Portal:En-literal

What's This?
"Literal" in this context means "word-oriented"&mdash;communicating the explicit meanings of individual words and phrases rather than the implicit meaning of the text as a whole. The opposite of a literal translation is a liberal translation, which takes many interpretive liberties, paraphrasing statements to make them flow more naturally in the target language and generally making an effort to bring the writing into the comfort zone of the reader. In contrast, a literal translation makes only minimal alterations to the text in order to preserve as much meaning as possible.

Isn't That Just a Bad Translation?
It's not what most people expect from a translation; most people want the text to feel as if it was originally written in the language they're reading. But for people who are interested in the source language, it can reveal interesting details, and for people who enjoy studying text and coming to their own understandings, a literal translation provides the raw material for a more informed interpretation. Official localizations of games usually hew to the liberal approach because of its broader appeal, and that's for the best&mdash;but this isn't an official localization! We're not trying to supplant any existing standard version, only to offer a specialized alternative. There's room (and in fact, need) in the world for more than one translation: the best way to come to the fullest possible understanding of a text, short of being fluent in the original language, is to refer to multiple high-quality translations both literal and liberal.

How Does This Relate to Touhou?
From a translator's perspective, the writing of Touhou Project, particularly early Touhou Project, is capricious and unruly, full of untranslatable puns, obscure references, and weird grammatical lilts that require significant lateral thinking to communicate concisely in any language other than Japanese. The current main English translations of many of the games are the horribly messy product of years of tweaking, each wildly varying from line to line in its approach from far too literal to far too liberal. The goal of the Literal English translation project is to move the literal translations into their own version, clean them up, and annotate them for clarity, so that the main translations can be moved in a more consistently liberal direction.

For an example of why a good literal translation is valuable, consider Reimu's encounter with Remilia in Embodiment. Remilia has a line where she says that she is "fed up". This is a very clever double meaning, and it does work in both English and Japanese: the word she uses can refer figuratively to being tired of some nuisance, or it can refer literally to having eaten one's fill. Since Remilia is a vampire, she might be saying, "I don't want to fight you; I'm fed up with this BS," or she might be saying, "I don't want to fight you; I'm not thirsty for your blood at the moment." Even in this ideal scenario it is of course impossible to appreciate this clever wordplay unless the correct translation is chosen, and even if it is correct, you can appreciate the pun as ZUN's only if you can be confident that it's neither an artifact of translation nor a liberal riff on the script.

Goals
The primary goal of the project is to preserve meaning. It is impossible to do this perfectly. Even when describing the same thing, users of different languages express different information and do so in different ways. Because of this, every possible pair of languages has certain distinctive patterns of meaning damage are most likely to occur.

Meaning damage may be divided into two broad categories, loss and artifaction.

Loss
Information is lost in translation if it is communicated in the original text, but doesn't make it into the translation. If a word in the source language has no precise equivalent in the target language, nuance will be lost. Wordplay is particularly susceptible to loss: in Embodiment, one interaction between Marisa and Rumia hinges upon the visual resemblance between Rumia's physical pose and the shape of the kanji numeral 10. For a literal translation, the only solution in such a case is annotation.

Artifaction
Information can also often make its way into the translated text despite being nowhere in the original text. Such changes are called artifacts of translation. They may occur when a word in the source text has no perfect translation, or when the target language requires certain information that the source language can leave ambiguous—both very often the case between English and Japanese. Again, annotations are important, as is some means marking insertions (see below).

Notes and Annotations
The translation should make judicious use of in-game annotations, marked up with the Tlnote template. If the annotation relates to a specific word or phrase in the line it's applied to, express it as a footnote: put an asterisk after the relevant word in the dialogue text and before the corresponding explanation in the annotation text. The annotations should be kept brief, and there shouldn't be too many for the player to take in at once.

If you want to discuss translation decisions at length, do so in a wiki comment using the  markup. These will appear on the translation page, but not in the patched in game.

Insertions
Sometimes it's impossible to avoid inserting words into the translated text, for the sake of disambiguity or even elementary grammar. Because Japanese is a relatively terse language and English a relatively verbose one, Japanese-English translation requires lots of insertions. To prevent these from becoming artifacts, all insertions should be marked with [square brackets]. Any word or phrase that does not directly correspond to some word or phrase in the original text counts. This even applies to copulas (is, am, are, etc.), determiners (a, an, the, my, your, etc.), pronouns, and other short words, provided that they are not part of a phrasal expression that you are using to translate some word or phrase in the Japanese.

For example, 「久々の仕事」 (said by Reimu in EoSD Stage 1) could be translated, "[first] job in a while". 「仕事」 is a noun meaning "job" or "work", in this context referring to something like a freelance gig. 「久々」 is a noun denoting a long period of time, and in the genitive case it expresses the sense of seeing something again after a long period of absence, hence, "first in a while". The phrase "in a while" stands in directly for the genitive 「久々の」, but the sense of first-ness is peculiar to the English expression and only incidental to the meaning of the phrase, so it's considered an insertion.

Retentions
Similarly, it's sometimes beneficial to retain a non-English word without translating it at all. This should be done sparingly&mdash;unlike insertion, retention is rarely necessary, and when committed excessively, is the mark of a lazy translation. As foreignisms, all retentions should be italicized in accordance with standard English style. This does not apply to character names.

Words like youkai, which refer to concepts unique to Japanese culture or folklore, should be retained. Otherwise, err on the side of English: himesama means "princess", kami means "god", and so on. If a concept is uniquely Japanese but does have a commonly accepted translation, use the English term: miko means "shrine maiden".

Names and Honorifics
Full names should be kept in the same form as in the original text, with the surname first and given name second for Eastern names (e.g. "Hakurei Reimu") and vice-versa for Western names (e.g. "Alice Margatroid"). Honorific suffixes (-san, -chan, -sama, etc.), when attached to names, should be retained. Honorific epithets (ojou-sama, sensei, etc.) should be translated.

Romanization
All romanizations should adhere strictly to modified Hepburn, except that long vowels should be represented as diphthongs rather than with diacritics (Gensoukyou, not Gensokyo or Gensōkyō). Spell the nominative は as wa, the accusative を as wo, and the lative へ as e. Preserve archaic kana where they occur (Hinanawi, not Hinanai), but leave an annotation specifying the modern pronunciation.