#onomatopoeia

I’ve been catching up on Lingthusiasm lately, the excellent linguistics podcast by Gretchen McCullochandLauren Gawne, and ran into their episode about untranslatability. You can go listen to the whole thing - it’s unsurprisingly pretty fun! But it made me also think of this article by Zach Davisson on translating sound effects from Japanese to English:

The greatest challenge you will face as a manga translator is the sound of silence. I mean that literally. When it comes to silence, Japanese has a specific sound effect for it. English doesn’t. When a Japanese character walks into a room and is encountered with “sheeeen,” readers know the room is deadly silent. When a Japanese comedian tells a joke and it falls flat, the comedian is confronted with the horrifying sound of “sheen”—the sound of silence.  English has no equivalent. It is untranslatable.

There are definitely onomatopoeia that do have translations (e.g. “wan wan” in Japanese going to “bow wow” or “woof” in English). But there are ones that don’t map easily, and yet are still very important to communicating within that visual space, as Davisson explains. You need to have sound effects, and leaving them as just the Japanese sounds transcribed into English doesn’t really work, because what seems totally natural to a Japanese speaker will mean nothing to an English speaker with no Japanese knowledge.

Well, maybe not nothing: there does appear to be some level of underlying meaning to particular sound profiles across cultures. But that doesn’t mean that the specifics of the intended meaning will get across for that particular situation. If you read the whole piece from Davisson, he discusses some strategies, but doesn’t bring up one that I like, even if it’s not actually sound effects, exactly: just writing out the action, as on this comic page from a work by our graphics team. It’s not like “nod” or “fiddle” works as a sound effect, exactly, but the font helps fill out the action in a way that works for me.

Anyway, onomatopoeia is a translation problem that doesn’t have a great solution, so you just have to pick something and be consistent about it. And how do you deal with the Japanese sound of silence? Davisson’s preferred solution is also mine:

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