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Every country's entertainment sub-industries will naturally have variations. Most Japanese live-action acting performances are unwatchable to me. I find the Korean music scene (and I'm not just talking about K-pop here) to be a barren wasteland ranging from awful to uninspired. On the other hand, Japanese rock is my favorite genre of music right now and Korean movies are frequently among my favorites.
I would also just add a possible contributing factor from my experience studying multiple languages: I find that Mandarin translates particularly poorly to other languages. None of the East Asian languages translate well to European ones, but works translated from Chinese feel especially uncanny valley to the point I can sometimes recognize them as such just by reading them in English. It feels like a language where a comparatively smaller proportion of meaning is expressed literally, such that connotations don't carry over properly. The structure of the language also means that these things get packed quite densely, so you can either try to awkwardly unpack them and become overly verbose or stay succinct and lose the meaning.
It’s hard (for me, in my limited experience) to imagine a language that translates worse to European languages than Japanese. Similar to what you said about Chinese, it’s heavily context-dependent and relies on a dense web of Japanese cultural associations to express meaning. And yet Japanese media is enthusiastically enjoyed in translation by westerners and people around the world (sometimes with appreciable liberties taken by translators; although I do think it’s basically always possible to find an acceptable translation that respects the original intent of the work).
I know almost nothing about Chinese, so if you’ve studied both Chinese and Japanese and you think Chinese translates even worse to English, I’d be very interested in hearing your perspective.
I think some of it is familiarity. Anime has been available in America since the 1990s for most people, so there’s a bit of exposure to Japanese idiom simply from watching those shows. This makes it somewhat easier both for translators who have had enough source material translated to know how best to approach the language and translate it into English, but because the audience itself is used to Japanese stories, they can pick up enough of the subtext to follow even if they aren’t directly translated. Everyone has seen the 10000 year old child, the demons and demon slayers, the school stories, and so Theres a common thematic vocabulary between Japanese and American fans that doesn’t exist for other countries. If I were to take an Israeli language cartoon and translate it, you don’t know the context and even a good translation would suffer because things the authors expect people to just get are not known in America.
Chinese culture isn’t well known.
Japanese culture wasn't well known in Sweden when me and my non-nerd friends started reading manga and watching anime in the 90s, the stories translated perfectly fine anyway. If anything, the cultural norms and peculiarities were novelties that made the stories stand out. Cultural familiarity has made the stories less attractive not more and to the extent there are cultural products of interests from China its because they are so different (see webnovels). Figuring out things like politeness levels and idioms is trivial and is mostly done in as little as a manga chapter. To the uninformed it mostly just comes off as a well realised fantasy setting.
There is something different going on with China, either it's much harder to translate or the output is just much worse. I would lean towards the latter especially seeing as there are good Chinese works, and sincerely hope they can improve.
The chinese government was heavily censorious for a long time, maybe it still is. It doesn't necessarily have an effect on quality but in practice it does. Look at US cultural output, ever since the creative milieu has gone censorious, as a grass roots effort, the quality of its production has fallen off a cliff.
I would say that they still are and it's pretty obvious, though I suppose some of it is probably self enforced, especially in larger projects through the typical group think dynamics. It doesn't completely kill creativity/quality but it's like a massive wet blanket over everything.
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My hot take is that the Japanese language is not quite as exotic as English-speaking Japanese learners make it out to be. It's still >4x as much work as picking up a Germanic or Romance language, but a lot of that additional work is front-loaded (hence an overwhelming number of people who never made it past the beginner stage and can only talk about how hard it is).
Yes, there is a lot of culturally-determined social subtext, but most of it is just using set phrases to express something you're already conveying with rather universal body, vocal tone, or facial expression cues. Also, a lot of this exists to an extent in English as well. "How are you?" is usually not an invitation to give a detailed update. "Next time, for sure" more often than not precedes a ghosting. We're plenty equipped to pick up on the analogous cues for Japanese with a little exposure or the right finessing of the translation wording.
The honorifics seem exotic and they give indications of the social dynamics in a conversation, but they are definitionally quite regular and rigid. Translations inevitably lose a lot of this, but you're just losing that particular feature uniformly across every text. If I were to hypothesize about why this isn't a huge impediment to foreign enjoyment, I'd posit that it has minimal role in the types of Japanese stories that foreigners find engaging, with most involving interactions between characters of shared social status. Japanese workplace dramas where these things may be more important have nearly zero attention from Western audiences. Shonen anime, one of the larger cultural exports, essentially throws honorifics out of the window. You don't need the specific Japanese first person pronoun used by an anime character to know if that person is fussy or tomboyish or rash or timid. 99/100 you'd guess correctly from their character design alone.
Regardless, a decent chunk of the features that make a given piece of Japanese prose "punchy" still seem to carry over into English. This seems less true for Mandarin. If I were to vaguely gesture at why, it would involve the idea that a larger percentage of Chinese speech feels idiomatic. After all, idioms are the extreme of densely-packed connotation. To explain the ways that hearing a character say "He kicked the bucket." differs from just "He died." would take an essay. To me, Chinese seems to use a greater variety and frequency of such idiomatic phrases in way that affects the visceral impact of more of its sentences, which cumulatively impacts the perception of a given work as a whole.
Right, a lot of people latch onto pronouns, honorifics, politeness levels, etc when talking about how exotic the language is. And those are legitimate differences that are prone to getting lost in translation. But I don't think those things are what makes Japanese difficult to translate.
It has a lot of grammatical constructions (topic/subject markers, verb forms to indicate oddly specific things like an action being done as a favor for someone else, an action being done in preparation for something else, etc) that simply don't exist in English, and thus get flattened out in any translation (this goes both ways of course -- Japanese lacks a future tense, and it lacks articles as well).
It's elliptical to the point that the translator often has to add multiple new words just to get a grammatically correct English sentence, and different translators won't always agree on these hidden context-dependent words.
It's funny that you mention the "punchiness" of Japanese prose, because I think it's actually a rather un-punchy language. The number of words and phrases that Japanese speakers use on a regular basis is simply more restricted than what we have in English, and a perfectly literal translation of Japanese text can come off as subdued, repetitive, and stilted to English ears; translators often feel it necessary to "spice up" the text a bit in order to reach the level of variety that's culturally expected in English writing.
None of this is to say that Japanese is "hard" per se, only that it is legitimately quite different from European languages and the text requires some massaging before you get something that reads naturally in English.
This line of reasoning kind of makes me think of an objection I always have to people wanting to use "safe"/garbage-collected programming languages like Javascript or Golang instead of C/C++, because "explicit memory management makes it hard to write correct code, and your program will crash with null pointer errors": bad programmers are going to write bad code, the only difference is that with C their bad code will crash right away, while in a GCed language their bad code will instead live to leak memory and contain subtle logic errors that you won't notice until it's too late.
As I see it, translating perfectly requires emulating the intention and mental state of the original author/speaker in full, and then leveraging your language skill in the target language to convey the intention as the author did in the source language. If you skip this step and translate by following the structure of the original text, be it word for word, idiom for idiom or sentence for sentence, your translation will actually be flawed - it's just that if the two languages were similar, the flaws will be less apparent, and you can go on for longer before the fraud (that the translator did not actually understand, but just chinese-roomed the translation) is detected.
I think this goes both ways, too. The context-dropping nature of Japanese means that if you actually communicate the context in it that an English speaker would habitually want to convey, you also wind up with something repetitive and stilted - but if you drop the wrong piece of context, you also get something that is between jarring and incomprehensible. A big part of Japanese fluency is knowing what context to provide with what timing, and how to play the language's much greater (compared to English) dynamic range from absolute minimalism to byzantine circumscription.
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I'd overall agree with you here. I mainly meant that, when it is punchy (by which I meant vaguely emotionally resonant), the way it does so is more often translatable to English in a way that I don't find to be the case for many Chinese texts.
It might be my love/hate relationship with purple prose, but I think the Chinese language excels at flowery descriptions.
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Are you a Number Girl enjoyer?
Absolutely.
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