Translating Blood+

I was excited today to look at the latest issue of Newtype USA and see "The Official Art of Blood+" on the cover. (Is this the final issue of Newtype USA? That is what I hear. On a side-note, my subscription to Premiere Magazine was cancelled when that awesome magazine folded, and all I got was a bunch of issues of US Weekly in repayment. I am now nervous to buy magazine subscriptions too far in advance, and am also glad the US Weekly stopped coming to my house because I read it from cover-to-cover in my driveway like a curler-wearing housewife every Friday afternoon.)

I will tell you why I was excited by this below, but allow me to state in this blog I usually wear my "reviewer" hat, and only give glimpses into my "real job" as a translator. The reason for that is that 1) being able to keep secrets is one of the tantamount requirements of highly-regarded translators (which I hope to be someday) and 2) translators are not the best self-promoters. I won't speak for anyone but myself, but the spotlight is best shown on the work, not the translator.

That being said, a couple events over the last couple days have inspired me to pull back the lid of the cardboard box that is a translator's life, if only a little, for you to peruse, enjoy, or scoff at.

Firstly, I was excited by the positive comments about the translation of Yuu Asami’s A.I. Revolution in Precocious Curmudgeon this week. It occurred to me that the translation aspect of bringing a title from Japanese to English wasn't always completely ignored. And more importantly the writer, David Welsh, "gets" the concept that the better the translation, the less noticeable it is. That is a sort of translator credo. "No news is good news" in the translation business. If you never hear how you did, you must have done a good job. Because if you do a crummy job, you are sure to hear about it. (Naturally, you could do a translation so poorly the client never contacts you again, and that's why translators have high blood pressure. No news is good news...unless the phone stops ringing altogether.)

Secondly, I was excited that a publisher I solicited for review material actually read this blog, saw the post I wrote being excited about a positive review for The Great Adventures of the Dirty Pair, which I translated the second of two stories for (the first expertly done by Dana Lewis), and asked me about work.

And thirdly, a close friend of mine said to me yesterday "Why don't you talk about translation more on your blog? People are interested in it."

I am not fully convinced that is true, but I will indulge at least one person with my happiness in seeing Blood+ on the cover of February's Newtype USA.

The reason might surprise you. I am working on the novelizations of the animated Blood+ series for Dark Horse. Dark Horse is also releasing the first issue of the Blood+ manga, based on the anime in February. (I believe the first novel comes out in March.) This has been an exciting and unique challenge, as this title has anime, manga, and novels, all coming out within months of each other, but each being done by separate translators and editors, and by two different publishers. (Sony is doing the anime DVDs and Dark Horse is releasing the manga and novels.) So there are three groups dealing with the same story. Personally I am doing the novelizations, and within the same publishing company, I have been able to work with the uber-talented Camellia Nieh, who is translating the manga, in terms of keeping consistency. Since the manga comes out first, a lot of that amounts to me keeping consistent with her work.

On a lot of titles this wouldn't be so difficult, but in Blood+ the stage moves from Okinawa to Vietnam to Russia to France, and so on. There are lots of characters with "foreign" (non-Japanese) names that need to be backtranslated into English.

My excitement about the Newtype USA official art spread is that it is the first definitive guide to how some of these characters' names are spelled in English. (I should have said earlier it doesn't take much to excite a translator.) The anime is the "reference material" for both the manga and the novels, though watching it in Japanese doesn't help us hammer down obscure "foreign" names. What we don't want is to be inconsistent from the anime's spellings, and now I have a hint as to how to properly spell a few of the names. (Even in-house we went back and forth between "Haji" and "Hagi" for quite a while. Personally, I like "Haji" better, but the votes fell to "Hagi"...which I have warmed up to.)

If you know nothing about Blood+, I hope you give it a shot. It is multi-layered, and any two-sentence description of the series you find can't possibly give justice to its complexity and emotion. It is less about vampires and monsters and more about self-discovery and learning to appreciate life as well as death.