hi!! i'm a huge translation nerd, i'm of the firm belief that translation is a form of adaptation, and that for analysis purposes a single work translated into two different languages are in fact two separate works.
luckily for me, i'm russian, and homestuck has a fully completed russian translation (https://mspaintadventures.ru/) that mostly works. it also has russian translations for problem sleuth, jailbreak, bard quest, the epilogues and paradox space, so i have a lot of things to work with lol.
i'd like to dedicate this thread to possibly the nerdiest and most tedious form of analysis: noticing differences in wording and analysing how these differences impact the text.
i also encourage asking questions about different translations of homestuck (i'd only be able to answer ones about the russian one, though), as well as discussing how homestuck was/is translated in your native language, and the interesting things that emerge from translating homestuck.
for the first post i'd like to discuss how typing quirks are handled in the translation (for the sake of length i'll just go over beta trolls of interest (i.e. ones whose quirk relies in some part on latin script/english language) to start). i've seen some people wonder how typing quirks work in different languages/scripts, and as far as cyrillic goes, most of them are not hard substitutions:
terezi's typing quirk is kept the same, with 4, 3 and 1 replacing the cyrillic А, Е and И, which make loosely the same sounds they do in english. despite the reasoning for 1 substituting I due to looking similar being lost since the equivalent sound letter is И, this doesn't affect the readability, since most russians are familiar with the basics of latin script and definitely know what sound I makes. plus, ukranian uses the latin i along its cyrillic script, so seeing i among cyrillic letters is not unfamiliar.
similarly, sollux's quirk keeps the substitution of И with ii, although what's notable about this is that double i basically doesn't exist in english words, but in russian "ИИ" is pretty common among a variety of words (my own full name is daniil with the double i!), so words like "настроенiiii" come up with four i's. thought that was neat to point out. in regards to replacing s with 2, cyrillic script doesn't exactly have a letter that looks like s. instead, the letter г gets replaced with two, which may seem clunky, until you see how the lower case г is written in cursive (and russian cursive is very standardized, being basically the standard way to write in school).
so yeah, it really works!
in terms of the wordplay of "to" and "too" being replaced by "two", this is predictably lost due to language differences. how the translation gets around this though is by replacing all instances of "ва" (va, not an uncommon letter combo in russian) with "два" (russian for two), so the wordplay is preserved in a different form.
equius is a little more complicated - in russian the substitution of "loo" with "100" doesn't really work. instead he replaced all instances of сто or ст in words with 100 (in russian, one hundred is translated as сто). as far as i can tell, though, the % and the "neigh" substitutions are lost.
in terms of eridan, instead of doubling the w and v's, he doubles л and м (l and m), partially to maintain the "wave" motif of his quirk (wave-like is волнообразным in russian), and personally i don't think this is too bad of an adaptation, as it still carries across a kind of "stilted" way of pronouncing some sounds, and the letters w and v only really have one cyrillic equivalent (в) (which we'll come back to)
for feferi, )( coincidentally replaces the same sound in both languages, H in english and х in russian, which both work visually. "glub" is translated as буль which both convey the sound of a bubble underwater.
now for vriska - perhaps naturally for vriska, the translation of her quirk is, in one aspect, perfect, and in the other the most unreadable. replacing b's with 8s works even better in cyrillic, as the russian letter в (v) looks like an 8 in both capitalised and uncapitalised forms. additionally, since the russian word for eight is восемь, all instances of во and вa in words gets replaced by a single 8. however, this also means that the replacement of "ay" or "ayt" sounds with 8 doesn't work. the translation attempts to kind of keep this by replacing occasional a's with 8s, but it doesn't really read well, making her quirk possibly the hardest to understand at times, especially when she replaces more vowels with 8.
these were all the most notable quirk translations, i might do the dancestors at a later time. some quirks also include wordplay and puns, which the translation does attempt to preserve, but the topic of translating wordplay is separate and more complex, so i might cover it in a later post.
Really cool read! I hadn't really thought about translations of Homestuck, it's fascinating to see how the quirks were handled. What a )(appy coincidence that Feferi's quirk works in both scripts ^w^
Out of curiosity, since Sollux's 2's replace an entirely different sound, is the effect of his lisp lost in translation?
(and, actually, how would a lisp be conveyed in writing in Russian?? is there a stereotypical way, like thpelling like thith in englithsh?)
This was actually really interesting to me. I've been thinking for years of making my own Homestuck Brazilian Portuguese translation, as I'm not the biggest fan of the big one in MSPFA (no shade to the folks who did, it's just a preference thing)
I think I agree with you about a translated work being a different work, at least in some level. I consider it more akin to like, an old video game port. Like a game that was both in the SNES and the GameBoy Color, they might have the same base, but it must be adapted into a new language (ayy)
-- The Butch
Never even thought about this lmfao How does Vriskas quirk work considering her 8's are like. Very contextual to the words used.
whoops got impatient and didnt read the full post nvm
@passeriInformal
it's actually super interesting because the sound "th" doesn't really exist in russian (if you look at how heavy russian accents sound, most russians struggle with pronouncing 'th', usually making it either closer to t or s, or z). instead lisping is usually conveyed with sh replacing s, and zh replacing z. so sollux's intro still states that sollux has a lisp, but it's meant to be something you imagine in his voice rather than something directly conveyed in his quirk.
and that one time he gets his teeth knocked out and then karkat puts them back and he speaks with a lot of "th"s as if his mouth if full, in russian that is conveyed with an "f" sound replacing all the th's, fun fact.
How are the names of the characters translated? In English, the characters have some particular letter counts, but I imagine that might not always be the same in a different alphabet. I also wonder how much of the cultural context is preserved, with there being lots of equivalents to the kid's names.
OH YESSS THIS IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF THING I ADORE !!!! I love going over some media that I like and going through and comparing the Spanish translation with the (usually) original English, it's always so interesting to me and also often very frustrating LOL. I'd love to go through the most popular Spanish HS translation some day and see what ideas they came up with, though it probably won't be as interesting as this considering Spanish uses the same alphabet...
Also, it's natural for puns to always get lost in any translation but are there any fun replacements you find particularly clever that come to mind (and would take the time to explain)?
In other words: meow meow
@chitonousCerate
the names are kept as they are, which, yes, does mean that the letter count gimmick is lost in some cases. and, yes, of course there are equivalents of the kids' names, but the story is already pretty america centric, so it wouldn't really make sense to adapt them. obviously with any story that has certain allusions to real life, there is a cultural context and an expectation of what the reader would already know, e.g. the movies john likes in the beginning of the story are meant to be recognized by the reader and the fact that john likes them is part of the implicit characterization based around the general reputation of said movies. but, if the reader doesn't come from a background that familiarized them to these movies and had a certain reputation associated with them, this implicit characterization is lost. to this extent the translation doesn't really try to "adapt" all the different pop culture allusions to be more readable to a non-american audience - and i think it shouldn't really be its burden to bare. a version of homestuck that isn't based in america and instead bases itself in the pop culture of a different country is certainly an interesting concept, but then it wouldn't really be homestuck anymore, it would be a different fan adventure. to this extent translations that try to adapt certain allusions are actually pretty disliked - for example harry potter (sorry to bring it up it's just a really good example) has two russian translations, one that tries to adapt the wordplay in the names of the characters, and one that doesn't, and the former is infamously hated. the general position on translations of proper names is that people's names shouldn't be translated, e.g. if you have a character named "mr brown" you wouldn't translate the word "brown", you'd just transcribe the name. this is somewhat of a debated topic, since with things like names of places, animals, and fantasy objects most people accept adaptation, to come back to the harry potter example: most people accept a translation of the name "griphook" since it's the name of an animal. and the reason harry potter is a good example for this is that a lot of the names include some sort of wordplay or meaning, the whole topic of translating them is pretty controversial. generally speaking there's no ruleset for how to translate proper nouns acceptably, you just gotta play it by ear and hope that the larger fanbase accepts your translation (even though there'll always be purists who insist you just have to keep the names as they are in the original). to go back to homestuck - the russian translation does translate the characters' handles, which makes sense as those are just made up of two real words. it doesn't try to do that with any of the names of the characters', though, and that also makes sense since having a kid in an american suburb who's deeply situated in american pop culture have a russian name would make very little sense. however this urge to adapt a story to a different cultural context does manifest in russian fandom spaces - there's a whole genre of fan works called "rusreal" where people take characters from non-russian settings and put them into a "typical" contemporary russian setting. danganronpa actually has such a big rusreal scene there are whole fangames and a pretty much separate fandom for the rusreal AU of it!
@bronze
i haven't had the time to properly reread homestuck in russian, i've just been selectively going over some moments, so i can't say what my "favorite" instance of translated wordplay is, although the translation does try to keep in the puns. sometimes it resorts to just taking out the pun and explaining what the original was to help the conversation make sense (the future arachnid's grip joke sadly gets this treatment), but that's just an unfortunate necessity in some cases, especially since the translation started in 2011 and had to translate as the updates were coming out in later years - they had to adapt as they went! but what i do really like about the russian translation and that i think does somewhat elevates the text of the original homestuck is that russian has a very rich vocabulary of cursing. when it comes to swearing english pretty much has shit and fuck, while russian has an array of different swear words in different combinations, which really does enrich the characters' dialogue, especially karkat's, since his whole gimmick is going on rants filled with insults.
one instance of this does come to mind - and this is kind of an original pun! in karkat's first conversation (from his perspective) with john, one instance where he just says "fucking" in the orignal, in russian it is replaced with "РАТЬ ТВОЮ МАКОМ", which will take some time to explain: firstly, it's a pretty common phrase that literally means something like "fuck your mother", which is generally used as an exclamation as an expression of dismay or surprise (so very similar to "fucking" in general usage). it also is a reference to a pretty common way of "censoring" or adding humor to the phrase, by exchanging the first letters of the two words (so, it would be like saying "dod gammit" in english or something similar). but what makes it a pun is that the phrase doesn't actually include the words "fuck your mother", the literal translation is "your mother in lobster/cancer", which is a name of a sex position, hence the "fuck your mother" implicit meaning. and it's a pun, since, well, it's a reference to cancer, and karkat is the one saying it! i just think that this is an example of the translation doing something similar to the original homestuck, which is seeing opportunities for emergent wordplay around the characters and making them into jokes, meaning that while some puns are lost in the translation, there are also new, added puns. the translation isn't just literally translating the words from the original, but understanding the general philosophies behind the way homestuck writes these characters and adapting general manners of speech and writing into a different language.
ah, this is a topic i've long been interested in but never really had the means to check out. how are concepts with conjunctive names are translated? like the echeladder (echelon and ladder) or kismesis (kismet and nemesis)
and then you sort of answered this already, but i would imagine the genetic code (words beginning with ACGT) aspect of chumhandles is lost if you're doing direct translations?
The Latin-looking I did used to coexist alongside И in Russian — the I is derived from Greek iota and was used for writing words borrowed from Greek as well as being used before vowels and Й. When using letters as numerals, I represented 10, while И represented 8.
..How was Jake’s typing quirk rendered in Russian? Does he use the older/obsolete letters?
And will we let the fire go out?
Is this the end for them now?
Sunken ship that has long gone down
Will we let the fire go.. out?
—DirkJake in memoriam
@rozie
yep, the gcat rule is lost, plus it wouldn't really work anyway since there's no translation for the letters of genetic code, you just use latin script. so really there's no way to actually preserve that in a translation in cyrillic.
as for concepts with conjuctive names, it really depends. in this thread i've already touched on the fact that translation of proper nouns is pretty controversial, with some purists demanding no translations, while the general standard is some things are translated and some are not, really it depends on 1. whether there is a good opportunity for a translated name 2. whether having a translation affects readability. for example, the word echeladder is translated (luckily echelon is also a borrowed word in russian), since it is important for readability to understand what an echeladder is, it's quite a concrete concept and understanding that it doesn't just have an abstract name but rather a name that speaks for itself is rather important for the story. quadrant names, on the other hand, aren't translated - since they're made up alien words that are meant to be unfamiliar it's not important to understand their origins to be able to understand them as concepts and the way they're used in the text (since they're also explained in detail). in this sense even the original has names and concepts that are references to other languages and stuff, but that you don't need to readily know in order to interact with the text of homestuck. for example, if you know that sollux's name is a reference to the mythological twins of pollux and castor, it adds to the twin motif and explains why his name is his name, but if you don't get that reference it doesn't affect his readability as a character.
so, the answer is it depends, and largely what it depends on is whether the name is self-explanatory or not. for example, "sburb" is not a self-explanatory name, even though it does have its meaning, so the translation keeps it as "sburb" (doesn't even transcribe it in cyrillic, btw, which makes sense considering it's a name of a game), but "pesterchum" is - homestuck doesn't need to sit down and explain to you what a pesterchum is, it's in the name, it's to pester your chums! so this does get translated.
@nobleRadi8ion
jake does not use obsolete letters, as i feel that would make him seem too old-timey, like borderline medieval. he does speak in a old-timey and kind of formal manner, though, using words and sentence structures that are really only seen in old literature nowadays (think nineteenth century, probably). there's really not a lot to say about the adaptation of jake, they take his quirk in english (overly formal, kind of old-timey) and does the same but in russian. it works - perhaps with a little less flair, but the basic idea is the same.
Yeah, I can definitely see Jake taking cues from literary Russian in his typing style / dialogue. That’s actually what made me wonder if he uses the obsolete letters for flavor, because 19th century Russian still had some funky spelling like using і before all vowels (and before й) or putting ъ at the end of a word that nowadays just ends in a consonant.
And will we let the fire go out?
Is this the end for them now?
Sunken ship that has long gone down
Will we let the fire go.. out?
—DirkJake in memoriam
@nobleradi8ion
while this is technically true, culturally this usage of ъ is perceived as way more antiquated than it actually is. in pop culture it’s generally a shorthand for “this story is taking place in ancient rus” (like, kievan rus), or something similar. even most funky spellings would probably just be confusing to most rather than be readable as “this guy is speaking in an old-timey way”. literary russian is just way easier to parse as a signifier of the idea jake is going for.