On the Indonesian subtitle of the anime films in JFF 2022

[icblues]

So I guess I need to write something, an inaugural post, for this new DW blog I made in preparation for escaping Twitter. It can crash and burn any day now, so please bear with me as I am trying to shake myself free from all the conveniences (and not-so-conveniences) of microblogging and re-learning doing stuff myself. Like... Man, did we really have to tweak that many colours during our LJ days?

Speaking of LJ, the title of this blog – New Access Identity – is a nod to my old LJ account, Access Identity. The account has been purged, apparently... which I did not regret too much, considering one of the last posts I made was about a Kpop group that I am reluctant to be associated with nowadays.

ANYWAY.

Last Saturday I went to watch all three anime films in Japan Film Festival 2022 – Blue Thermal, Poupelle of Chimney Town, and Inu-Oh. They’re very different from each other, yet I truly enjoyed each one. On purpose, I went in knowing as little as possible of each film, and somehow this worked really well. The surprises I got! The (low, or even non-existent) expectations exceeded! I just never knew that I would cry that much during Poupelle.

If you want more detailed reviews of each films, I think there are people out there who can do them better than I can. At least I’m not going to write such reviews now, but instead I will write about one thing that bugged me so much while I was watching the films: the Indonesian subtitles.

My complaint about the Indonesian subtitles is not new; I remember the barely-readable Indonesian sub for Miss Hokusai that I watched during Japan Cinema Week 2018. The Indonesian sub was clearly a translation of the English sub instead of the original Japanese dialogue. Okay, sometimes second-hand translation/subtitle is inevitable. However, the EN → ID translator wasn’t even doing the job properly. Or was it a... machine translation? I remember ‘nagaaaaaai matsuri’ (‘loooooong festival’) became..... ‘festival looooong’, the machine seemingly unable to identify that it’s ‘long’ with extra o’s. Another example that I remember was icchatta, which was translated into “she’s gone” in English, which then got translated into “dia menghilang” in Indonesian, when “dia sudah pergi” was more appropriate. A mess.

As for the subtitles of the anime films in JFF this year... The ENG-INA translator for Blue Thermal either had no grasp in Japanese at all, or they were working only with scripts, without audio. It was honestly annoying to see, for instance, the character named Sorachi Daisuke who was called “Sorachi-senpai” by his juniors to be called “Daisuke” in the Indonesian sub. In English, they did change the way he’s called into “Daisuke” because, well, that’s English, they’d call their parents with given names if they can. It felt so odd that the Indonesian sub simply copied the English sub and made his juniors call him Daisuke, not Kak Sorachi, or not even Kak Daisuke, for a more natural-sounding Indonesian way of calling. There were also parts that were translated too literally, which I could not recall now but I remembered feeling disappointed reading them.

Inu-Oh’s sub would have been unbearable, if only the anime wasn’t a musical and I could just focus on the songs most of the times. Just like the translator for Blue Thermal, it was clear the translator for Inu-Oh translated the English sub into Indonesian. Again, if only the job was at least done well, I wouldn’t really complain. But translating “yeah right” into “benar”? That’s just one small example.

The sub for Poupelle seemed to be based on the English script also. However, the translator managed to produce a more natural-sounding, quite enjoyable translation in Indonesian. For instance, “I told you so” was translated into “Nah kan” instead of (God forbid) the more literal “Aku beritahu kamu begitu”. They seemed to have some grasp of Japanese also, because some translated dialogues were closer to the original Japanese dialogues than to the English sub. In fact, I was only sure that they worked based on the English script when they stumbled in translating phrases or proverbs. Guess what the original English words of “tebal bibir” and “burung dari bulu domba yang sama”...

All in all, I had a great experience watching JFF 2022, the anime selection was great, but I really hope that in the future the subtitle quality will be improved. If film festivals are annual, isn’t it a good time to arrange to ensure good translators at hand every year?