How Are You? by Miki Yamamoto
By Avery Fischer Udagawa, Bangkok
SCBWI Japan Translation Day 2016 featured a manga mini-joust with translators Zack Davisson and Alexander O. Smith, who discussed the work How Are You? by Miki Yamamoto. Yamamoto attended the event in Yokohama as a special guest.
How Are You? is the poignant story of a family’s break-up, told from the perspective of a girl in their neighborhood. The husband in the family is Japanese; the wife is from northern Europe. Their daughter is a teenager. The story unfolds in urban or suburban Japan.
For the mini-joust, Davisson and Smith each translated the same three pages from How Are You? and discussed their approaches, with Smith in Yokohama and Davisson appearing by Skype from Seattle.
The mini-joust by all accounts ended in a draw. Smith, translator of Akira Toriyama’s Dr. Slump and Davisson, translator of Shigeru Mizuki’s Kitaro, presented their work in different formats: Smith with his English text handwritten into the graphics, and Davisson in typewritten text with industry abbreviations: numbers to show which panel, FX for “effects.”
Alexander O. Smith (standing) and Zack Davisson (via Skype) discuss their translations of How Are You? by manga artist Miki Yamamoto, seated at left in the white sweater.
Here are the three excerpts the translators discussed, each followed by Smith’s translation and then by Davisson’s. Following each excerpt are a few notes.
Excerpt 1
[Source: p. 10, How Are You? by Miki Yamamoto (Shodensha, 2014). ISBN-10: 4396782055]
Translation by Alexander O. Smith
Translation by Zack Davisson
P10
1.1 … she only wants to be like her daddy.
1.2 You’re imagining things.
1.3 I’m not! Dying her hair black …
1.4 Straightening it with an iron …
2.1 Sheesh!
2.2 She’s a pubescent high school girl. That’s all.
4.1 So what do you want for dinner?
4.2 Eh? I’m good with whatever Lisa wants.
4.3 His beautiful foreign wife and charming daughter are like vivid flowers blossoming in a garden from one of his drawings. A typical Sunday for the happy Masaoka family.
AU: The translations of this first excerpt show some confusion about who Lisa was (wife or daughter?). The translators at first did not have access to the full book, so had no way of knowing Lisa’s identity.
ZD: I think this shows how ambiguous translation can be, and how sometimes translators have to make a “best guess” . . . one that is often revised later down the line when you go back and do revisions.
AOS: At the mini-joust, translator Hart Larrabee suggested that instead of saying “foreign wife” we could use the wife’s nationality (I think it was Danish?), as an alternative to removing “foreign” altogether, which is what I did.
Excerpt 2
[Source: p. 18, How Are You? by Miki Yamamoto (Shodensha, 2014). ISBN-10: 4396782055]
Translation by Alexander O. Smith
Translation by Zack Davisson
P18
1 FX: Chop chop chop chop
2 FX: Chop chop chop
3 FX: Chop chop chop
4.1 FX: Huh
4.2 Oh.
4.3 Crap.
4.4 I think I overdid it.
5.1 Did you get any sleep last night?
5.2 Not really … but
5.3 In case, you know … when he comes home.
5.4 I thought I should have breakfast ready.
7.1 Is this … miso soup?
7.2 Or a bowl of onions …?
8 …. I have to go to school. See you later!!
ZD: Something I just noticed: The text here only says gohan, and Alex made that dinner while I had it as breakfast! Ah, the choices translators have to make when they don’t have enough information…
AOS: It’s interesting how both Zack and I approached the miso soup part on the bottom right of p. 18 the same way, changing what was a statement in the Japanese (direct translation “but this miso soup . . . has nothing but leeks”) to a rhetorical question. My version hews a little closer to the Japanese, but I find myself preferring Zack’s more in-the-moment take on the line.
Zack Davisson and Alexander O. Smith pose with manga artist Miki Yamamoto.
Excerpt 3
[Source: p. 32, How Are You? by Miki Yamamoto (Shodensha, 2014). ISBN-10: 4396782055]
Translation by Alexander O. Smith
Translation by Zack Davisson
P32
1 What if … what if he never comes back?
What if I never learn anything more than this?
I never know why he left. Where he went.
3
What if … this is it? He never comes back. He’s just … missing. And I …
What do I … what do I … w …what am I s..supposed to d..d..do …
Miki Yamamoto has also authored the works Ribbon Around a Bomb and Sunny Sunny Ann. All illustrations in this blog post are © Miki Yamamoto, and used with permission.
SCBWI Japan Translation Group 