Subtitling question

[solo]

I read a really interesting sub-thread in a convo I can't find again now, but as somebody who's very interested in language, it made me think.

So far in the subtitling, I've privileged English over Chinese because I want stuff to be accessible to people like me, who don't know any Chinese. But even as I get more used to it I become more aware of the nuances and with that, the difficulty of choosing the right words/things to do.

So. Until now, I've always translated 'lao' as 'old' and 'xiao' as 'little'.

But I'm really and truly easy on this - no solution is ever perfect, and I can do a search-replace easily.

Only one question really because the rest will follow.

Poll #21652

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32

View Respondents

Lao Chu or Old Chu?

View Answers

Lao Chu
22 (68.8%)

Old Chu
7 (21.9%)

other and I will make your life even more complicated with my comment but it's totally worth it
3 (9.4%)

*note I'm not going to turn Zhao Yunlan's 'Hei Lao Ge' into 'Lao Bro Black', that is a step too far into madness for me, and I want people to get the flavour of this thing and also, I'm ultimately doing the subs for me and I like the 'Old Bro Black'.**

**and also, also, it's softsubs so anyone who hates it can change it easily if they care enough.

Comments

[jo_lasalle]

Strong, strong preference on the translated terms here. So if you end up doing a full search and replace (the Lao X versions certainly seem popular in fic), maybe shoot me the pre-S&R versions? ^_^ *bat's eyelashes*

[solo]

I will do your bidding as always. :)

[jo_lasalle]

It is the way of things. 😁😘😘

[teaotter]

In American English, at least, I think the closer form is Big Chu -- yes, I know that Lao is frequently translated as Old, but it has connotations of respect that the word old just doesn't have in English.

Back when we used nicknames more often, Old John was usually about age, but Big John could be about size or power or respect (think "Big Man on Campus").

[asya_ana]

I really agree with this. "Old Chu" just doesn't capture the sense of it.

[solo]

Okay, big is an interesting alternative, and I have been stressing (sleepless nights, no, I mean it) over the discrepancy between 'old/little' vs 'old/young', so the big would solve that. Big Bro Black is also pleasingly alliterative! :) Keeping this in mind!

[mecurtin]

Yes, yes! It can be size, power, respect OR age, e.g. big brother.

[solo]

But doesn't Big Brother sound like... Big Brother? Like, isn't that term now reserved for the Orwell thing?

[teaotter]

I've referred to my older brother as Big Brother. Generally to his face and when I'm asking for something, but that's kind of what we're talking about here anyway. No one thinks I'm referencing Orwell.

[mecurtin]

Only when both are in caps, and only sometimes! When talking to or about your older male sibling, it's almost always "my big brother". And there's a well-known charitable organization, Big Brothers Big Sisters.

[trobadora]

Personally I prefer Lao over Old.

(Also, "bro" sounds so American to me, it keeps kicking me out of the story. But that's neither here nor there; there really isn't a good English translation.)

[extrapenguin]

Same on both counts. ("Bro" sounds like a very American frat boy. None of the characters are that nor the Chinese equivalent of it AFAICT.) I've seen "Brother Black", and for heilaoge, something with "buddy" or "pal" would probably be closer in effect in at least my idiolect of English.

(If you absolutely insist on using Old, at least spell it as Ol' so it's more akin to the casual-ish term it is in Chinese?)

[solo]

Ol' I could do but does that solve the Bro? If you had to translate it, for Anglophone n00bs, what would you pick?

[extrapenguin]

For heilaoge, uh, "Ol' Brother Black" would work. The rest of the -ge:s, I might just ignore? Lin Jing-ge can just be Lin Jing. The plot-significant ones like Chu-ge, I'd honestly leave in as a fansubber, but for Anglophone n00bs who have never heard of another language in their life and are allergic to untranslated honorifics, I'd go for "Brother Chu" over "Bro Chu". (And in places where that's not plot-significant, again, mayhaps just "Chu"?)

(There's also a place in episode 40 where I really think a conversation should contain zero instances of "Bro" but have at least one of the didi:s translated as "little brother" [instead of just "brother"] for characterization reasons.)

[solo]

I totally agree on ep 40. 38 to 40 are special places which will get special treatment because nothing is casual any more.

[solo]

I'm doing Brother Chu, not Bro Chu, I'm saving the Bro for irreverent Zhao Yunlan. :) Where I feel it works, perhaps because I'm not American... but will ponder!

[extrapenguin]

I'm not American, either, but "Bro" just sounds so American it breaks my suspension of disbelief. *g*

[solo]

Okay, maybe the fact that I don't watch TV is tripping me up here. :)

[maggie33]

I prefer Lao Chu and Xiao Guo, the same way I prefer, for instance, Hong-jie and Chu-ge instead of sister Hong and brother Chu. But I don’t mind the English version.

[solo]

I'm the same, but I just want stuff to make sense to anglophones, who are generally not among the people most likely to grok foreign languages. I mean, I consider stuff I don't understand a challenge, but many consider it a turn-off, and I don't want to turn anyone off this show.

Point in case, like me, you're not originally anglophone. We need to think of those poor, limited people. :)

[maggie33]

You probably right that there are people who would consider original terms too hard to get through. You know, I often forget that there are people who find it hard to read subtitles, and for some of them all those lao, xiao, gege and didi can be an additional difficulty. :)

[qikiqtarjuaq]

+1. This is exactly where I'm at. I'm subtitling something right now, and my personal approach has been to explain it in the Translator's Notes and then keep the Chinese nomenclature. The -jie and -ge especially don't translate well to "sis" and "bro" in my opinion.

There was a hilarious tangent on this in one of the fic plotting channels (possibly #nsfw) of the Guardian discord a few months back, where someone speculated about porn with "bro" being liberally used in place of 'ge. It was cursed. Hysterically funny but cursed. Like, I just can't divorce the use of "bro" from my mental image of an early 20s douchebro drinking and getting high.

[maggie33]

I'm subtitling something right now, and my personal approach has been to explain it in the Translator's Notes and then keep the Chinese nomenclature.

Yes, I think that the best approach and definitely something I would prefer as a viewer or a reader. And I have the same reaction as you to the word "bro". For me that's just frat douchebag from American movies. :)

[solo]

Maybe I should just drop the -jie and -ge completely. They don't seem to do much, really? Hmmmm.

[riventhorn]

I like Lao Chu and Xiao Guo best--once I got used to them and understood them. If it was me, I would like the subtitle to read at first:

Lao Chu (Old Chu)

Do that for the first few times, and then just use Lao Chu going forward.

[solo]

That's a good option, especially since I do .ass (haha yes I know) files where I can put info somewhere else. Will defo keep that in mind!

[teaotter]

That's an interesting point. You can use the subtitles to transition people into the Chinese forms of address.

[trobadora]

Lao Chu (Old Chu)

Ooh, I like this a lot! Making it a gradual transition would help a lot for people completely unfamiliar with Chinese.

Um, it's late where I am and this may not be as coherent as I think it is, fair warning.

[firestar]

This monolingual Anglophone tends to prefer honorifics/suffixes etc left as they are, there's nuance and context that doesn't really translate well in English, especially if the form of address changes throughout the show. Not to mention the workarounds can be... hit and miss. A (Japanese) show I love has a couple of characters who use -chan on the end of each other's names and the subbers translated that as Kenny and Ranny, instead of just going with Ken-chan and Ran-chan, which is perfectly fine and not as oh god why cringe-inducing cutesy that makes me want to stab my eyes out*. There was much wailing in despair before I went into aegisub and just changed it for my sanity. >.>

Also, seeing people referred to as Brother 'name' or Sister 'name' just gives me connotations of religious orders and 'Bro' also seems very American and/or dudebro'ish. Old Bro Black works because Yunlan is deliberately being irreverent, but generally it makes me twitchy.

*Okay, that's an exaggeration, but if nothing else this comment has shown me that I do indeed still have Feelings on this topic, even if I thought Toku fandom had worn me down with it. >.>

Re: Um, it's late where I am and this may not be as coherent as I think it is, fair warning.

[solo]

Kenny and Ranny, OMG! I can see how that's problematic. :)

I'm not personally that happy with Brother and Sister either, but 'Bro' and 'Sis' seemed even worse; swithering now between just leaving the 'jie' and 'ge' stuff out completely or using the originals.

Re: Um, it's late where I am and this may not be as coherent as I think it is, fair warning.

[firestar]

It was painful. DD:

Yeah, that dilemma seems to be a common thread in fansubbing. :(

[melannen]

I am almost always in favor for the untranslated terms for things like that; as has been pointed out above, any possible English translation will miss nuance (or even be misleading.) But also that English as a language (and English speakers as a whole) are incredibly flexible and variable, so that if you leave in the untranslated terms for something that comes up a lot, people watching will almost always just start reading it as a newly-adopted English term amazingly quickly.

But also re: translated terms, I know Anglo American native English speakers who casually refer to friends and relatives as "brother so and so" and "sister so and so" on the regular. (It used to be way more common a hundred or two years ago, but it's not gone.) - 'Brother Lin Jing' would strike me as a perfectly normal translation. So honestly, English is also such a mess of different regional/subcultural usages that any attempt to translate the terms is going to read very differently to different people anyway.

(Also I think "Bro" is fine for Zhao Yunlan if you do translate! He reads to me as the sort of person who would use "Bro" a lot in his English because he wants to appear to be the sort of person who uses "Bro" even if he isn't, and that's most of the people who use "Bro" in my area anyway.)

[goss]

I also second the comment above about placing the English translation into brackets at first, and then transition to later down the line removing it altogether.

In addition, I could be way off here, but I was thinking that maybe using a completely different title that commands respect/power would work to express the spirit of 'Lao' if not its exact meaning.

eg. Master, Officer, Venerable, Captain, Warrior, etc.

[solo]

Maybe using a completely different title that commands respect/power would work to express the spirit of 'Lao' if not its exact meaning.

OMG no, making decisions like that is above my paygrade! I don't know enough Chinese for that. #hides

[powwie]

I think that is the never ending debate when translating from asian languages when honorifics are required but have no meaning in the translated into language.

It's the same dilemma with japanese.
Officially, and I mean in manga, anime, movie officially released they never translate honorifics like -kun. -san is a bit easier to portray in any languages.
Fans, at least here in Italy, always complain about the lack of honorifics in the translated text, because they say, the translation doens't convey the relationship status those honorifics implies.
True, but either you add footnotes everytime you write them or they won't convey anything to those who don't already know.

As for your poll, I chose Old Chu because to me it just sounds better than mixing chinese and english.
I wouldn't use the -ge, -jie, -didi or any of their translations the same way I wouldn't use -kun, -chan, -tan in Japanese. Those who know, they will hear them anyway. To people who are not familiar with honorifics, they only add to the confusion.

[solo]

Okay, food for thought here particularly in your second paragraph. Just to check, since 'kun, chan, tan' aren't exactly the same as 'ge, je, didi' - would you also drop 'neesan, baachan, obasan' and the like in Japanese? (I'm trying hard to remember what my own practice was...)

[likealeafonthewind]

I grew up watching fansubbed Japanese anime, where usually the honorifics are kept in and I felt like that added more to the show than it detracted because they tell you how the characters relate to each other. I feel like it would be the same with Guardian, so my personal preference would be to keep the honorifics in their original form, with maybe a note of what meaning it's conveying.

Same with titles like Heipaoshi (though I know you're asking more about ZYL's informal addresses and not SW's actual title). It just always looks weird to me to see that translated to Black Cloaked Envoy, like it loses some of the formality when it's in English. Though I've been trying to think - if there was a person in real life whose title is Heipaoshi in Chinese, and they visited an English-speaking country, would their title get translated into English when people are addressing them or speaking about them? Or would they still call them by the Chinese title?

....maybe we do always translate titles from other languages, because I can't think of any non-English titles that I've heard of in real life.

[solo]

There seems to be a bit of a consensus regarding the honorifics, yes. I'm pretty much decided to go with Lao and Xiao (at least for Chu and Guo). Not sure yet how much I care about standard stuff like 'ge' and 'jie'.

I'm afraid the Black-Cloaked Envoy will remain that, but hey, they're softsubs, if you use them you can always switch him out. ;)