Hi everyone,
I’m currently working on a translation project for a Japanese visual novel, and I’ve come across a Chinese character who speaks with a stereotypical Chinese accent (ending sentences with “aru”). I’m having trouble deciding the best way to translate her dialogue into English, and I was hoping to get some input from the community.
Here are the options I’m considering:
1. Ignore the accent: Should I simply translate her dialogue without including the “aru” at the end of her sentences? This would make her dialogue sound more natural in English, but it would also mean that I’m not fully capturing the character’s accent.
1. Add “aru” to the end of sentences: Alternatively, I could include “aru” at the end of each of her sentences to convey her accent. However, I’m not sure if this would come across as too gimmicky or make her dialogue hard to read.
1. Write her dialogue in a stereotypical Chinese accent: Another option would be to write her dialogue with a stereotypical Chinese accent in English (e.g. “Me so solly”), but I’m worried this could come across as offensive or insensitive.
1. Add appropriate Chinese words and phrases: Finally, I could add appropriate Chinese words and phrases to her dialogue to emphasize her ethnicity and cultural background. However, this could also make the dialogue harder to read for English-speaking audiences who aren’t familiar with Chinese.
What do you think would be the best approach? I’m open to any suggestions or advice. Thanks in advance for your help!
8 comments
I always hate to recommend footnotes/translators notes as a solution to what could be met with creative solutions, but here you run the risk of cultural insensitivity and offensiveness.
I personally would go with option 1 with a translators note.
Option 4 is not a bad idea but you risk adding too much with an approach like this. Considering it’s a visual novel (which I assume is a fan project?) the level of headache and care needed to effectively tackle this approach honestly doesn’t sound worth it to me. Pick your battles, if the character is noticeably chinese in other ways you’re not erasing a large part of their character by opting to not keep something that doesn’t really have a linguistic equivalent in english
If you search for common errors from Chinese speakers learning English, you might find some things you can pepper in, being authentic while dodging the “me so solly” bullet.
Dropping articles, mixing up he and she (etc). More examples [here](https://www.astro.ncu.edu.tw/~wchen/Courses/SciWriting/chinese-english-mistakes.pdf) and [here](https://www.beinganomad.com/15-most-common-english-mistakes-made-by-chinese-students/) and [here](https://www.sjsu.edu/wac/docs/MandarinEnglishGuide.pdf).
So she might speak like this:
“I speak to Hanako yesterday, and he said he not coming to a party on Saturday. That too bad! I bought many soda and snack.”
As a note: most people might write better than they speak because they’ll likely have access to dictionaries, etc. Speaking is more “on the fly,” so there’s more of an opportunity to slip up.
If you’re familiar with some of the common grammar mistakes made by native Chinese speakers speaking English as a second language, I would select a few and repeatedly use them throughout her speech.
I think grammar mistakes are usually easier to understand than writing in eye dialect, especially for accents that many people don’t commonly know or that might not have an “easy” way to spell. (Plus swap / replace R and L feels very lazy and low effort imo).
I would ask how important the accent is to the story, and whether the character design also indicates their origin clearly.
I’d suggest staying away from 3, it is very easy to fall into the offensive stereotype trap. 2 and 4 seem like good ideas. Maybe look at how the localization of Chrono Cross did different accents for some ideas. Try both options to see how they feel and tweak from there, just don’t overdo it to the point that you lose reading clarity.
I would stick with aru. Fan translations are relatively niche anyway and the Hetalia fandom in general tended to keep China’s aru. I feel like it’s pretty well accepted.
I would recommend something more subtle.
Why not have the character end sentences with 。instead of a normal period? That’s pretty much what is going on with アル.
Foreign accents should be shown by quoting their language with katakana instead of hiragana, when written in Japanese, but really,
>Write her dialogue in a stereotypical Chinese accent: Another option would be to write her dialogue with a stereotypical Chinese accent in English (e.g. “Me so solly”), but I’m worried this could come across as offensive or insensitive.
Trust your instincts. Unless you are in the targeted demographic, any highlighting of the flaws of that group is exactly what you think it is: Targeting.
This is “funny”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb3gdUrIC4Q
I wonder how people who had been put in concentration camps by their country just 20 years before felt about this being a matter of fact source of humor. And was still part of humor 20 years later in Sixteen Candles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qwBuBCTKTU
Just don’t. Let’s treat humans with basic dignity.
If translating the accent doesn’t add anything, I’d just ignore it.
Not everything needs literal translation