Jamen Willis
Figure 1 A picture of my BSC collection. Image: (c) Jamen Willis.
Whether you’ve read one of the books or not, chances are you’ve at least heard of the ultra-popular series from the late 80s called The Baby-Sitters Club. It revolves around a group of girls who, as different as they may be, come together to form a babysitting service in their town. While the series is far from being realistic and is not without flaws, it does a good job at teaching its readers about responsibility, friendship, and compassion. Ann M. Martin, the author whose name is plastered on each of the pastel covers, surely made her mark in the literary world. The Baby-Sitters Club series is comprised of over 200 books and has “more than 176 million copies in print” (Woytus). Talk about a financially successful series for the publisher, Scholastic! Especially now that Netflix has taken it upon themselves to turn the beloved series into a TV show, its audience is bound to grow.
Nishio Ishin’s light novel series, Monogatari, is a bit of an infamous modern classic in Japan. It was not written with readers outside of Japan in mind and this was made evident when I decided to work through the original, untranslated novels during my never-ending study to acquire Japanese as a second language. It is an incredibly dense, difficult series, famous for intelligent and creative manipulation of linguistics. Monogatari has been translated and adapted to various languages and mediums from graphic novels to animation and film. Therein lies the beauty (or glaring issue, depending on outlook) with the series. Translators are quickly met with great difficulty turning the original work into something comprehensible for readers unfamiliar with the countless quirks and irregularities in Japanese culture and linguistics. Seemingly each of the thousands of pages of text throughout the series are coated in critiques and commentaries on the Japanese language, culture and customs. My first time experiencing Monogatari was watching the animated adaptation by Studio Shaft, accompanied with official English translations in subtitles. While the official subtitles done by esteemed translators at a certain popular localization company did what I would call an impressive job, it was still painfully evident how much of the story is simply untranslatable. To reiterate, Japanese is not my first language and I did not grow up in Japan so a ton of idioms and cultural references are bound to fly over my head, yet even a consumer in my position can notice subtlety; details in the story that would never be understood by someone without an understanding of the Japanese language. I want to put a spotlight on a couple of examples of this phenomenon I found myself to, perhaps, show appreciation for the original work and caution any readers of any work that has gone through translations and republication, if nothing else. For clarity, I will Romanize any Japanese words necessary.
