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The Meaning of Language

Posted by Nashrakh on

Something very interesting I found in “Critical Thinking” by William Hughes.

It’s actually a book on philosophy, but I found these paragraphs to be of interest to people interested in language – amongst which are we translators.

2.2.3
Meaning As Use

A new approach to meaning was developed in this century by Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951) and John Austin (19111960). They recognized that many words do refer to things, and that many words have a mental image or idea associated with them, but they held that the primary bearers of meaning are not words but sentences. Words have meaning only when they are used in sentences: without such a context they have no meaning. When we ask what some particular word means, we seem to be asking for the meaning of the word itself, as if it had a meaning apart from the way it is used in sentences. In fact, the only meaning a word can have is the meaning it gains from the meanings of the sentences in which the word is typically used. Notice how the different meanings of a word are expressed by using that word in different sentences:

I gave him a hand with his baggage. (i.e., help)
The crowd gave him a hand. (i.., applause)
Please hand me the scissors. (i.e., give)

She is a green lawyer. (i.e., inexperienced)
He is looking green. (i.e., nauseous)
We had a green Christmas last year. (i.e., without snow)

Don’t strike that child. (i.e., hit)
The strike was over wages. (i.e., refusal to work)
Strike three! (i.e., the batter is “out”)

But if the meaning of sentences is primary and the meaning of words is derivative if we cannot derive the meaning of a sentence from the meanings of the words it contains how are we to account for the meaning of sentences? Wittgenstein and Austin held that the meaning of sentences is to be found in their use. Language is a tool, and just as we don’t really know what a hammer is until we know what its use is, so we don’t know what language means until we know what it is being used to do. In order to know what a particular sentence means we need to ask, What is this speaker, in this particular context, using this sentence to do? If someone says Hold it, we cannot know what the sentence means until we know what the speaker means, and we cannot know what the speaker means until we know what he or she is using the sentence to do. Did the speaker say Hold it to get someone to stop doing something, or to instruct someone to grasp hold of an object? Only when we have answered this question will we know what the sentence means.

It is important to pay attention to the context, for the context typically gives us the clues we need to determine what the speaker is using a sentence to do, and thus what the sentence means. There are various contextual features we can make use of, such as the social setting, the speaker’s personal goals, the nature and expectations of the audience, and what has just been said by other speakers. Changing the context of a sentence can sometimes dramatically affect its meaning. For example:

The queen is in a vulnerable position: (a) when said by a spectator at a chess match and (b) when said by a teacher in a lecture on the role of the monarchy in Britain.

The President has been shot and died a few minutes ago: (a) when said by a character in a film and (b) when said by a radio announcer in a news broadcast.

Let me go: (a) when said by a person whose arm has been grabbed by someone and (b) when said by a child whose teacher has asked for a volunteer to run an errand.

More commonly, however, context affects meaning in less dramatic but equally important ways. Usually, there are only a few possible uses of a sentence in any particular context, and we can make a reasonable judgement of its primary or intended use. It is important, therefore, to understand the various uses or functions of language.

So, why do I think it is interesting?

Mainly because it reinforces my personal belief that a translation must be based on meaning, not on words alone. As such, it is in some cases better not to cling to the words as they are provided (if they make little sense when translated directly, for example), but to ask yourself, “what is the speaker meaning to say?” and base your translation on that.

Actually, I believe that meaning is transcendental – the problem is embellishment (or the lack thereof) and cultural peculiarities. While the meaning of a sentence can be extracted from any sentence from any language without much problem, it is the way of expressing it that is placing barriers which translators have to overcome. As such, we basically have to strip the sentences of their culture and language-specific oddities to lay bare the core, the very meaning itself. Only then can we translate something without having it sound goofy – which is more ideal than reality, but you can always shoot for the stars.

‘On the state of the community’ – Part 2

Posted by Nashrakh on

Since my internet died over the weekend, have some rage in return.

Posting this from my university’s connection. Took the risk and visited e-hentai too, saw what’s in the toplists, couldn’t help but double facepalm (if I had a third arm, I’d use that one too). So I think this is spot on if I say ‘overwhelming majority of the reader base’ (gotta read the text to know where :D ) – I had reservations about putting it that way, but oh well. Seems like I wasn’t really wrong. Love for ‘all of hentai’ my ass – read on to see why.

After part 1, which dealt with those that profit from redistributing the work of others, part 2 will be mainly about the ‘reader base’ and its perception of the works they read. It will also describe my impressions of how the ‘reader base’ views and reacts to the various types of English versions of hentai manga (including its subgenres) and the ‘reader base’s relationship with those that produce texts. Part 2 will be split into different sections, and the sections will be split due to length (like, I will be posting section c and d later).

Section a) Internal and external knowledge of text creation

“Translation is different things for different groups of people. For people who are not translators, it is primarily a text; for people who are, it is primarily an activity.”

Douglas Robinson

Basically, internal and external knowledge are two sides of the same coin that is translating (and text creation in general). In short, ‘internal knowledge’ encompasses how translations are being made and what kind of different problems translators face while going about their work. The external perspective, however, is how a non-translator sees those texts and what he expects from them. There are no hard distinctions, though; there are those that concern themselves with translation theory, translators that just do things their way, editors, readers; a myriad of varying levels of knowledge exist. There are roughly five different types of readers between both extremes, however:

1) Overly concerned about the internal perspective and its principles (translation theorists)
2) Knowledge about the finer points of translating (translators in general)
3) (Rough) knowledge of how scanlation works, but more on the external side; at least partially interested in obtaining only quality text and work (beginner translators, editors, interested or quality-aware readers)
4) Little to no knowledge of scanlation or translating in particular; main focus is functionality of the text, but still interested in a faithful reproduction of the source language text; quality is an added plus (average manga reader)
5) Sees text as a commodity; interested only in its most basic functionality and shows no concern about fidelity or quality of the text provided (overwhelming majority of the ‘hentai reader base’)

As you can easily see, people that belong to type 1 will most likely be overanalyzing any translation or text they see (by comparing the translation to the raws to see what choices the translator made, for example), while those belonging to type 5 will read and like anything with roman letters in it, even if basic text coherence is lacking or the text was seemingly written by preschoolers. ‘Functionality of the text’ in this case means being able to follow the basic story and events within it, and ‘most basic functionality’ means nothing more than being able to jerk off to it without being concerned with the finer points of a translation, like a coherent representation of the story and its characters that is at least somewhat faithful to the source language text, or even following basic rules of the English language to make it a halfway pleasant read to begin with.

It is also easy to imagine that type 5 readers will have no idea of where the texts they read originate from or who made them able to read it in the first place. They are mostly present on aggregation sites, waiting to be spoonfed with what those sites pick for them (with the site’s own profit in mind, of course), or in the case of public redistribution aggregators, what people decide to post on them (it is no exaggeration to say that many ‘readers’ actually think the admins/uploaders translated the works they merely post). And because they have no interest in seeing who is the source of the texts, they continue to stick to the aggregator of their choice like sheep, being completely at the whim of the uploaders.

They do not know in the slightest how scanlation works or what kind of skills a translator or editor needs to possess; they are not concerned with what happened to the original source language text to be formed into the English text they read, whether it was faithfully represented, what shortcomings the target language text has or what trade-offs the translator had to make, whether it was translated literally or liberally, or, in the worst case, whether the source language text was discarded (at least partially or even completely) in favor of the text creator’s own imagining of the story and its characters, which, to no surprise, is a sacrilege to translators and readers who value a faithful rendition of the mangaka’s artistic intentions. Readers of the latter (‘rewrites’ for short) usually use the ‘it’s just porn’ argument to argue in its favor.

Section b) The ‘it’s just porn’ argument and type 5 readers

The ‘it’s just porn’ argument is what type 5 readers primarily use when a non-type 5 reader raises concerns or when faced with the rightful accusation of being a type 5 reader. Like, should anyone have anything to say about the quality or fidelity of the work (including, but not limited to criticism of any kind) or, in a broader sense, the art form in general, type 5 readers are usually quick to pull the ‘it’s just porn, dude’ trigger. In essence, this argument expresses what type 5 readers are all about. As mentioned, they cannot see what lies beyond what I called ‘the most basic functionality’. They do not perceive hentai as an art form nor do they appreciate the scanlators’ efforts to infuse works with surplus value for English readers (as explained in part 1).

They think that just because a work of art is erotic in nature, it is not worth anyone’s time and effort and it surely does not deserve any praise or appreciation, or god forbid, the status of art. Let me ask you though, what is the difference in translating ‘normal’ manga and hentai manga? One might think that hentai manga would be easier with pages full of seemingly nothing but moans and ‘IM CUMMIN’ – but that would imply that hentai manga can’t feature intricate plots and rich characters, which is a very common misconception. Actually, if you think that way, you could also assume that your average shounen series are on the same level with all their bangs and booms and IMMA GONNA USE MY NINJUTSU screaming going on. And I’m sure many people (including the translators) would be offended by that claim, but even more so the fanboys.

Well, one thing that seperates ‘normal’ and hentai manga is purely rooted in the internal knowledge side of text creation. For example, hentai manga, unlike non-H, do not feature Furigana (because hentai is targeted at 18+ readers, and non-H to younger readers who may not have a detailed knowledge of Kanji). That means extra sensitivity to the source language text is of the essence; you need to do more work consulting dictionaries, for example – but you also need to invest more time into ‘getting the words right’, as in making sure you haven’t picked a wrong vocab which would distort the entire meaning (which is less likely with Furigana). Furigana have the advantage of making it able to read a vocab not by spelling, but by pronunciation (it can also be used to comic effect, but that’s beside the point). This means hentai manga actually need translators to be either more proficient with Kanji or be more handy with picking out Kanji by radicals or using OCRs, the latter two requiring the translator to have an eye for choosing correct radicals.

Another thing to consider is that hentai manga are filled with slang and sex-related terms. Surely, non-H manga have their own peculiar vocabulary depending on the genre and subject matter, but with hentai manga, you often have to deal with very strange slangs and vocabs you won’t find in a dictionary, ever. A rule of thumb is that the grittier and darker a hentai manga is, the harder it will be to translate (but also more fun, in my opinion) – while vanilla stuff is generally closer to your everyday manga in terms of dialogue, stuff like gang rape can feature very obscure slangs and biological terms that could be right out of an anatomy textbook. Japanese also have a tendency to embellish their dialogue, to bloat it, even – what can be said in a few words in English is expressed in a whole string of different vocabs. The opposite is also true, however, but what I’m trying to draw attention to is that a single thing like ‘fertilization’ could easily take up a lot of space. See example below.

One thing to note is that the Japanese used a paraphrasing of what the vocab is supposed to be like instead of calling it by its name (this effect is used to enhance the emotional impact of the word), something that would not only take up more space than is viable in a translation, but would also be a very wonky and awkward read.

Emotion is a nice cue here, actually (and partly covers the external perspective of hentai scanlation). Hentai translators not only need to convey the meaning of the words properly, they also have to infuse them with the emotions the mangaka tries to express in the story. Of course, this is not exclusive to hentai manga at all, but certain nuances can make or break the mood in erotic writing. You could, for example, favor some wordings over others to create a desired effect although it may not be a direct equivalent to the words in the source language – the thing is, it would work better. In short, favoring emotion or meaning over direct equivalence. Best (and most famous) example would be イク (literally: to go), which any translator worth his salt would be translating as ‘to cum’ instead of ‘to go’ – it would not only be painfully literal but also not make any sense to monolingual readers of the target language text to put it that way. This can be extended to wordings that have a more natural flow to them to create a more dramatic impact in say, a rape scene. You could make the nasty gang boss even badder by choosing the right words, for example, instead of giving him a stiff dialogue that would result from a literal translation. Over the course of the story you could also change how a rape victim speaks to show her detoriating state of mind (especially in mind break scenarios). You could also make a love scene even more heart-warming by choosing words that have a stronger emotional meaning attached to them. Note that this is not the same as rewriting. As a translator, you have a very profound idea of what the mangaka tried to convey, and you do not try to alter it in such a way that it would be detrimental to the meaning which you try to keep alive even by choosing synonyms. Anyway, as said, choosing different wordings for different effects also applies to non-H manga, but since hentai mainly deals with emotions, they need extra care and attention in that regard. In my opinion, you can usually tell who is a great hentai translator (or writer) by how he tries to convey emotion, and his attention to detail.

But what happens when you discard the source language text and try to make up a story and dialogue of your own to go with the non-verbal representation of the mangaka’s vision which was condensed onto paper? First, you blatantly disregard what the mangaka, the artist himself, tried to convey with his dialogue. In essence, you strip the artist of his art, whether you think it to be good or bad or any other suitable description (though it is most likely that you won’t be able to put labels on it in the first place – you can’t even read it!). You basically try to claim that you, a type 5 reader gone writer, can make up a better story, better characters, and a better dialogue than the artist himself while using his visual backdrop. While there are surely exceptions to the rule (albeit under 0,5%), the classification system I introduced in section a can help us try to understand why they usually fail so horribly. You see, if one undertakes to do a rewrite, you generally show little to no concern about what the source language text actually is, or the ‘fidelity’ of the text you are about to create. This means you are automatically a type 5, because type 4 or higher would require you to demand an at least somewhat faithful reproduction of the source language text. The resulting text is nothing more than a mixture of mere interpretation of non-verbal signs and wild guesses, and thus the coherence between text and visuals will fly right out the window. Furthermore, since type 5 readers are also not concerned with quality in general, they display a severe lack of care when it comes to crafting so-called stories, characters or dialogues, or worse, applying basic English language rules to their texts like spelling and grammar, which further proves my point.

To conclude this section, people that use the ‘it’s just porn’ argument and type 5 readers in general publicly display their ignorance and how little they are concerned with the inner workings of scanlation, the mangaka’s efforts and goals in creating an artistic microcosm, and the art form that is hentai in its entirety; in laymen’s terms, they make our lives easier by showing us how brainless and retarded they are before we even start arguing with them. Seeing hentai ‘just as porn’ is like seeing music ‘just as sounds’. To be slightly more aggressive, type 5 readers attempting to create ‘texts’ of their own take a huge shit all over the artists and their work; the same goes for those that read those ‘texts’. There is no ‘love for all of hentai’ in that, only ignorance and selfishness.

TL;DR of the last two sections: people neither know jack nor do they care, and the pretense of accepting rewrites as a ‘legitimate alternative to translations’ shows how little one gives a shit about how they ass-rape the artist and his art -  to make it worse, they applaud it, even. Also, translating hentai manga is not just putting IM CUMMIN x100 in your script.

‘On the state of the community’ – part 1.

Posted by Nashrakh on

Part 1 – About aggregation sites and illegitimate claims of private property over hentai

So, people – let’s start off with the most important part of this essay, which I adequately marked in my flowchart as ‘aggregation sites making money off other people’s work’. I think you can guess what all this will be about.

First, let me clarify what aggregation sites are, for those of you that never heard of that term before. Aggregation sites are websites that aim to offer a condensed library of works of a specific nature, in this case, hentai manga and doujinshi;  ‘having it all in one place’, to keep it short.

Aggregation sites are an excellent way to spread your work if you’re with a translation group. Sites like that often have a reader base running in the upper ten thousands of hits per day, sometimes in the hundred thousands. One example comes to mind where visitor numbers have been a few MILLIONS a day (most likely than not the same few guys hitting F5 all over the place, but whatever). Your work will be read by thousands of people, which results in an increase in your group’s popularity – or so you might think. People never read credits pages anyway…

This all comes at a price though. First thing to note is that several aggregation sites have only been brought to life as a quick money machine; just as in non-H manga online reading sites, most aggregation sites were not intended to spread the love of the works on those sites – it’s about cold, hard cash. Of which translators don’t ever see a single penny, unless the money flows back into commissions (which is something only very few sites do).

The means by which most of the admins earn money are ads (shitloads of them) and paying file hosters. It works like this – the admins upload to several different mirrors, all of which pay per download. It’s not much of a stretch to think that with the massive numbers of hits these sites get, they will make a killing that will far exceed the costs – aka profit. And I can’t ponder it enough, all they do is uploading stuff, without doing any of the ‘actual’ work involved with scanlation. Should we treat that as a ‘compensation for uploading and aggregating hentai works’?

The answer is simply no. While a few of them recycle their revenue by funding commissions to give something back to the community without which they wouldn’t even be able to get any cash in the first place, most of them do not and have only installed their sites for the intention of making money off the work of others. Their ‘work’ is only marginal, to say it nicely. The relation between unpaid volunteer work worth multiple hours and cashing in big time for a few minutes of uploading scanlations is simply flying out the window right there.

One very peculiar case are aggregation sites that outright steal scanlations. Now, while scanlations are free, public goods (albeit derived from illegitimate copyright violations), quite a number of aggregation sites try to turn a profit on keeping the fact that the scanlations they offer are publicly available for free elsewhere. This basically means that they SELL scanlations they do not own (because of the nature of scanlations being a free, public good in all cases, which I am about to prove), although the transfer of property of one owner to the next requires the seller to have private property to the good which he sells. The scanlation groups, like in all other cases of their works being uploaded to aggregation sites, do not get a single buck for their work that is shamelessly being exploited here. The only one benefit aggregation sites offer scanlation groups is also nil – that is, the publicity, because if the ‘customer’ knew that work X was done by group Y, he would not shell out the cash to be ‘allowed’ to look at it.

Another peculiarity are those aggregation sites that sponsor commissions, but do not offer them to the public for free. This is a blatant case of illegitimate private ownership over goods that are supposed to be public (the very nature of pirated goods).
While I am an anarchist communist at heart and despise the very concept of private property at its core, let us, for the sake of the argument, look at a capitalist view at private property, namely that of the indescribably ridiculous capitalist apologetic Hans-Herman Hoppe.

Everyone is the proper owner of his own physical body as well as of all places and nature-given goods that he occupies and puts to use by means of his body, provided that no one else has already occupied or used the same places and goods before him. This ownership of “originally appropriated” places and goods by a person implies his right to use and transform these places and goods in any way he sees fit, provided that he does not thereby forcibly change the physical integrity of places and goods originally appropriated by another person. In particular, once a place or good has been first appropriated, in John Locke’s words, by “mixing one’s labor” with it, ownership in such places and goods can be acquired only by means of a voluntary—contractual—transfer of its property title from a previous to a later owner.

The Ethics and Economics of Private Property by H.H. Hoppe

The interesting bits are in bold. Nature-given goods is a nice term. Would you consider pirated goods to be nature-given? Simply there, lying on the ground for you to take up and shape as you see fit, to turn it into a good? While appropriating hentai manga unto yourself by translating them would indeed constitute making them your private property if they were nature-given, this is not the case for pirated ones; for, as Mr Hoppe points out, property can only be transferred by voluntary contract from one owner to another, which is most obviously not the case.

Therefore, even though they have put their own work into it, the goods which they sell are not their private property. They are still free, public goods, albeit illegitimate ones – the pirates (in this case, scanners) could not transfer property unto themselves through the act of piracy and made them a public good (with or without intending to do so – fact is, it is publicly available to no cost) – so, in return, even though you may have infused this good with surplus value (not in the Marxian sense), it is not yours for the reasons stated above.

For these reasons, any aggregation sites (or anyone else, for that matter) trying to exploit the work of others by selling them or trying to sell goods of which he illegitimately appropriated private property are nothing more than a petty thief; a liar and a scammer.

You might wonder, hell yeah, translators and commissioners (that are not working for those trying to keep scanlations to themselves to sell) are also part of the piracy, why not bash them?

The simple reason is that we DO NOT try to illegitimately claim ownership over stolen goods. On the contrary, we infuse these goods with surplus value for English readers (because it is obvious that, for English readers, ENG>>JP, while the good basically remains the same at its core) and return it back into the pool of free, public, albeit illegitimate goods.

What to do?

I recommend scanlation groups to remain vigilant at all times, and to fight all aggregation sites they deem detrimental to the common good. If you have the means to take their illegitimate property and return it to the pool of public goods, by all means, do so.

Stay strong, brothers.