For day 1 of vrisktereziweek, please consider me and @prospitian-monarch‘s au where
Terezi and Vriska are massively famous competing rock stars who don’t actually
hate each other at all anymore and just find their media rivalry completely
hilarious.
The bitterness actually was real for a while, after they
broke up and Vriska ditched their underground indie duo to make it big as a
solo star and Terezi got into the business too, and for about a year they
genuinely meant it when they wrote thinly veiled mean songs about each other
and subtly (or unsubtly) badmouthed each other on talk shows and deliberately
booked venues across the street from each other to try and drown each other’s
music. But then the press started speculating about backstabbing and catfights
and which boys they were fighting over, and soon Terezi was sending Vriska
links to the worst articles and their friendship was back on track again, and
within a few months they were kissing backstage and wearing outrageous disguises
to go on dates together. They kept the public rivalry, though, because it was
too much fun to watch music writers on clickbait sites pick through every
little detail in their lyrics, and the whole theme was doing wonders for both
of their brands, and they hated to let down their fans! And so it continued, and
they continued having a blast.
Their fans can’t tell what the hell is up with them, but
both of their official fansites have forums just for theorizing about what the fuck
happened between them back in their Scourge Sisters days. People pore through
their lyrics looking for clues and post comments on lyric sites speculating on
the meaning of the songs. Both Terezi and Vriska have whole fleets of interns
who they hire solely to write scathing replies to people who make clueless
heterosexual comments on their youtube videos, or to post wild rumours about
the massive property damage caused last time the two had met in public.
Every time they go on an “incognito date” Terezi insists on
wearing shitty red plastic heart-shaped sunglasses and a giant red hat instead
of her trademark, ostensibly to hide her face but mostly because she loves how
horrified it makes everyone around them look. Vriska tries to look slightly
less like a celebrity by wearing baggy jackets and hoodies, but inevitably, at
least once a week, they’re recognized and asked for their autographs, and they
get a chance to showcase their ridiculous lying skills. Terezi’s favorite alibi
is to pretend to be a hapless law student who has no idea what they’re talking
about and wouldn’t dream of giving them her signature. Vriska, every single
time, signs as Spinneret Mindfang and claims to be a very devoted pirate
cosplayer.
At one point, they both released dramatic press statements
just a few weeks apart announcing that they were writing memoirs that would
contain all the juicy details of their rivalry. Then they both signed contracts
with Rose Lalonde, accomplished novelist, and gave her creative license to
ghostwrite whatever she wanted based only on what she knew about them
personally and her wildest Freudian speculations as to their psyches and
motivations. Both books were bestsellers, despite being wildly conflicting and filled
to the brim with purple prose.
Terezi had her publisher contact Vriska’s publisher to ask
if they could release the books side by side as some sort of omnibous, just so
that Vriska ignite some more controversy with an incendiary response. They
cuddled up in Terezi’s bed with their laptops and Vriska fired off eight angry
tweets about how she’d rather die than have her life story published alongside
Terezi’s. Terezi responded saying that Vriska was right to fear being compared
side by side, considering how atrociously boring and tasteless Vriska’s book
would look in comparison, and then they spooned while scrolling through the
resulting twitter war on Terezi’s phone. What can they say? Some people just
want to watch the world burn, and the reunited Scourge Sisters are two of them.
ugh the Skype chats got lost because SKYPE IS DUMB but anyways i think we’d staged like, the flarp debacle but it was vriska ripping off one of aradia and tavros’ songs or something and terezi’s like “i wish to succeed… but at what cost.” there was also this like, legal contract terezi drafted about how no one who signed with her could do anything to also sign with vriska!!! and vriska used like a blatantly copied version of the exact same contract but with all of terezi’s name scribbled away and replaced with her own. #pick a side
(except for kanaya who’s probably like an amazing costume designer. she gets a pass probably because she’s amazing and also their annoyed friend.)
THERE WAS ALSO THIS WHOLE CODA that had nothing to do with them being rock stars and was mostly dumb gay fluff but hey who can say no to dumb gay fluff??? not me
ok so, rose and kanaya are together and married and have a cute tastefully decorated flat because they are Pro Adults. also they have an adopted child whose probably roxy
when roxy was a baby terezi and vriska came over to rose and kana’s house for dinner and something and they thought roxy was SUPER CUTE and they kept cooing over her until they just … essentially stole her
like they just shoved her into terezi’s silly and gigantic trenchcoat (its a disguise! she has to maintain her anonymity as an official famous person!) and climb out the window and go home
they just will NOT give this baby back. they aren’t very good at taking care of her either and vriska panics a lot because ROXY IS CRYING and she CANT DEAL
finally after some terse texts exchanged with rose they work out a deal. by “deal” i mean basically “a hostage exchange”
this is the story of how terezi (and by extension vriska) became officially the person who’d gain custody of roxy if rose and kana tragically died
rose drew the line at making it officially vriska. dave is so salty even so! HOW COULD YOU, ROSE. VRISKA GETS CUSTODY OF ROXY BEFORE ME, YOUR OWN SWEET AND RESPONSIBLE BROTHER. “responsible?” rose says. “more than vriska fucking serket,” says dave.
probably at least once when she’s a teen roxy runs away from home to live with her cool aunts terezi and vriska.
I’m screaming??? So my cat knows I get upset when he steps on my paintings (not yelling or anything I think he just sees me spend hours trying to cover up what his paws do) in my “studio” which is a crammed small storage closet with painting all over the floor drying , so like I’m in there rn and I saw him try to get to point A to point b but it was impossible for him to jump over so like he realized the matte parts were dry and like he was stepping on the corners of the painting and every step he’d look at his paw to see if he fucked up and honestly it was the most thoughtful thing ever I don’t ever wanna hear anyone ever say that cats don’t care
the thing you need to realize about localization is that japanese and english are such vastly different languages that a straight translation is always going to be worse than the original script. nuance is going to be lost and, if you give a shit about your job, you should fill the gaps left with equivalent nuance in english. take ff6, my personal favorite localization of all time: in the original japanese cefca was memorable primarily for his manic, childish speaking style – but since english speaking styles arent nearly as expressive, woolsey adapted that by making the localized english kefka much more prone to making outright jokes. cefca/kefka is beloved in both regions as a result – hell, hes even more popular here
yes this
a literal translation is an inaccurate translation.
localization’s job is to create a meaningful experience for a different audience which has a different language and different culture. they translate ideas and concepts, not words and sentences. often this means choosing new ideas that will be more meaningful and contribute to the experience more for a different audience.
There was an example during late Tokugawa period in Japan where the translator translated, "Я люблю Вас” (I love you), to “I could die for you,” while translating
Ася, (
Asya) a novel by Ivan Turgenev. This was because a woman saying, “I love you,” to a man was considered a very hard thing to do in Japanese society.
In a more well-known example,
Natsume Soseki, a great writer who wrote, I am a Cat, had his students translate “I love you,” to “the moon is beautiful [because of] having you beside tonight,” because Japanese men would not say such strong emotions right away. He said that it would be weird and Japanese men would have more elegance.
Both of these are great examples of localization that wasn’t a straight up translation and both of these are valid. I feel like a lot of people forget the nuances in language and culture and how damn hard a translator’s job is and how knowledgeable the person has to be about both cultures. [x]
Important stuff about translation!
Note that you can apply this to your own translations even if they aren’t big pieces of literature or something. Don’t feel bad about not translating word for word. An everyday sentence may sound odd translated literally – it’s okay to edit a little bit so it feels right!
Oh my god, I’m about to go on a ramble, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, the inner translation nerd is coming out. I’m so sorry. The thing is–there is actually no such thing as an accurate translation.
It’s literally an impossible endeavor. Word for word doesn’t cut it. Sense for sense doesn’t cut it, because then you’re potentially missing cool stuff like context and nuance and rhyme and humor. Even localization doesn’t really cut it, because that means you’re prioritizing the audience over the author, and you’re missing out on the original context, and the possibility of bringing something new and exciting to your host language. Foreignization, which aims to replicate the rhythms of the original language, or to use terminology that will be unfamiliar to the target culture–(for example: the first few American-published Harry Potter books domesticated the English, and traded “trousers” for “pants”, and “Mom” for “Mum”. Later on they stopped, and let the American children view such foreignizing words as “snog” and “porridge.”)–also doesn’t cut it, because you risk alienating the target readers, or obscuring meaning.
Another cool example is Dante, and the words written above the gates of hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
In the original Italian, that’s Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. Speranza, like most nouns in latinate languages, has a gender: la. Hope, in Italian, is gendered female. Abandon hope, who is female. Abandon hope, who is a woman. When the original Dante enters hell, searching for Beatrice, he is doomed, subtly, from the start. That’s beautiful, subtle, the kind of delicate poetic move literature nerds gorge themselves on, and you can’t keep it in English. Literally, how do you preserve it? We don’t have a gendered hope. It doesn’t work, can’t work. So how do you compensate? Can you sneak in a reference to Beatrice in a different line? Or do you chalk her up as a loss and move onto the next problem?
You’re always going to miss something–the cool part is that, knowing you’re going to fail, you get to decide how to fail. Ortega y Gasset called this The Misery and Splendor of Translation. Basically, translation is impossible–so why not make it a beautiful failure?
My point is that literary translation is creative writing, full of as many creative decisions as any original poem or short story. It has more limitations, rules, and structures to consider, for sure–but sometimes the best artistic decision is going to be the one that breaks the rules.
My favorite breakdown of this is Le Ton Beau De Marot, a beautiful brick of a translator’s joke, in which the author tries over and over again to create a “perfect” translation of “A une Damoyselle Malade”, an itsy bitsy poem Clement Marot dashed off to his patron’s daughter, who was sick, in 1537.
This is the poem:
Ma mignonne, Je vous donne Le bon jour; Le séjour C’est prison. Guérison Recouvrez, Puis ouvrez Votre porte Et qu’on sorte Vitement, Car Clément Le vous mande. Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur fade Tu prendras, Et perdras L’embonpoint. Dieu te doint Santé bonne, Ma mignonne.
Seems simple enough, right? But it’s got a huge host of challenges: the rhyme, the tone, the archaic language (if you’re translating something old, do you want it to sound old in the target language, too? or are you translating not just across language, but across time?)
Le Ton Beau De Marot is a monster of a book that compiles all of Hofstader’s “failed” translations of Ma Mignonne, as well as the “failed” translations of his friends, and his students, and hundreds of strangers who were given the translation challenge (which you can play here, should you like!)
The end result is a hilarious archive of Sweet Damosels, Malingering Ladies, Chickadees, Fairest Friends, and Cutie Pies. It’s the clearest, funniest, best example of what I think is true of all literary translations: that they’re a thing you make up, not a thing you discover. There is no magic bridge between languages, or magic window, or magic vessel to pour the poem from one language to another–translation is always subjective, it’s always individual, it’s always inaccurate, it’s always a failure.
It’s always, in other words, art.
Which, as a translator, I find incredibly reassuring! You’re definitely, one hundred percent absolutely, gonna fuck up. Which means you can’t fuck up. You can take risks! You can experiment! You can do cool stuff like bilingual translations, or footnote translations! You write your own code of honor, your own rules that your translations will hold inviolable, and fuck it if that code doesn’t match everyone else’s*. The translations they hold inviolable are also flawed, are failures at the core, from the King James Bible right on down to No Fear Shakespeare. So have fun! It’s all in your hands, miseries and splendors both.
As a translator i think the best thing to do when translating something that has no equivalent in culture is to stay as true to the text as possible. It depends on the kind of audience you have, though, but to stay on the example of the “i love you” thing: If that were me, I’d have kept it be “I love you” in Japanese, because even if a Japanese person wouldnt say this, the audience knows they aren’t reading a story that takes place in Japan. It gives them insight into another culture. I find it sad that this insight is lost in some translations. And when some part of the intention is going to be lost in translation/ you know the audience won’t understand a translation that is too straight, nothing is keeping you from adding a translator’s note.
queerhomestuck 