leeway to approach the text however I want, which is a scary thought.
Of course, it is unethical to take advantage of such a position of power for obvious reasons, and as a professional translator, I see no point in questioning this position.
Still, the occasional chuckle arises when one word can make an otherwise serious film title sound ridiculous!
Sometimes I put silly place-holder words and phrases into translated texts, so that I can immediately know the literal meaning in English without having to recheck in the dictionary. I go over the text a few times, revising it until the word or phrase sounds natural and acceptable, so normally the place-holders are replaced. There are times when I grow attached to them, though!
Like this week, when I had to translate a Japanese program into English for number of film screenings which no non-Japanese speaker would bother going to. The director of “Suicide Club”, a grotesque cult hit in the West, is having a spotlight screening of many of his films at some point here in Kochi, but there is going to be no support for non-Japanese speakers such as subtitles, which makes one wonder why the organisors insisted on an English program!
Still, one of the films was called “気球クラブ、その後” (Kikyuu Club, Sono Ato). 気球 (kikyuu) means balloon, as in hot air balloon, and その後 (sono ato) basically means ‘afterwards’. From the sentence-long plot description, all I could really glean about the film was that it was a drama about a group of people who used to be members of a ballooning club, meeting 5 years later and reminiscing about their time in the club.
Unable to find an official English translation online and asked to write translations of the unknown titles in brackets, I put in a silly place-holder and chuckled to myself at the dramatic nuance the title had now taken on. Unfortunately, the more I worked on the project, the more the place-holder grew on me until the final title for “気球クラブ、その後” became:
Ballooning Club: The Aftermath
Despite knowing next to nothing about the film, I now felt like I understood the entire story: There is an elephant in the room at the ballooning club reunion. The question is what is that elephant? What really happened at ballooning club?!
In the end, the person who gave me the job decided to do without the unofficial title translations in brackets. As sad as I am to see my baby deleted from the final translation, I can’t say I blame him!