Linguistic line in the sand

[branchandroot]

I can't do it. I just can't.

I cannot bring myself to use "bloodline limit" as the translation for kekkei genkai.

This is one of those situations where it would really have been helpful for someone to think for ten seconds put together about how Japanese is put together before translating it 'literally'. Indeed, 血 means "blood" and 継 shows up in words having to do with inheritance. And 限界 translates to "limit" or "boundary". And when you put these together, if you are translating with the utmost in infelicitous literality, you might wind up with "bloodline limit". But that utterly mangles the meaning and structure of the original phrase.

What the phrase indicates is [contextual noun] limited to inheritance by blood. In this case, ninja-magic talents, often with some particular physical expression.

Japanese grammatical structure sometimes leaves a noun unspoken, to be filled in contextually. Standard English doesn't generally do that, and the job of translators is to make a phrase that works in English. In this case, however, the attempt to provide the original phrase with a noun resulted in using the wrong one. "Limit", in the original phrase, is serving as an implicit verb--that is, a form of "to limit" rather than "a limit". "A bloodline limit" (observe that "limit" in this translation is the noun) is an incorrect 'literal' translation.

And while I'm willing to use a lot of moderately nonsensical or not-entirely-felicitous catch phrases that fandom has previously agreed on just because they'll be recognized, I can't bring myself to do it here. Nope. It's going to be "bloodline talent" for me, adding in the noun and leaving the genkai unspoken in context instead; I feel that's sufficiently communicated, in English, by "bloodline", which I kind of have to use to achieve any recognition at all. If I'd been the initial translator, I'd probably have used "blood bound talent"; hell, maybe I should use that anyway.

Now just watch and see how many wee fangirls who probably couldn't even tell me the difference between a noun and a verb in English, let alone anything about Japanese phrase structure, try to tell me that I Got It Wrong. I should probably make this post public so I can just link them to it and have done.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

"bloodline" brings to mind stockyard mating. "family talent"?

[branchandroot]

*wry* A stockyard is actually not an entirely inaccurate association, from what little we see of how these things came to be bred in. The source text puts a pretty heavy emphasis on the genetic factor.

[adalger]

Forgive me; I know little Japanese, and no Naruto. Your post elicits the question in my mind, what's wrong with the word "hereditary"?

[branchandroot]

I expect it wasn't considered snappy enough for an action series. *sighs* And if I used a phrase, now, that doesn't have a direct "blood" reference in there somewhere, no one will actually know what I'm talking about.

[adalger]

Oh, okay. I get it now. Nothing's wrong with it except that you're constrained by fanslation error. Gotcha.

[branchandroot]

Pretty much! There are far easier ways to translate this, but none of them are as "direct" and sometimes the fanslation tendency to literalism has Really Clunky results.

[sporky_rat]

It's good to know that my definition of 'kekkai' is pretty close to correct: shield or boundary.

[branchandroot]

Yep! That's an interesting one, since it also sometimes indicates the /space/ contained, to a degree.

[alas]

Heh! Your translation is indeed much more correct, but in a way I feel "bloodline limit" does work - the ninjas with them tend to be one-trick ponies ^^;.

[branchandroot]

*amused* Yeah, Kishimoto has a really bad habit of writing /everyone/ as specialists. I suppose it looks flashier that way, but I gotta say it makes ficcing them a pain when I get to the action scenes.