With all this Mirage I have been reading, I'm beginning to write like Kuwabara-sensei. My scenes in my current novel draft are beginning to go like:
There was a setting, and it was like this, and this.
And there was a person there.
And the person was So-and-So.
Alas, it doesn't play as well in an English SF novel as in a Japanese light novel. :-)
The funny thing is, my writing style is not like Kuwabara-sensei's AT ALL. As a translator, I'm constantly arguing with myself: "but she uses these words!" "but it would sound so much better like this!" "but that's not what she actually wrote! aaargh!"
I feel like I've gotten better at finding a balance between capturing the essence of Kuwabara-sensei's work and a style I'm comfortable with. It involves giving myself permission to restructure some things and being a bit more implicative than what might be in the text. Translator's license?
Personally, I restructure a lot when I translate. It just doesn't work any other way in Russian. English, I think, is more tolerant of short abrupt sentences, but what I do in Russian is basically a translation-adaptation. Localized version, so to speak :) So, for me capturing the essence is not about using the same words and structures, but in preserving the meaning of what she said (also emotion, speach style differences etc.) using a broad spectrum of linguistic tools. What I've done in English also kind of leans towards that, but, as I said, English seems to be more tolerant and somehow structurally closer to Japanese... Anyways, my two cents: give yourself permission all you want :)
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Very interesting thoughts on translation! I've done very little real translation (some from Latin), but it always seems necessary to me to do a literal pass first and then an idiomatic impression. I figure Japanese is not only structurally different but different in literary expectations from either English or Russian. No easy task!
After starting to study Japanese and doing my own modest attempts at translating, I've also come to realize just how difficult it is to translate to English! I've actually been thinking about trying to translate some important parts to my native Finnish just to see how it would feel. Finnish is pretty flexible with word order, so it would be interesting to see if it might be possible to preserve certain things better, compared to what needs to be done with English translations. Not that there would be many people interested in reading it, unfortunately. But it's nice that the Russian translations seem to have a real audience!