LITMIR.BIZ

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assumed that by the time the film came out in English, someone cleverer than me would have come up with a good word (or words) for it. In the nearly twenty-plus years since the film came out, no one has come up with anything.

       Rule 3—Sometimes you just have to let go and leave things out.

      As soon as the final version of a Japanese commercial film is approved for release, the translator or translators begin making an English-subtitled version.

      Creating the subtitles is very hard. Your translation has to be accurate. It has to sound natural. And you have to be able to read the subtitles in exactly the same amount of time it takes for the character to say the lines on screen.

      This is an example:

      In the film Princess Mononoke, Ashitaka, riding his faithful elk-like animal named Yakul, comes upon a battle. As he watches from a hilltop, several of the samurai fighting below notice him. One of them says “Kabuto kubi da!” Direct translation: kabuto—helmet, kubi—neck, da—is. Literally, the samurai has said, “The helmet is a neck.”

      Though kubi may literally mean neck, it also refers to a severed head. So “kubi da” refers to a head cut off. Kabuto in this case is just a very quick way of saying “that guy wearing the helmet.” In feudal Japan a soldier often received a bounty for every severed head he brought back from a battle. Proof of an enemy kill.

      So the samurai is saying “That guy wearing the helmet, if we cut off his head we get a reward.” That translation made into a subtitle would take eighteen beats. “Kabuto kubi da” is six beats long. Your subtitle translation needs to lose twelve beats. It needs to be 70% shorter.

      “Get the guy in the helmet! Take his head!” Ten beats. Still need to lose four beats.

      “The helmet guy is mine.” Six beats, so it should be OK. But now the translation sounds funny. What’s a helmet guy? And you’ve lost the head being cut off and taken in for a bounty.

      “His head is mine.” Four beats so it fits fine, and as a bonus, slow readers can follow. It feels right in the context, but you’ve given up mentioning the helmet. But it’s a better line. Japanese speakers get the full flavor. English speakers get an abridged yet acceptable alternative.

       Rule 4—Don’t take anything for granted.

      In the film Spirited Away is a scene where it’s reported that the character Haku has stolen the character Zeniba’s seal. The Disney writers working on the English-language screenplay of the film contacted us urgently because they were puzzled by this. In Japan, a seal (an emblem used as a means of authentication) is a very important thing. Americans routinely affix their signatures to checks, credit card slips, and legal documents, but in Japan everyone uses a seal for this purpose. For legal documents and such, a Japanese person takes out his/her seal, presses it into a pad of red ink, and then stamps it onto the relevant document.

      The Disney writers wanted to know why, if Haku had stolen Zeniba’s seal (semi-aquatic marine mammal), the seal never appeared in any subsequent scene in the film.

      When it comes to foreign cultures, you just never know what other people know and what they don’t.

       Rule 5—Review everything.

      When we got back the first screenplay for Castle in the Sky from Disney to review, we checked the dialogue over and over again, but we didn’t think to check the characters’ names. It was only later when we began to get samples of recorded dialogue that we noticed that some of the characters had odd names.

      Wishing to impart to his film a slightly international flavor, Hayao Miyazaki had given two of the characters French names, Charles and Henri. These names pronounced and written in Japanese come out as Sharuru and Anri. Disney’s translator, who was a third-generation Japanese-American and had never lived in Japan, and who also didn’t believe in asking questions, had decided that the names were probably Chinese. So despite Disney’s frequent complaint that the names in Ghibli’s films were too exotic and hard to pronounce for an American audience, Disney ended up with characters in its version of Castle in the Sky named An-Li and Shalulu when they could have had Henry and Charles.

      * * *

      After the monumental box office success of Princess Mononoke, potential foreign distributors wanted to see English-subtitled versions of all Ghibli’s films. Some of these existed but were for the most part very quickly and very poorly done. From both an artistic and a commercial viewpoint, we wanted the films to be as well translated as possible.

      Our method at Ghibli of translating the films into English was to do it with a team of at least five people. We figured that with at least two native speakers of English and two native speakers of Japanese, and one person who could go either way, we had a better chance of getting everything right. The biggest problem with that was Hayao Miyazaki. Hayao Miyazaki can say something in Japanese, and five people hearing him will have five completely different ideas about what it was that he meant. And none of them will be wrong.

      Our process was an attempt to render the often difficult but beautiful Japanese of the original films into English equivalents that gave the non-Japanese speaker a feel for the original language insofar as it was possible. Making a film is essentially a collaborative undertaking. We thought that the translation of a film should be, too.

      Translating a film has other special problems. In the movie business a film made in one country and shown in another is usually deemed to lose commercial value the longer the amount of time since its first release in its country of origin. If your film has a commercial shelf life, as soon as it’s completed, or even before if possible, you have to produce an English-subtitled version that you can show to potential distributors abroad. So speed can be important.

      Once a film is sold to a distributor in foreign Country A, the distributor will want to subtitle and/or dub it into the language of Country A. If Country A is Norway, say, there aren’t a lot of translators who can do Japanese to Norwegian. But there are plenty who can do English to Norwegian.

      It turns out that the English subtitles we made for the Ghibli films weren’t that useful in creating Country A subtitles or dubbing scripts. The shortcuts we had to take to get the English subtitles to match the length of the dialogue on screen turned out to cause more problems than they solved. So for every Ghibli film we made what we called a direct translation. This was a faithful translation of the film that made no compromises for timing. Then the Country A translators could get their translation right, and it was up to them to figure out how to fit their subtitles to the screen.

      Translators are nerds and want their product to be accurate. Because nothing stimulates excellence in the workplace like having someone review your work, we reviewed all the foreign translations where there were people at Ghibli who spoke the language—essentially French, Spanish, and English. If an error was serious enough that we could catch it, it was probably a problem.

      But all writers resent criticism of their work. Creating and reviewing the foreign-language screenplays often resulted in heated battles over words and ended with bad feelings. We once had to do Italian subtitles for a Ghibli film that was entered in competition at the Venice Film Festival. We hired a team of Japanese/Italian and Italian/Japanese translators. The work had to be done in Japan at Ghibli for security reasons because the film itself had not yet been released even in Japan. By the end of the project, a stout referee had to be installed in the conference room where the work was being done to keep the translators from physically coming to blows.

      The final thing I learned about translation is that if you get it right, no one will thank you for it or praise your work. If you get it wrong you will hear about it, loud and clear. Thanks to the internet, you will never have to wonder where you went wrong. There is no such thing as a perfect translation. Of anything. Whatever you do there will be criticism. And yes, it does hurt.

The Circus

      When Princess Mononoke was released in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki hadn’t been out

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