"Akuma no Merry Christmas" - Knowing Your Goal in Translation

Merry Christmas!

To celebrate this holy day, we've got a special Christmas edition Studyoke! We're going to learn Seikimatsu's metal carol Akuma no Merry Christmas ("Devil's Merry Christmas") - the perfect song for adding some life to holiday karaoke parties. And in today's lesson, we're going to talk about the big hairy question of all translation.

Original Lyrics / Romaji / Phrasal Translation / Poetic Translation

About the Song

Seikimatsu is the original Japanese metal band - or at least, the first to achieve any sort of success. If you're a fan of Detroit Metal City, Seikimatsu is mainly who they're spoofing. According to Wikipedia:

"Seikima-II is a group of Akuma (悪魔, "demons") from the futuristic hyper-evolved dimension Makai (魔界, "demon world") that preach a religion called Akumakyo in order to propagate Satan through the use of heavy metal music."

This merry band of demons is led by the estimable Demon Kogure, former Vice King of Hell, leader of the world heavy-metal religion Akumakyo, and currently a sumo wrestling commentator. He also graduated Waseda University with honors (which is kind of a big deal).

If you don't think this guy is awesome, you don't know what awesome is.

No matter who you are or what type of music you prefer, I highly recommend adding a few Seikimatsu songs to your act. They're perfect for over-the-top dramatics and memorable performances. At the very least, check out 蝋人形の館 (Rouningyou no Yakata) for some amazing theatrics.

[Today's Topic: Knowing Your Goal in Translation is after the jump]

Today's Topic: Knowing Your Goal in Translation

Translation is a big topic, far bigger than we can hope to tackle in one lesson. But there is one thing you may already be wondering: what the heck is a Phrasal Translation?

To answer this, I'm going to show you four potential translations of the opening lines of Akuma no Merry Christmas. See if you can spot what makes them different

Original:

妖しげなきらめきが 街を包む Holy night
破滅への秒読みが 鈴の音に消され

Translation A:

Seductive glimmering lights envelop the city on this Holy Night
The countdown to destruction drowned out by the ringing bells

Translation B:

Seductive glittering Wrap the city Holy night
The countdown to destruction Erased by the sound of bells

Translation C:

Seductive-glittering-city-wrap Holy night
Destruction to countdown bell sound by erased

Translation D:

Questionable glitter [indicates sentence subject] town [indicates direct object of action] [to wrap up] Holy Night
Ruin [indicates direction or goal] [indicates possessive] countdown [indicates sentence subject] [bell (often globular)] [indicates possessive] sound [at (place, time)] [to erase]

Can you see a difference? Can you hear how some sound good and some sound incredibly awkward?

At this point it would be easy to say that Translation A is the "good one" and B-D are the bad ones. But why? That's the big hairy question of all translation: What makes a translation "good"?

Is it technical accuracy - staying as close as possible to the original words? If we translate the individual words without considering the context we get Translation D: something completely unreadable.

Sticking too close to the original sentence structure gets you Translation C: something that almost kind of makes sense, but also hurts your brain to read. But these are the most faithful translations when it comes to vocabulary and grammar!

Is it readability - making sense in the new language? Doing that gets you Translation A, which is pretty and poetic, but also inaccurate. For example "lights" doesn't appear in the original, just "glittering."

You may also notice the entire phrase "妖しげなきらめきが 街を包む" is a modifier for "Holy Night", not a separate phrase.  It's more accurate to say "Seductive-glittering-city-wrap Holy night" , per Translation C. It's terrible and annoying to read, but it sure is more accurate!

There are plenty of other issues to consider. Translation D claims to be word-to-word accurate, but it's only dictionary accurate. Ayashige can mean "questionable," but this song uses an unusual kanji which moves the meaning more towards the sexual, as the rest of the verse shows (in Japan, Christmas is a night for couples).

Even Translation B has problems: it's more readable than C or D, and more accurate than A...but it's also less readable than A and less accurate than C or D! Even the middle ground means dealing with more potential problems, not less.

And so on, ad infinitum. There are very smart people who have very well thought out answers for these questions, none of which are fully satisfying. At the end of the day, the best and only answer is, "It depends on what you want the translation to do."

So the real question is not "What is a Phrasal Translation." The real question is, "what do I want a Phrasal Translation to do? What is the goal of a phrasal translation and how does it differ from a regular song translation?

If you think about it, a normal song translation has two goals:

1). Accurately represent the meaning of the original.
2). Be enjoyable to read.

Which makes sense. A general audience doesn't want to know the ins and outs of Japanese grammar, they just want to know what the song is about and enjoy reading it.

But as a Japanese student, for you it's more important to see what parts of the translation correspond to the original. That way you can compare the two and gain a better understanding of how the grammar affects the meaning of the individual words, So our goals, our want to dos at StudyOke look more like:

1). Accurately represent the meaning of the original.
2). Help Japanese students see how the original lyrics are put together

That's why our Phrasal Translations end up like Translation B: we want it to be easy to see which phrases in the translation correspond to which phrases in the original. You've got dictionaries - you can look up individual words yourself. And you've got a brain - our Phrasal Translations are great starting points for your own more poetic translations (that's what this person did with this post).

Knowing your goal makes seeing the path forward easy. So if you ever get confused about the way forward in life or translation, just go back to your goals - what is the desired outcome? What do I want to do and who do I want to be? The path forward is necessarily bound up in the answer to that question.

That doesn't mean it's easy. It does mean it's clear.

Our goal here at StudyOke! is to enable you to study and practice and understand. That's why we do Phrasal Translations, and that's why we keep coming back with new posts and videos. So keep your eye on the goal, keep moving forward, and keep StudyOkeing!