 This is where
anime translation starts: the people who make what amounts to the first
draft of the script which eventually becomes what you read on subtitles
and hear in dubbing scripts. Anna Exter (left) is working on the Trigun
series and Jong Park (right) moved from technical journal translations
to anime work with the Gestalt series. Their translations usually are rewritten
into the final form for dub and sub release. |
 "I just hear
the sentence and I write down the first thing that comes to mind," Exter
said. "What you have to do first is to get into the characters' psyche."
In Trigun, the retro-future story of a pacifist gunfighter, "Almost everyone
has a weird way of speaking," and Exter has to find a way to express that
in English. |
 As noted translator
Takayuki Karahashi quietly watched from the back of the room, Exter talked
about Trigun's characters. "Vash...he speaks weird all the time. He speaks
like a Tokyo city boy. Other times he's totally serious. Merrill talks
like a proper girl school student. I make the character sound like what
he would sound like in English," Exter said. |
 Park has found
that anime translations are "...more of a hell than technical translations.
Formality in Japanese is very straightforward, but English is the hardest
language to learn because it's so flexible." While Japanese has a reputation
for multiple meaning from one character, Park said that English has many
similar words with nearly the same definition - and that can make English-to-Japanese
translation difficult. |
