Read on Twitter
1/11) As promised, I'm going to explain how I dealt with Kyoto-ben while translating "Chōko" by IND Kary. Thanks to @_sinfulcrow for the wonderful lettering work, and to @irodoricomics for letting me post the images! All the pics and lines I'll post here are SFW, so don't worry.
2/11) First of all, an analysis of how Chōko's Kyoto-ben and accent are perceived within the work itself. Everyone perfectly understands her (as does the reader) but other characters think that her accent is way too thick, so much so that some believe that she's faking it.
3/11) So we need something that is understandable yet foreign-sounding. The best way to do so, in my opinion, was to encapsulate some of the most prominent features of how Kyoto-ben is perceived in Japan and create some quirks to work as shorthand for that dialect.
4/11) This is by no means comprehensive, but the impression that most Japanese people who don't live in Kyoto have of that dialect is that it is elegant, slow, and soft. To render the elegance I used pretentious, pompous verbiage.
5/11) For example, instead of a simple "頑張って!" ("do your best!"), Chōko uses "おきばりやす", a not quite archaic but still pretentious Kyoto alternative. People laugh at her for this, so I went with something that would elicit the same reaction in English: "Play with valour!"
6/11 Slowness is relatively easy, you just use no contractions and use the passive voice more than you normally would. Anything more heavy-handed than this would, imo, be distracting. The most difficult part was making her sound "soft", and this is where I went all experimental:
7/11) I decided I'd muddle vowels, changing them through umlauts or making them longer with macrons. Most of these changes, while they fall on the normally-stressed syllables of words, happen near the end of her lines, subtly telling the reader that her inflection is also unique.
8/11) This is extremely versatile, because once you establish that usage as shorthand for the accent, you can have a character introduce themselves by saying "Hellö!" and the reader instantly knows that they also have an accent. (this happens with a character later in the manga)
9/11) What's more, it doesn't even really matter how the reader actually interprets the sounds of vowels, so long as they know that it sounds foreign (and there are no umlauts in English, so that's a given). And if the reader doesn't like it, they can just ignore it very easily.
10/11) Of course this is very ad-hoc and isn’t applicable to 100% of cases, but it’s easier to implement, and, given how context-neutral it is, less issue-prone than, say, changing the Kyoto dialect into a specific American dialect or something.
11/11) Again, thanks to Irodori for letting me try this out, despite none of the 3 QCers liking my idea (
). Five years from now, when everyone has accepted this as the only good solution for translating Kyoto-ben into English, please remember me. I'll be waiting.
). Five years from now, when everyone has accepted this as the only good solution for translating Kyoto-ben into English, please remember me. I'll be waiting.
