There was an interesting article in The Daily Yomiuri about a playwright who translated Mamet's seminal play Glengarry Glen Ross into Japanese. it seems it was a challenging task:
"I was overwhelmed by the amount of dialogue. On the first reading, I could barely understand what was going on. But I could feel the power in the dialogue," Emori said. "Even though I'm not a native English speaker, I got a real sense of the lively, aggressive atmosphere of the story through word choice and alignment."
Glengarry, written in 1982, tells the story of four real estate agents over two desperate days. They need to unload some undesirable properties onto unsuspecting customers. They flatter and lie to their prospective buyers, while swearing, yelling and backstabbing each other in the hope of beating out the others for promotion.
The title comes from two of the developments--Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms. Better salesmen get better leads, which means better properties and a higher class of customer. One of the agents tries to get good leads through bribery, while the other plots to steal the leads and sell them to a competitor.
The play was performed in London and the United States, and in 1992 was adapted into a film of the same name (Japan title: Matenro o Yumemite), with a cast that included Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alex Baldwin, Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey.
Glengarry is a dialogue and jargon-heavy piece that requires a lot of work and energy from its actors, and, of course, its translator.
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Mother-tongue proficiency key
Like most Japanese, Emori studied English until high school. From that point onward, however, he studied on his own. He says he is not a literary man, and has never lived or worked abroad.
Despite his lack of formal education in the field, he chose to take on a play that had never been translated into Japanese before. With little information about the story and the incredible amount of dialogue, he found himself in over his head at first. But after getting a grasp on the atmosphere of the play, he started to understand the desperation the middle-aged men were feeling as they tried to get their piece of the American Dream. After reading the story, he was determined to have it performed before a Japanese audience.
"The most important thing when translating is to be proficient in Japanese," Emori said, adding that a translator needs to have a wealth of linguistic knowledge stored up to know which words or expressions would best fit the nuances of the original.
According to Emori, choice of personal pronouns is one of the most difficult things when it comes to translation.
"When you translate the word 'I,' beyond the gender difference, you must choose between words such as 'boku,' 'ore,' 'uchi' and 'washi,' for example," he said.
"And the other interesting thing about Japanese is [even in the same character], the way they use pronouns changes. For example in English, 'you' will be still 'you,' but the tone of voice used when saying 'you' may differ based on the character's emotional state. In Japanese, on the other hand, the words can be switched from 'anata' to 'anta' as the speaker becomes enraged. These subtle changes can completely influence the feeling of a conversation," he said.
Despite the rough language spoken by the characters, this interviewer found Emori's 135-page Glengarry script elegant and old-fashioned. Images of stylish, aggressive men from a period drama speaking like Emori seem to float from the pages. The dialogue does not have the feeling of a translation, instead reading as if it was written in Japanese, not diligently converted from English.
Emori also discussed the problems raised by the variety of verb endings found in Japanese, as opposed to English, which tends to stick to one easier pattern, the so-called "be verb."
During translation for Glengarry, Emori struggled with the word "lead," a word and concept key to the entire story. He needed to find a short, punchy word for the script, as it is repeated frequently throughout. In his theater company's previous productions, he simply chose to stick with the original, "leads," but in this latest version, he chose to go with the word "tama," an expression that Japanese often use like English speakers would use the expression "good one." The film's translator--the famous Natsuko Toda--however, chose to go with the word "neta," a word reporters, for example, often use when they receive a tip-off or lead.
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