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ANIME FANSUBS: TRANSLATION AND MEDIA ENGAGEMENT AS LUDIC

PRACTICE

by

Douglas Michael Schules

An Abstract

Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of

Philosophy degree in Communication Studies in the Graduate College of

The University of Iowa

December 2012

Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Timothy Havens

1

ABSTRACT

The democratization of new media technologies, particularly the software tools

though which “content” can be manipulated, has invited a seemingly vast array of modes

through which people can express themselves. Conversations in fan studies, for example,

cite the novel ways in which new media allow fans to alter texts in the expression of their

subcultural needs, while theorizations of media often reverse the paradigm by arguing

how advances in technology will revolutionize how we interact with, and hence, know

the world. Frequently overlooked are the ways in which these technologies and

communities co-construct engagement and the extent to which this engagement spurs

novel ways of interaction.

This dissertation addresses these problems by theorizing the role of the medium as

a ludic negotiation between text and fan, informed—but not determined—by the rules

and strictures that construct both these discrete media artifacts and the communities in

which these texts circulate. Nowhere are these concerns more evident than in the

subcultural realm of anime fan translations, where an eclectic blend of tech-savvy,

Japanese language proficient, culturally competent individuals from different

backgrounds converge to form groups who have self-nominated themselves to spread

anime through timely, efficient, and accurate translations. To be successful, they must

navigate multiple linguistic and cultural currents as they move between Japanese and

their target language, deftly avoid running aground on the shores that structure the

boundaries of container media, all the while remaining mindful of ideological and

subcultural discursive shoals as they scan the horizon for alternate paths to their

translation goal. These fan translators are, to be less dramatic, limited in the types of

translations they can provide by the formal properties of the selected medium, but these

limitations should be conceived as a generative process motivating translators to seek

novel ways of engagement with the medium to meet both their translation needs and the

2

needs of the communities in which their translations circulate.

Abstract Approved: ____________________________________ Thesis Supervisor

____________________________________ Title and Department

____________________________________ Date

1

ANIME FANSUBS: TRANSLATION AND MEDIA ENGAGEMENT AS LUDIC

PRACTICE

by


A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of

Philosophy degree in Communication Studies in the Graduate College of

The University of Iowa

December 2012

Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Timothy Havens

2

Copyright by

DOUGLAS MICHAEL SCHULES

2012

All Rights Reserved

Graduate College The University of Iowa

Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

_______________________

PH.D. THESIS

_______________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of


has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies at the December 2012 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ___________________________________ Timothy Havens, Thesis Supervisor

___________________________________ John Durham Peters

___________________________________ Kembrew McLeod

___________________________________ Stephen Vlastos

___________________________________ Andre Brock

ii

2

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation has been a long time coming. The topics and arguments have

changed drastically since its conception, not only as I expanded my theoretical horizons

but in large part, I suspect, to the continuing production of anime and fansubs: each

season brought a new show and related fan-produced subtitles that appeared just a bit

better, more suitable, than what I was previously working with. As fan groups grew and

died, replaced in part by speed subs and quasi-corporate entities tangentially fan-driven, I

reflected on the possibilities this diversity offered and tried to explain it all.

I wish to thank those who helped during this extended period of revelry in my

topic of chose, bouncing off ideas and gleefully running down theoretical rabbit holes

with me—especially since many of them did not share my animation in anime. Nathan

Wilson and Diana Bowne spring readily to mind, but other colleagues of mine equally

deserve recognition for walking this path at some point during this process: Eleanor

King, David Morris, Kristen Anderson-Terpstra, Hsin-Yen Yang, Evan and Cindy Jones,

and Shiori Yamazaki. The editors of Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens, who

provided extensive feedback and patience with my argument on language and games,

also need recognition.

My committee and the library staff also deserve my thanks, as their ability to

point me to the places—both theoretical and physical—I needed to complete this project

was invaluable. University of Iowa librarian Chiaki Sakai merits particular mention as

her help with getting me into Tokyo University’s main library and teaching me how to

navigate its databases provide essential for the earlier visions of my argument.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. iv

LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................v

CHAPTER I GAMING THE SYSTEMS: AN INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE, LUDOLOGY, AND ANIME FANDOM .................................1

Introduction .......................................................................................................1 Towards a Ludology of Language ....................................................................5 Fan Studies and Translation ..............................................................................9 Fansubbing as Fandom? .................................................................................14 Summary/Chapter Overview ..........................................................................17

CHAPTER II LUX-PAIN, LUDOLOGY, AND THE LINGUISTIC GAME ...................21

Introduction .....................................................................................................21 Games: Playing by Rules ...............................................................................23 Lux-Pain and Fan Discontent .........................................................................24 Lux Pain: Language at the Local Level .........................................................33 Internal Gameplay and the Limits of Lux-Pain ..............................................44 Simulations and Names: Lux-Pain’s Inscrutable Location ...........................50 The Unintentional Return of High Modernist Aesthetics ...............................56 Loose Ends and Unresolved Tensions ............................................................60

CHAPTER III THE MEDIUM IN TRANSLATION: OR, THE MEDIUM STRIKES BACK ............................................................................................62

Introduction .....................................................................................................62 Container Media: Definition and Practice .....................................................64 Linear Notes: The Translator’s Visibility ......................................................81 The Medium in Translation: Foreignness as Translation Strategy ................93 Conclusion ....................................................................................................107

CHAPTER IV OF FANSUBS AND CULTURAL CREDIBILITY ...............................109

Introduction ...................................................................................................109 A Quick Primer on Fansub Groups: Evolution and Current Status .............111 Language and Linear Notes: Subcultural Capital ........................................116 Foreign Words: Selective Fissures in Translations .....................................140 Concluding Remarks: Subcultural Capital and Perceptive Plurality ...........142

CHAPTER V EXPANDING THE FIELD: CONCLUDING REMARKS ON MEDIA COMPOSITION AND ENGAGEMENT ......................................145

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................155

iv

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 4.1: List of LN topics in Figures 4.10-4.16 ..........................................................131

v

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1: Lux-Pain’s experience screen. ........................................................................25

Figure 2.2: Quantification of Atsuki and his powers. .......................................................26

Figure 2.3: Battle sequence with Silent ............................................................................28

Figure 2.4: Time, damage, and randomness in typical encounter. ...................................29

Figure 2.5: Sigma’s ability to reveal hidden shinen. ........................................................31

Figure 2.6: Shinen in Japanese and English ......................................................................34

Figure 2.7: Underlying and surface representations in Lux-Pain. ....................................35

Figure 2.8: Localization errors in Lux-Pain. .....................................................................46

Figure 2.9: Localization errors in Lux-Pain. .....................................................................47

Figure 3.1: The Legend of Basara, Opening Credits, Anime Keep [A-Keep], avi ..........67

Figure 3.2: Fairy Tail, episode 93, Kyuubi Fansubs, mp4, hardsubbed ...........................71

Figure 3.3: Nurarihyon no Mago Sennen Makyou, episode 04, WhyNot?, mkv Normal rendering ............................................................................................72

Figure 3.4: Nurarihyon no Mago Sennen Makyou, episode 04, WhyNot?, mkv Larger font size ...............................................................................................72

Figure 3.5: Nurarihyon no Mago Sennen Makyou, episode 04, WhyNot?, mkv Smaller font size, mirrored .............................................................................73

Figure 3.6: Nurarihyon no Mago Sennen Makyou, episode 04, WhyNot?, mkv Smaller font size, italics, screen top ...............................................................73

Figure 3.7: Tokyo Majin Gakuen, episode 09, Shinsen-Subs [SHS], mkv .......................75

Figure 3.8: Ah! My Goddess Goddess, episode 04, AnimeONE and AnimeYuki [AonE-AnY], avi ............................................................................................75

Figure 3.9: Nichijou, episode 16, Coalgirls, mkv, KMPlayer ..........................................76

Figure 3.10: Nichijou, episode 16, Coalgirls, mkv, VLC .................................................76

Figure 3.11: Beelzebub, episode 23, Shogakukan Fansubs & Tomodachi [SGKK-TMD], mkv ...................................................................................................77

Figure 3.12: Deadman Wonderland, episode 02, Shogakukan Fansubs & Ruri Subs [SGKK-Ruri], mkv .......................................................................................77

Figure 3.13: High School of the Dead¸ opening credits, gg Fansubs [gg], avi, KM Player ............................................................................................................79

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Figure 3.14: High School of the Dead¸ opening credits, gg Fansubs [gg], mkv, KMPlayer .....................................................................................................79

Figure 3.15: High School of the Dead¸ opening credits, gg Fansubs [gg], mkv, VLC ..............................................................................................................80

Figure 3.16: Otogizoushi, episode 02, Anime-kraze [Ani-Kraze], avi .............................84

Figure 3.17: Genshiken, episode 03, Solar and Anime-Faith [Solar & Faith], avi ...........84

Figure 3.18: Hakuouki, episode 01, DatteBayo [DB], avi ................................................85

Figure 3.19: Keroro Gunsou, episode 06, Hitoribochi Fansubs [HB],avi ........................85

Figure 3.20: Scrapped Princess, episode 14, Anime-Keep & Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai [Keep-ANBU], avi ...............................................................86

Figure 3.21: Shuffle!, episode 01, AnimeUniverse Fansub Group [AnimeU], avi ...........86

Figure 3.22: Keroro Gunsou, episode 47, Doremi Fansubs & Keroro Fansubs [Doremi-keroro], avi ....................................................................................87

Figure 3.23: Nagasarete Airantou, episode 03, Ayako Fansubs [Ayako], mkv ...............88

Figure 3.24: Toaru Majutsu no Index, episode 16, Eclipse Productions [Eclipse], mkv ...............................................................................................................88

Figure 3.25: Deadman Wonderland, episode 12, Shogakukan Fansubs & Ruri Subs [SGKK-Ruri], mkv .......................................................................................89

Figure 3.26: Gintama, episode 79, Yuurisan-Subs & Shinsen-Subs [YuS-SHS], avi ......91

Figure 3.27: Gintama, episode 79, Rumbel Subs & so Many idiots Fansubs [Rumbel-sMi], avi ........................................................................................91

Figure 3.28: Keroro Gunsou, episode 09, Doremi-Keroro, avi ........................................98

Figure 3.29: Tokyo Majin Gakuen, episode 07, Shinsen Subs [SHS], avi .......................99

Figure 3.30: Ah! My Goddess! Everybody has Wings, episode. 11, AnimeONE and AnimeYuki [AonE-AnY], avi ......................................................................99

Figure 3.31: Gintama, episode 80, Yuurisan-Subs & Shinsen-Subs [YuS-SHS], avi ....102

Figure 3.32: Gintama, episode 80, Rumbel Subs & so Many idiots Fansubs [Rumbel-sMi], avi ......................................................................................103

Figure 4.1: Gintama, episode 74, Rumbel-sMi, avi ........................................................118

Figure 4.2: Gintama, episode 74, Rumbel-sMi, avi. .......................................................119



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Figure 4.5: Gintama, episode 83, Rumbel-sMi, avi ........................................................124

Figure 4.6: Gintama, episode. 73, YuS-SHS, avi ...........................................................127

Figure 4.7: Gintama, episode. 82, Rumbel-sMi, avi .......................................................128

Figure 4.8: Gintama, episode. 79, YuS-SHS, avi ...........................................................129

Figure 4.9: Gintama, episode. 79, Rumbel-sMi, avi .......................................................130

Figure 4.10: Gintama, episode 84, Rumbel-sMi, avi. .....................................................132

Figure 4.11: Gintama, episode 80, Rumbel-sMi, avi ......................................................133


Figure 4.13: Gintama, episode 84, YuS-SHS, avi ..........................................................135

Figure 4.14: Gintama, episode 75, YuS-SHS, avi ..........................................................136


Figure 4.16: Gintama, episode 04, SHS, avi...................................................................138

1

CHAPTER I

GAMING THE SYSTEMS: AN INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE,

LUDOLOGY, AND ANIME FANDOM

Introduction

When I first experienced anime in the early 1990’s, the choices were exceedingly

limited and the only game in town was corporate offerings—but I didn’t care, as the

images and story developed in movies like Akira, Vampire Hunter D¸ and Wicked City

were unlike anything I had ever seen in America. Characters in these movies did things,

said things, that their American counterparts could never get away with, and I assumed

this reflected some cultural difference—perhaps superiority—cultivated in Japan. I

didn’t know Japanese, and I never really considered the role translation had in shaping

my understanding of anime and Japanese culture.

In retrospect, I attribute a lot of that naivety to ignorance of alternative

distribution networks and the fact that at the time anime as a word had not yet entered the

vocabulary of mainstream America. I didn’t know fan translations existed (or where to

even get them!), and even if I did corporate translations were underground enough to this

teenager to be sexy. The fact that I knew what anime was and that I watched it was

enough to mark me as a member of a subcultural group distinct from the masses.

The development of Internet technologies, particularly broadband, in tandem with

an evolution in digital recording and editing technologies has fundamentally altered the

amount of anime available and access to it. Hundreds of fan organizations have spawned

around anime and subgenres of anime, carving niches into an object that remains in the

mainstream eye and some scholarship a singular edifice. The popularity and increased

recognition of anime, aided in large part by a sustained effort of the Japanese government

to leverage the genre as a soft political tool, has eroded the subcultural sexiness merely

watching anime has conferred; indeed, as Lam (2007) notes the forces driving anime

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distribution are distinctly market ones, and as anyone tangentially familiar with fan

subcultures will wryly opine, mainstream products do not a subculture make. While

knowledge of anime remains one facet of demonstrating credibility in fan communities,

the market success of Japan’s soft political campaign has given rise to alternative

standards by which fandom can be measured. Cultural and linguistic proficiencies with

Japanese have emerged as one yardstick by which subcultural status can be measured,

and these disparate forces have unwittingly converged to reveal subtle and not-so-subtle

tensions in the processes of translation and the influence of the medium in its realization,

some of which come to the fore in the example from two translations (Shinsen-Subs was

a fan organization, Crunchyroll is a corporate one) of episode 8 of Gintama below:

Shinsen-Subs Crunchyroll

Kondo: I'm just such a pitiful wreck… It's not gonna happen…besides,

my butt hair is too thick

There's no way any woman would

go for me.

There's no way a girl would go

out with me.

I'm just no good… I'm no good.

Tae: That's not true at all. That's not true.

You're so manly… It's nice. You're just very manly! And

that's attractive, isn't it?

Kondo: Then, Otae-san, Then let me ask you this…

if your boyfriend… If your boyfriend's…

What if he were impotent? rear end looked like an afro

with a part down the middle,

what would you do?

Tae: Then I'd love him, impotence and

all.

I would love him, butt afro and

all.

Kondo: She's so calm. She just accepts it,

like the Buddha!

What a goddess! She purifies

unclean things, just like a

Bodhisattva.

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Let's do it at the altar! Butt…butt…butt…but will you

marry me!

Note appearing

top of screen:

Note: this line is a play on the

words for "marry" and "sex"

These differences in the translations offer a nice primer into the themes of this

dissertation: namely, the relationships between language and the medium, drawn to the

fore via the otherwise invisible hand of translation; the navigation of these currents by

fans; and the consequences of such pursuit within anime communities. Individually, each

of these areas forms a field of study in its own right, but one central theme advanced in

this project argues that these elements operate in tandem and cannot be parsed: they are

co-constitutive. To speak of translation necessitates a simultaneous examination of the

operations of language, the role of the medium, and their articulation in fan practice.

This is an admittedly difficult, but plausible, task requiring a reconceptualization of the

these objects and the relationships between them, a concern addressed in the second

central theme to this project by arguing for positioning the myriad interactions between

language, medium, and fan practice as a ludic endeavor, a game guided (but not

determined!) by the strictures of their compositional rules. As McLuhan notes, all media

are comprised of other media, and the emphasis ludology (the study of the rules and

strictures by which a game operates) places on the formal parameters that structure

human interaction with discrete media objects offers a useful approach to theorizing their

relationships by highlighting structural tensions that arise when conceptualizing the co-

constitutive impact of such discrete media. Translation, then, should be conceived as a

state of play in which the possible "moves" reflect interactions with and responses to

formal parameters between languages, languages and medium, between medium and fan,

between fan and languages.

While I do advocate that language contains a ludic component, I maintain that this

feature operates in tandem with the more traditional approach of the medium as a

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representational (i.e. narrative). It functions, in other words, narratively and ludically at

the same time, and the methodologies—rules, really—through which we approach its

study necessarily limit the results we can see. To strike a scientific analogy, the study of

language in this context parallels that of the study of particles: examining the narrative

dimension of language precludes its ludic behaviors, although this does not mean the

ludic dimensions fail to exert influence on the other media in which it is embedded.

My interest in the surrounding processes of translation, however, narrows the analytical

focus of fan engagement with media to fan translations, a smaller segment of the broader

anime fan communities. Also known more colloquially as "fansubs," those involved in

their creation (i.e. "fansubbers") train their efforts specifically on the issues of language

and the medium in which I am interested by inserting subtitles into Japanese source

material. Their process is informed the formal properties of the media in which they

work, but rather than stymieing the types of engagement possible, these properties should

be conceived as generative wellsprings from which novel engagement with media

emerge. This focus carries significance beyond the subcultural sphere of fan

communities, as differences in translations arbitrated in part by the formal properties of

media and language that have direct relevance to the perception of Japanese culture and,

through this, Japanese soft political power. The term “soft politics” as used by Joseph

Nye (1991, 2005) refers to a country’s attempt to accomplish its agenda through

attraction rather than direct force or other forms of coercion. As Article 9 of Japan’s

Constitution expressly forbids the accumulation of military force, the country has relied

on cultural ambassadorship via anime to introduce its culture globally. With a lack of

centralized oversight with respect to translation, however, the images of Japanese culture

may be at odds with the agenda of the government. Whether impotence or butt hair, each

choice feeds into divergent representations, and hence narratives, of Japan.

While the overarching theoretical framework I sketch here with respect to the

processes informing translation can be applied generically, my choice to focus on how

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these processes guide engagement with Japanese cultural media, especially anime,

reflects a relationship between Japan and America, and more broadly Japan and the West,

laden with unique historical, social, and cultural baggage. Said’s (1979) analysis of such

relations in Orientalism, particularly in terms of knowledge and authority, speak to

problems specific to (Western) translations of Japanese cultural media that are not

encountered elsewhere, and approaching English (fan) translations of Japanese cultural

media as a game in the ludic sense offers insight into the role the formal parameters of

media objects play in shaping, maintaining, and reaffirming the currents of Orientalism

through their structuring of fansubbing engagement.

Important to navigating these currents as I chart them lies a grasp of how these

discursive tributaries intersect and the larger theoretical bodies that serve as their sources.

The rest of this chapter offers a theoretical introduction to the topics of this dissertation

and includes overviews of language and ludology, fan studies and translation, and

fansubbing as fan practice. More specific analyses will be given in subsequent chapters,

suffice it to say that as my interests lies with explicating the role formal properties of

media play in shaping such narrative tributaries, I approach fan translations (i.e.

“fansubbing”) primarily from linguistic and ludic perspectives, tangentially engaging in

scholarship from fan studies to ground the more practical applications of my argument.

Towards a Ludology of Language

McLuhan’s (1994) theorization of games offers an initial insight into the study of

games through its emphasis on community and communication reminiscent of the

“interpretative communities” of fan studies. For McLuhan, games are microcosms of

larger social trends and anxieties, ways to resolve tensions plaguing the body politic

through the adherence to formalized, ritualized sets of interaction. “All games,” he states

rather boldly, “are media of interpersonal communication” (1994, p. 237). While

McLuhan emphasizes the nature of the game itself as the communicative device, he

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approaches the game itself as a sort of communicative metaphor for society. While

games reflect specific social attitudes largely premised upon the types of interaction

allowed (i.e. their rules), we must not forget that these rules themselves emerge from

various negotiated interactions in which they were codified, and that these negotiations

occur simultaneously among multiple, at times competing, communities.

Broadly speaking, then, to be a game there must be interaction. Whether this

takes place between opposing teams, between distinct narratives, between related

communities, or between fansubbing groups and their fans, interactivity remains a

necessary condition for the existence of games. Yet while all games may be interactive,

not all of them need to be interpersonally interactive; one would be hard pressed to claim

that solitaire was not a game because it lacked an interpersonal component. Likewise, the

lack of interpersonal interaction would discount chess when one’s opponent is the

computer. Both are games, and both are interactive although not necessarily in the spirit

of McLuhan’s prescription: the interaction occurs via engagement with the rules that

construct the game, themselves the products of interpersonal interaction that possibly

motivates McLuhan’s claim that all players must tacitly agree upon the rules.

Regardless of the scope of interaction, it is generally agreed that rules govern the

types of interactions allowed within any given game. These rules may regulate

interactions explicitly or implicitly. Scholarship from ludology, for example, notes that

rules are a condition of any game’s existence (Frasca, 2003; Juul, 2001), and that they

can take the form of explicit proscriptions with respect to internal and external gameplay.

Implicit rules manifest in understood assumptions about what the digital technologies

allow, but also narratively through story elements and player interactions.

This last point linking narrative requires a bit more explication because, as

ludologists have argued, story elements represent a separate, non-constitutive and

unrelated, facet of games. After all, there is no narrative in chess or, if we construct one,

it is irrelevant to the actual regulations through which the game is played. Likewise, one

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can still play a Japanese video game without any understanding of the language: the

rules governing the playability of the game operate separately from its narrative

component. We must bear in mind, however, that separating narrative from ludology is

not the same as divorcing it from language. In ludology, narrative refers to specific

arrangements of linguistic and visual elements typically analyzed from the fields of

literature and film studies; however, language itself boasts a broader field, encompassing

the rules that influence narrative structure as well as other social and asocial mechanisms

that constitute its operation.

Language, at the most basic definition, is a rule-based system. From the asocial

generative linguistics first developed by Chomsky to the community-oriented

sociolinguistics of Hymes, Gumprez, and others (for example, Labov, 1991; Tannen,

1996), the importance of rules—prescriptions, really—guiding linguistic output underlies

scholarship in the field of linguistics and its subfields. For Chomsky (1966), navigation

of the various complexities of grammatical and phonological rules of language enable

individuals to produce novel arrangements of morphemes, which he calls the creative

function of language. The most relevant contribution Chomsky affords at present is the

recognition that these linguistic rules are implicit, learned by engagement with language

communities. In a similar vein, sociolinguistics extends these insights to apply to

systems of power and prestige emerging from specific grammatical and phonological

choices, noting again the implicit or unseen nature of such rules’ operation.

While traditional sociolinguistics would hesitate to label the perceptions

associated with specific linguistic performances as motivated by discursive power flows,

as the discipline eschews critical cultural analyses in the pursuit of objective, measurable

data, their insights find resonance within poststructural reflections on language.

Lyotard’s (2002; 1999) concept of language games bridges some of these tensions by

recognizing that interactions occur within specific power relations that guide linguistic

output. Which rules—in this case discursive prescriptions—prevail in such interactions

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emerge from systems of inequality. To be successful, the subordinate group must adopt

the rules of the dominant one, meet them on their own terms as it were, which in letter at

least meets McLuhan’s assertion that all groups must agree to the rules of the game for it

to function properly.

Whether we speak of games in the more denotative sense or broaden the term to

connote more abstract interactions, the rules that guide games appear explicitly or

implicitly. Comparing rules in the ludic sense with those of language may appear to be

comparing incommensurable systems, but their operations suggest parallel purposes

when couched within the functions of the rules themselves: to limit, guide, or constrain

interaction within a specific set of parameters. These functions do not imply, however,

that deviation or defiance is not possible; indeed, it is preferable, as Lyotard’s

theorization of linguistic games suggests that deviation is generative. One may, for

example, alter the rules of solitaire to produce the variations on traditional game that

come pre-loaded with computers, and one may even alter the rules of a game appearing

on the apparently unforgiving platform of the computer via recourse to patches or hacks

(indeed, MMOs such as World of Warcraft consistently provide updates to the rules of

the game in order to “balance” player experience). In short, the rules structure experience,

but they do not determine it.

This returns us to the spirit of McLuhan’s basic theorization of games: that they

are interpersonal interactions. When we engage in a game we engage with others, even if

they are not directly present as opponents. Media artifacts represent another, albeit less

ethereal, means of influencing language choice. This crystallizes most clearly in the

intersections between fan engagement with anime and ideologies of translation in

Western culture. The relevance of these dimensions of linguistic behavior for ludology

appears through their application to discrete media artifacts.

9

Fan Studies and Translation

Using the term “fan” typically implies an interest in the practices of fans and their

relationships to and engagement with texts surrounding a particular object of discourse—

the “active audiences” of Ang (2002) or the “textual poaching” of Jenkins (Jenkins, 1988,

1992b)—especially as these processes relate to individual and community meaning-

making. While such practices certainly bear relevance to fansubbers of anime, the texts

they produce differ from the fan texts discussed in the literature of fan studies: anime

fansubbers do not create their own narratives in the subtitled anime, thereby creating

alternate universes in which the primary characters inhabit; nor do they tend to be defined

by any one specific object itself, as fans of anime more broadly hold an interest in and

engage with a larger circle of Japanese cultural products ranging from video games to

music to, more broadly, the image of “Japanese-ness” articulated as cultural uniqueness

in Japanese soft politics.

The interactions fans have with their texts of interest have guided recent critical

academic study, particularly in terms of identity formation (Fiske, 1992; Jenkins, 1992b)

and the tensions between fans and copyright holders known as “convergence” (Jenkins,

2008; Postigo, 2008). In both areas, studying fandom emphasizes the role of the fan or

the fan community in creating texts and navigating meaning, how they are “appropriating

and reworking textual materials to constitute their own varied culture” (Jenkins, 1992a, p.

209). Yet while this position clearly demarcates the role of the fan in the process, little

discussion has taken place on how the medium itself impacts the ability of fans to rework

texts to fit their various needs. This is particularly important for the study of anime

fandom wherein the term has come to be a catch all phrase aimed at containing a variety

of interests related to Japanese culture.

One problem with this schema of fan studies is that it treats anime as a

homogenous text rather than a series of discrete, individual ones that comprise a distinct

genre. Anime consists of a variety of subgenres and aesthetic modes, and what

10

consolidates these various differences into one genre is the animation and location of

production. Conflating the child-oriented Pokemon or Doraemon with the more adult-

themed ettchi anime Sora no Otoshimono or Queen’s Blade shown on late night Japanese

television does the genre a disservice by glossing over real nuances located in the fandom

of specific shows. Consider the ramifications—scholarly or culturally—of making no

distinction between Star Trek and Star Wars fans, labeling both “Sci-fi fans:” these

shows certainly contain parallel thematic elements to allow generic categorization, but

they are distinct programs with divergent vocal fan bases some of whom overlap.

Scholarship on anime rarely makes such distinctions, primarily because emphasis on

anime fandom reflects the field’s concern for the individual’s or community’s navigation

of meaning with the text. The original texts themselves simply are not that important.

The inability to make such distinctions (or refusal to) when it comes to anime

evokes broader historical spectres of the East as homogenous, this time framed via media

content. With respect to fan studies, speaking of anime in broad strokes may coalesce the

larger, shared trends of various communities into a more manageable object of study, but

it does so at the price of overlooking how these discrete communities interact with and

reproduce anime to serve not only their needs but also the needs of the larger

communities of which they are a part. While this project cannot completely escape this

criticism, it strives to narrow down the focus of its analysis in two complementary

fashions: first, via emphasis on one segment of the fan community—those who produce

fansubs—and second, by generally couching its analysis within the context of one

specific show, Gintama. Other shows certainly receive attention, as do a variety

fansubbing groups, but rather than being anecdotal their inclusion mainly serves to show

that the trends I note in the fansubbing of Gintama find more broad appeal within a

specific fansubbing segment (the details of which are expounded upon in Chapter III).

The second problem with discussions of anime within fan studies reflects

problems in how discrete media artifacts impact fan practice itself. In discussing how

11

fans derive pleasure from their interactions with their texts or how they develop status

within the community, the very real material limitations placed upon fan practice by the

mediums through which fans engage the source material is relegated to a whisper in the

literature. Anime fandom in particular boasts a variety of practices through which fans

express themselves and become closer to the source material: construction of cosplay

costumes, engaging in the performative aspects of cosplay, writing doujinshi, and

providing translations scratch the surface of the myriad practices engaged in by anime

fans. Each practice represents a different way of interacting with anime (let alone if we

wish to be wary of the point above and be attentive to specific shows) shaped by the

formal properties of this medium, although this does not imply that the medium

determines how such practice is enacted; rather, that is a negotiated process involving a

larger set of social, cultural, and aesthetic discourses in which these media emerge.

Essentially, the literature foregrounds the telos of fan practice rather than the

means and methods by which fans negotiate the media they work in to create these

meanings. Part of this mediation process, as I argue through the incorporation of

ludology, involves the medium itself—which can abstractly be conceived as the

parameters that guide interactive experience, in essence the frame in which other stuff

(i.e. “content”) is put. Another complimentary part of this process engages language as it

transitions from Japanese to English (or any other set of languages for that matter)—how

fans interact with grammatical, syntactic, and semantic parameters in negotiating the

language systems.

Scholars from various fields have long noted the difficulties involved in moving

between languages (Benjamin, 2004; Jakobson, 2004; Sakai, 1997), but approaches

interestingly vary depending on ideological perspective and teleological purpose.

Scholarship informed by post-structural reflections on language generally argue for the

referential fissures that erupt during the translation process (Derrida, 2004), but such

problems tend to fall flat from the perspective of industry which has a longer history

12

(Cronin, 2003; Munday, 2008). Contemporary perspectives on translation originate in

the Romantic notion of the creative genius, an ideological position that Venuti (2008)

argues denigrates the role of the translator by denying her own creativity in translation

while additionally erecting structural limitations to the organization of the text itself. In

discussing these concerns, Venuti focuses largely on literature and poetry wherein the

seed of the creative genius initially took root, but his approach by no means reflects the

only voice in the matter.

Beating beneath Venuti’s literary take on translation rests the broader ideology of

market relations. At the core of these relations, according to Frankfurt scholars, is the

overriding drive to reduce all to the laws of exchange (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002;

Jameson, 2005). In the case of translation, language emerges as the currency through

which such exchange is measured, implying as with all systems of exchange a sense of

equivalency between the objects so ceremoniously propagated. Equivalency in this

context rests predominantly with overall meaning rather than literal translation of

individual words, although this can happen. Business, medicine, and law readily adopt

this ideological position as a firm belief in the transparency of language central to their

systems of knowledge production. Recognizing semantic fluidity in international law or

business contracts, for example, would be detrimental to establishing a system in which

all parties are, ideologically speaking, supposed to be equal. Likewise, adopting a

transparent approach to translation benefits scientific knowledge by reinforcing the

discourse’s fetishization with objectivity.

The various ideological approaches to translation reflect the depth to which

referential instability is broadly recognized as a problem that must be surmounted,

particularly in terms of the extent to which words, concepts, and meanings need to be

adapted to the receiving culture, a process known as “localization.” Localization

strategies are as varied as the ideological approaches to translation, but within the market

context of cultural media the general rule is to alter narrative and visual elements to better

13

fit the new target market (Chandler, 2005; Thayer & Kolko, 2004), an approach with

deeper ideological roots that frame a “good” translation as one devoid of foreign

elements (Venuti, 1998, 2008). These various ideological and institutional approaches to

translation articulate another dimension to a ludic theorization of language by

demonstrating that different approaches to translation—what constitutes a “good” one,

for example—emerge from rules aimed at meeting specific communal needs. By

understanding how these rules operate in conjunction with the more formal properties of

language and media, translation and localization strategies function as games.

The extent to which localization strategies resonate within fan communities must

be tempered by specific discussion of media objects; while fansubbers certainly “rework

textual material to constitute their own varied culture,” they can only do so within

specific constraints imposed by the medium itself and ideological framings of translation

and language. This issue finds particular purchase within the context of anime fandom as

many members of the genre utilize it to develop their own language skills and learn about

Japanese culture (Napier, 2005, 2007), and the Japanese government, as noted before,

adds a political dimension to these processes by advocating the exportation of anime—

among other cultural products—as a means of soft diplomacy. Of course, while not all

fans of anime watch fansubbed versions, message board posts within fansubbing

communities suggest that those who do watch fan-produced translations are particularly

sensitive to the pedagogical applications of the genre noted above, especially when it

comes to translation and language practice. Unfortunately, the role of translation within

anime fansubbing communities (let alone anime in general) has not been addressed in this

context, despite insights into the ideological base of translation practice emerging from

translation studies.

First and foremost, then, this project reflects upon fan translations of anime with

respect to the role of the medium plays in the practice. As McLuhan notes that the

content of a medium is another medium, I initially approach these fan translations in a

14

more generic context by emphasizing how language as a medium shapes the genre. In so

doing, I emphasize the formal features of language—its structure—rather than the more

common practice of analyzing language in terms of its content, narrative or otherwise.

As a medium language functions ludically by limiting the ability of fans to engage in

unfettered play via its own formal rules, but additional constraints can be found in

ideological reasons centered on translation (show has to make sense in terms of original

content), as well as in the interaction with the “rules” of the medium in which linguistic

content is embedded.

Fansubbing as Fandom?

While the scope of fan practices is vast, most scholars agree that they share a

common teleology, and these purposes constitute “fandom.” Jenkins (Jenkins, 1988,

1992a) notes two practices relevant to the fansubbing of anime: fans produce texts, and

fans create communities. Both emphasize the interpretative power of fans to rework

texts and invest them with meanings relevant to the individual fan and the community in

which the reworked text circulates. In the case of anime fansubbing, however, the nature

of translation and communal prescriptions on it interfere with the ability of fans to freely

rework texts in the traditional sense, but this does not imply that fansubbing exists

outside fandom—fansubbing is a form of fandom.

Reacting to claims that fandom merely re-circulates nostalgic readings of texts,

scholars emphasize the creative processes by which fans generate meanings relevant to

their circumstances. Although conceived of as a space wherein marginalized subcultural

groups can carve identities distinct from that of the dominant sphere—a space that hard-

core anime fans from Japan known as otaku may inhabit—process equally constitutes

fandom (Fiske, 1992; Jenkins, 1992a). Jenkins states, “it [fandom] is a way of

appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests, a

way of transforming mass culture into popular culture” (Jenkins, 1988, p. 87), noting that

15

in the case of Star Trek, “it is something that can and must be rewritten in order to make

it more responsive to their needs, in order to make it a better producer of personal

meanings and pleasures” (Jenkins, 1988, p. 87). Of course, Jenkins frames this

production within the context of Star Trek fans who produce new texts in which the

characters and perhaps themes of the original appear, but a parallel in the anime

community would be the creation of doujinshi, comic book fan fiction. Fandom,

especially as we shall see within the anime community, extends much further than the

creation of texts although this function does reveal two significant compositional

characteristics of the field itself: the production of texts and the creation of communities.

Anime fans, however, are different in that they typically express interest across a

large number of cultural texts that span multiple media. This appears to be true

regardless of the fan’s country of origin, although the specific subcultural reasons for

their interest vary. Azuma (浩紀, 2001) mentions, for example, that a broad range of

cultural media constitute otaku subculture and that the subculture itself obsesses over

Japan and Japanese culture. Napier (2007) observes a similar trend in American fans of

anime, who express interests in media ranging from anime to music to video games, but

their interest is constituted by a desire to develop linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge

rather than the sense of loss Azuma argues motivates their Japanese counterparts.

Despite popular use of the word otaku to describe excessive fandom of Japanese culture,

particularly anime, internationally, the word refers to a distinctly Japanese phenomenon

as it connotes specific cultural, historical, and social relations rooted, in part, in a sense of

nostalgia circulating the country’s nationalist discourses of kokumin and minzoku. Ivy

(1995) addresses some of these concerns with respect to Japan’s relation to modernism,

noting in particular that a reflection on the past and a perceived sense of loss in national

identity has spurred a Japanese fixation with its national heritage. The irony lies in the

fact that many of these traditions, as Gluck (1985) notes, were designed in the Meiji to

create the shared sense of unity essential to the survival and legitimacy of the modern

16

nation-state. So, what constitutes Japanese culture for an otaku is fundamentally different

from what an American, or any other, fan experiences.

Conversely, the American fan interest in linguistic development, and more

broadly development of cultural knowledge on Japan, represents a different set of

motivations for fandom, and in terms of fansubbing opens a space for a specific type of

fan to contribute to anime communities by fulfilling their pedagogical needs. The

differences in translation approaches, ranging from language choice to use of media,

enter the community and are evaluated. While differing in the nature of product, anime

fansubbing equally shares in the production of meaning-making as fansubbers rely on

linguistic strategies to serve “different interests.”

While fans may certainly generate pleasure from the creation of their own texts,

their submission to communities, particularly for interpretative and critical review,

implies hierarchical relations of power. Bourdieu (1984) speaks of these processes as

elements of cultural capital, but Thornton (2005) refines these distinctions to apply to

subcultures and other groups operating outside of the traditional nexuses in which power

circulates. Sharing the language of Jenkins with respect to fandom, Thornton theorizes

subcultural capital as a set of knoweldges through which a group or community

distinguishes itself from others, highlighting the central role hierarchical arrangements

stemming from the display and performance of these knowledges—what she calls

objectified and embodied practices—play in shaping their organizations. What

distinguishes subcultural capital from Bourdieu’s more mainstream cousin is the role

media play in its circulation: “for within the economy of subcultural capital the media is

not simply another symbolic good or marker of distinction…but a network crucial to the

definition and distribution of cultural knowledge” (p. 187). A correlation exists between

possessing relevant knowleges and media consumption, and a person cannot navigate one

without proficiency in the other. In anime communities this especially holds true as

Internet networks, forums, and databases offer the only means through which information

17

regarding shows can be conveniently and expeditiously accessed for the majority who

belong. It is even more important for fansubbers who must stay relevant by providing

quality translations in an increasingly competitive market fixated on speed. In addition to

cultural knowledge about shows and trends within communities, these fansubbers must

also possess an intimacy with operating the media in which encode and distribute their

translations. Fansubbing represents a convergence of cultural and technical knowledges

the performance of which cannot be parsed into their constituent components. The

position of media to fansubbers, in other words, is not a question of relevance but one of

definition: without digital media there is no community as we currently know it.

Summary/Chapter Overview

Overall, I am concerned with how language and media mutually influence each

other and argue that formal properties of both inform fan engagement to co-constitute

texts, in this case translations of Japanese cultural media. In arguing for a constitutive

relationship between language and media artifacts, I switch not only between genres of

media—videogames to anime—but hone in on very specific formats within those genres:

the handheld, portable iteration of videogames and the various computer video formats

(what I call “container media” and defined more precisely in Chapter Four) that comprise

fan translations of anime. Furthermore, while I generally analyze one specific game or

show I do occasionally make reference to others. My choice to do so reflects my

contention that language can be treated as a ludic device and, from this assumption, that

translation itself is a game.

The diversity in genres of media studied and specific content within these media

may initially appear as a shotgun approach to the critical study of the role of language

and the medium in translation, but my choice prioritizes the stake media objects play in

shaping interaction reflected in the study of games, a contrast to the bulk of literature in

fan studies which emphasize human agency. McLuhan points out that the content of any

18

given medium is another medium, and in this sense analyzing the operations of language

and its impact within the context of video games and computer media remains the

singular thread woven into the dissertation’s binding by providing one demonstration of

the efficacy of analyzing language as a ludic medium in its own right.

In positioning language as a game, it should come as no surprise that I view the

processes of translation in a similar light. Language’s quantum nature—the fact that it

operates narratively and ludically simultaneously—implies that the act of translation is

one of constant negotiation: between languages and their structures, between languages

and media artifacts, between languages and social-cultural discourses. To navigate these

shoals without running aground, one must be cognizant of how these waters overlap and,

more importantly, the different tidal influences media objects exert upon them. How the

medium of video games engages translation and vice versa is different from how it

operates in anime due to differences in their formal composition, although both media

draw from the same quantum linguistic architecture. To understand how translation

operates is to study how the rules of the linguistic medium guide its trajectory, and these

processes are the most opaque when examined though different multiple media formats.

This is not to suggest that content is irrelevant or that the medium in which

language is contained analytically static. To the contrary, the reality is much more

complex and my argument draws attention to the fact that these separate dimensions

operate in a concerted, mutually reinforcing fashion. The interactions between the

“content” of translation and the medium in which it is housed reflect choices

demonstrating what is important to the communities in which the translations circulate.

In this vein, how translators employ the potentialities of the medium reflect these

communal concerns as well, pointing to one aspect of the constitutive relationship

between the two.

Less theoretically, however, this dissertation speaks to how anime functions

within various communities, offering a more concrete demonstration of the academic

19

observation that such communities use the medium as a learning tool. In arguing how

language, particularly processes to translation, operates synergistically with media to

construct parameters that structure fan engagement, I draw attention to the creative and

novel ways in which fans push the limits of these boundaries and note how these

processes become bound to credibility. The observation that language, media object, and

fan practice converge so closely within anime fansubbing would not be a tremendous

problem if not for the pedagogical element fans invest in their consumption of anime, a

fact that bears directly on issues of cultural perception as different translations

conceivably promote divergent visions of Japan and Japanese culture.

Chapter II grounds the larger conversation by making the case that language can

be treated as ludic device by parsing the consequences of such an approach. As the term

ludology operates largely within the field of game studies, particularly video games, I

frame my argument within these parameters to more efficaciously demonstrate how

linguistic ruptures in the U.S. localization of the Nintendo DS game Lux Pain disrupt

gameplay, one of the key definitions of a game. This gameplay, according to ludology, is

generated from the strictures of the game itself—the compositional rules of which it is

comprised—which neglects language as a rule based system. Although grammatical and

referential foibles clearly destabilize the game experience, they are small ruptures

compared to the way perfectly formed language guides our understanding of the world—

whether this be a game world or otherwise. The ability of language to guide ideological

world views through its formal characteristics presents it as containing a ludic dimension.

Chapter III turns to the medium of digital video, building upon the claims

established in the previous chapter by drawing connections between how a medium

impacts translation through its formal characteristics. While language may thwart

attempts to reinscribe meaning to words due to their associations within language

communities, the extent to which this can take place is constrained by the medium in

which it is housed. This chapter approaches the apparent contradiction with the previous

20

chapter’s argument by demonstrating how the physicality (digitality?) of container media

formats impact translation choices. Complicating matters further, the nature of the

medium is such that these choices enacted by fansubbers can be altered by the end user.

This interaction with the medium, both in terms of the fansubber and the fan viewer,

frames container media as one of potential play—a game cognate to the ludic

construction of the genre in the sense that both parties manipulate the medium according

to a set of rules to achieve specific purposes. In so doing, the chapter extends literature

on fan studies by highlighting the importance of interaction with the medium in fan-

textual practices, both from the position of the fansubbers as well as that of the fan.

Chapter IV argues that anime fansubbing represents a form of subcultural capital,

one that relies on the merging of linguistic and digital prowess visibly performed through

engagement with container media. Framed through challenges the translation ideology

Venuti terms the “translator’s invisibility”—the removal of the translator and stripping of

foreign elements from the text proper—I analyze how fans combine container media with

translation strategies to stoke subcultural capital.

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CHAPTER II

LUX-PAIN, LUDOLOGY, AND THE LINGUISTIC GAME

Introduction

It is interesting that an analysis of language itself, arguably a core component in

the construction of a game’s story and the development of character in role-playing

games, has appeared as nothing more than vague ripples in the literature. This is not to

suggest that language has not figured into analyses of games; rather, I contend that

language as an analytical tool itself has been glossed over. At the risk of

overgeneralizing, analyses of the subject tend to either emphasize narrative game content,

drawing connections between linguistically constructed story elements and larger non-

game social discourses (Bogost, 2007), or privilege the medium, maintaining a separation

between the two realms based on differences in how they operate (Aarseth, 2004).

Both approaches treat language as a representational vehicle; the irony is that

language, as a rule-based system, fits the very basic definition of a game (Lyotard, 2002;

McLuhan, 1994), and the implications of embedding the linguistic game within another

rule-governed system—like RPGs, regardless of platform—have not been directly

addressed in this context. My understanding of an “analysis of language,” then, differs in

that I refer to explorations of the medium’s rule-based characteristics—its grammar

(Chomsky, 1957, 1965) or pragmatics (Austin, 1975; Lyotard & Thebaud, 1999)—and

how these rules construct game worlds and intersect with more mundane corporeal

existence. From this vantage, I am not interested in the compelling explorations of how

to approximate the complexities of linguistic rules into a game so that the computer will

understand nuance but, rather, how existing and intuitive human applications of linguistic

rules inform the game environment.

The process of video game localization witnesses these concerns, and so I

scrutinize the grammatical, semantic, and prescriptive operations of language within the

22

America iteration of the Nintendo DS (DS) game Lux-Pain (Killaware, 2009) to argue

that language contains a ludic impulse and can be approached in terms of its impact on

gameplay. Sociolinguistic theory informs this argument, as do insights into language

from Austin (1975) and Lyotard (2002; 1999); discussion of the medium itself draws

from McLuhan (1994) and Baudrillard (1994) peppered with scholarship from ludology.

My choice to use a corporate localization rather than a fan one reflects both

theoretical and practical necessity. At this point in the dissertation I am theoretically

more concerned with making the case for the ludic dimensions of language, which takes

as its focus the internal mechanisms that structure engagement rather than how those

rules are engaged by players, corporate or otherwise. Making the case for how language

operates ludically precedes any discussion of how those rules are engaged. In terms of

media, I begin with video games as this is where the literature in ludology concentrates

and consequently easier to remain focused on the primary task of demonstrating my

argument about language; as later chapters engage anime rather than video games, the

scaffolding erected here by the formal properties of language with respect to play

translate with little variation to other media as we are dealing with grammatical and

pragmatic rules. The media may be different, which as I note do impact narrative

dimensions of language, but the formal aspects remain largely static—whether I pen this

dissertation in the medium of paper or a videogame bears little consequence to the

grammatical realization of language. Practically, however, my choice to focus on the

video game medium in this chapter is motivated, in part, by the fact that fan translations

of video games are rare due to the fact that the medium itself requires specialized

knowledge to access and “patch,” thereby making corporate versions the only one

available. As such, the medium itself leans towards those very ideologies regarding

language I wish to parse, and this chapter couches this conversation within a dialogue

between how we should theorize the video game medium itself and the role of language

in this medium.

23

While Lux-Pain was neither popular nor profitable its inability to create even a

ripple in the popular gaming market does not imply a dearth of critical potential. My

rationale for choosing this game stems directly from my overall argument that language

operates ludically: the game’s spectacular failure as a localization more clearly elicits

how language operates as gameplay—a good translation, to paraphrase Venuti (2008),

smoothes over linguistic ruptures—the explicit operation of which would be difficult to

parse from a better constructed text.

Games: Playing by Rules

Frasca (2003) broadly defines the ludic approach by stating that games “model a

(source) system through a different system which maintains (for somebody) some of the

behaviors of the original system” (p. 223). Pointing specifically to audio-visual

components as the most frequently reserved features of the original system, he notes that

games encapsulate more than what players see or hear, a point Aarseth (2004) identifies

as integral to the study of games in general: “When you put a story on top of a

simulation, the simulation (or the player) will always have the last word” (p. 52). While

games may engage in storytelling, that is not necessarily their primary purpose or, in

cases like chess, even a condition of their existence.

Rather, games operate by a system of rules that may or may not parallel the

semiotics of narrative. This fact is what Frasca (2003) alludes to when he states that

“video games are just a particular way of structuring simulation, just like narrative is a

form of structuring representation” (p. 224). The rules of games tell us how to play; the

rules of narrative tell us how to read. DRPGs consist of both systems of rules, and to

come to an effective analysis of the genre we must engage how these systems interact to

construct the gaming experience. In this respect language offers an excellent analytical

entrance to these concerns as it, too, possesses the same protean nature: alternatively

approached as a representational tool (see the general work of Levi-Strauss) or generative

24

system (Austin, 1975; Lyotard & Thebaud, 1999; Searle, 1989, 1995), it offers multiple

modes of structuring the DRPG experience.

Fan reactions to Lux-Pain provide a doorway through which I argue language’s

ludic potential. Three arguments form the core of this central claim: first, that violations

in linguistic rules such as grammar and pragmatics potentially disrupt immersion in the

DRPG game experience and thereby impact gameplay, a feature I refer to as immersive

dissonance; second, that language can exceed the structuring of simulation organized by

the game, resulting in an immersive dissonance motivated by semantic confusion; third,

that this ability of language to operate both internally and externally to the game offers an

analytical approach sympathetic to ideological critique. Before trekking these admittedly

intricate paths, I begin with an overview of the Lux-Pain, including its genre

classification and its plot.

Lux-Pain and Fan Discontent

Lux-Pain was developed by the Japanese game company Killaware for the DS,

and Ignition Entertainment handled the 2009 distribution of the U.S. localization. The

game resists black-and-white genre classifications, mashing action, RPG, and adventure

elements together to produce multiple gameplay interfaces. In terms of its DRPG

characteristics, the game incorporates three distinct elements that scholars (Barton, 2008;

Wolf, 2002) cite as definitive of the genre and shown in Figures 2.1 and 2.2: a formal

leveling system, statistical representation of the protagonist Atsuki, and randomness.

These elements are drastically simplified when compared to DRPG “classics” such as

SSI’s Gold Box, Origin’s Ultima, or SirTech’s Wizardry series, but their inclusion

directly affects gameplay in that if Atsuki is under-leveled no amount of touch-pen

dexterity in the action inspired sequences will help him overcome the various obstacles

he encounters. In these sequences, for example, he inflicts damage upon whoever he is

probing; the greater his skill, the less damage he inflicts and the more time he has to

25

complete his task. As one progresses in the game, these elements become increasingly

Figure 2.1: Lux-Pain’s experience screen (Killaware, 2009).

26

Figure 2.2: Quantification of Atsuki and his powers (Killaware, 2009).

27

more unfavorable to the player—time becomes shorter and damage greater—so that

leveling becomes necessary to counterbalance the increase in game difficulty. To

complicate matters, each encounter plays out differently; the positions of objects he must

find and their movements randomly change each time Atsuki confronts the same

obstacle, leaving a small portion of the encounter to frustrating chance (Figures 2.3 and

2.4).

This emphasis on leveling and luck rather than skill aligns the game more closely

with DRPGs than the other genres (Barton, 2008), but the three general definitional

guidelines noted above reflect Western historical indebtedness to the pencil-and-paper

predecessors of the genre (Apperley, 2006). Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs),

emerging from different historical and social conditions, possess an aesthetic and

gameplay different from their Western counterparts; this area, as Barton (2008) woefully

notes, is academically undertheorized. Gamers, however, maintain—some with religious

zeal—that story and character development are hallmarks of JRPGs (Nagidar, 2008 and

more generally the whole thread). In the land of the JRPG, immersion in the game world

rules, and many fans see this as the true roots of RPG. Indeed, Lux-Pain spends more

time advancing the convoluted themes of murder, suicide, and isolation than forcing

characters to grind for levels or money. Lux-Pain’s official webpage describes the plot

and premise of the game as such:

Lux-Pain is set in historical Kisaragi City, a town plagued by mysteries from small mishaps to murders – with no logical explanation as to why these events occur. It seems “Silent”, a worm born through hate and sadness, has infected humans and forced them to commit atrocious crimes. The hero’s parents, Atsuki, are victims of such crimes. To avenge his parents, Atsuki goes through a dangerous operation to acquire Lux-Pain in his left arm, a power so strong that his left eye turns golden when using it to seek and destroy Silent for good. (Lux Pain Official Webpage, 2009)

Silent infects people with negative emotions which appear to Atsuki as worm-like balls

of moving light that meander around an infectee. In order to see these balls of light,

28

Figure 2.3: Battle sequence with Silent (Killaware, 2009).

29

Figure 2.4: Time, damage, and randomness in typical encounter (Killaware, 2009).

30

referred to as “shinen” (思念, thought), Atsuki activates a power called “Sigma” that

enables him to literally scratch the surface of reality to see what lies underneath. In order

to more efficaciously mete out his revenge on Silent for his family’s murder, Atsuki has

joined an organization known as FORT which is comprised of individuals like him with

the ability to see shinen.

The game takes place in Kisaragi City (the location of which a problem addressed

later). It contains everything one would expect in a town—a church, apartment buildings,

bars—but what takes center stage in the game is the local high school. Early in the game

FORT narrows Silent’s base of operations to the vague “someone operating through

someone operating at the school”; as a result, what begins as a detective story resembling

a cross between Dashiell Hammett and H. P. Lovecraft tropes transforms into something

profoundly darker—the navigation of high school social banality. In his quest to track

down the link to Silent, Atsuki enrolls in Kisaragi High as a transfer student and is thrust

into the world of high school romantic and social drama; how he navigates these currents

determines which of the eight endings the player experiences.

The emphasis on narrative and character development dovetail well with what

fans perceive as the general conventions of JRPGs, but what makes Lux-Pain unique in

this regard is the almost universal agreement that due to its rife linguistic errors the U.S.

localization was released prematurely. One concise reviewer described the game by

stating:

Dodgy localization is everywhere with typos galore. (Castle, 2009)

A more gregarious reviewer expounded on these points by stating, in part:

But maybe there’s a reason they keep their name on the down low with Lux-Pain. This fantastic game does sport it’s [sic] own Achilles’ heel. Well, maybe that’s not the right metaphor to describe it. Achilles’ heel was not huge, throbbing, and had a million neon signs pointing to it saying, “Here! Hit this! It’s an easy kill!”

31

Figure 2.5: Sigma’s ability to reveal hidden shinen (Killaware, 2009).

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So what is the game’s fatal weak point? Well, have you ever watched an anime DVD with both the dub audio and the subtitles on at the same time? Notice how the subtitles are basically saying the same thing as the dub actors are saying, but using different words here and there?

That’s the entire localization of Lux-Pain…the only thing that’s wrong with it is.. well… THE TEXT! It’s crappy. It’s horrible. It’s a complete and utter embarrassment! (Video game review: Lux-Pain for Nintendo DS, 2009)

The emphasis both reviewers place on the game’s poor localization offers a starting point

to theorizing language as a dimension of ludic gameplay. Games structure simulation

which, according to Baudrillard (1994), are “beyond true and false” in that they do not

attempt to make referential prescriptive claims about the world external to their

operations (p. 21). They are, as discussed later, self-contained. Narrative, to

overgeneralize, strives to forge such connections due to its understanding of language as

a representational device. But telling stories is merely one function of language, and

overlooking the game’s narrative does not throw the rules through which language

operates out with the narrative bathwater. The fact that reviewer discontent with the

game emphasizes how the localization impacts immersion in the game world rather than

the narrative itself suggests a problem in rules, not story.

My argument regarding the ludic implications of language takes shape over the

course of three major sections that build upon the insights of the last. I begin this

analysis by focusing on a close reading of linguistic rules emerging from the audio and

written channels of Lux-Pain; the argument remains, more or less, constrained to material

generated internally by the game. The section after, however, examines how internal

inconsistencies in semantics disrupt the game and claims that language as it functions

ludically exceeds the structuring of simulation imposed by the game text. From here, I

close with some critical implications these insights have for the study of games.

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Lux Pain: Language at the Local Level

While the ultimate aim of this argument is to explore the ways in which market

politics is interwoven with linguistic performance and the demonstration of cultural

competence, I wish to begin the analysis of the aesthetics of localization by concentrating

on the relatively small, seemingly inconsequential, linguistic unit of the single word. As

localization process hinges on the smooth transition from one referent to another to be

effective, it seems prudent to begin at level on which this process takes place prior to

moving to the larger cultural contexts and consequences of this process.

Figure 2.6 provides a side-by-side comparison of the Japanese original and U.S.

localized versions of Lux Pain. The conversation itself takes place in the very beginning

of the game, serving as a contextualizing device and orienting the player to the larger

overall plot of the game: the main character is after someone or something named Silent

and he or she or it can be tracked through these shinen. In terms of translation, the U.S.

localized version is fairly accurate; however, what is not important at this juncture is the

skill of the translation team but, rather, the term shinen itself. As the process of

localization itself is predicated upon the equivalency of languages, the lack of translation

despite an analogous English word implies something significant with the word itself.

The word could, perhaps, be analyzed from a semantic standpoint, focusing on its usage

within both the Japanese and American contexts. While literally meaning “thought,” the

word “思念” itself is not commonly used and perhaps this infrequent usage conveys

something that a literal translation could not adequately capture. Given the mood and

tone of the initial stages of the game, the common usage of such an uncommon word may

have a variety of effects, including situating the game environment or establishing a sense

of disbelief. Within the English text, the lack of translation of this term—especially

when considering the option of using the banal translation “thought”—can at once

convey a sense of foreignness and mystery that seem so integral to the plot. These are

mere speculations as to semantic implications of the word and its lack of

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Figure 2.6: Shinen in Japanese and English

translation in the U.S. localized version; however, raising this point draws attention to the

role and function of a specific word with the translation environment as they intersect

with specific concerns regarding the levels of linguistic representation as initially

postulated by transformational/generative linguistics and still in vogue in some form

within the discipline as a whole.

The DS allows for two images to be broadcast on its two separate screens; the

bottom screen is touch enabled, allowing players to interact with games that support this

feature through the use of a stylus. In Lux Pain, the bottom screen is where the “action”

of the game takes place; the upper screen, as seen in the upper half of A, B, and C of

Figure 2.7, typically display the same image as the bottom screen but in a hazy,

35

wavering, almost dream-like replication. The screens, though, are not always exactly

alike. Only through a close examination of the upper screen can players discover those

elusive shinen that infect people, which appear as dull balls of light as marked in example

B. These shinen exist on the bottom screen as well, but can only be revealed by the

player through frantic scratching of the bottom screen, as seen on the lower half of

example B.

Figure 2.7: Underlying and surface representations in Lux-Pain.

The difference between what we can see on each screen suggests that the upper and lower

screens are engaging or presenting different aspects of the same game situation. More

specifically, since the same content that exists on the upper screen also exists on the

lower, albeit obscured through the superimposition of additional material onto the content

of the upper screen, what we are left with is the impression that the upper screen offers

the glimpse at what underlies the reality as we see it in the bottom screen, that the upper

36

screen hints at the “deeper” or “underlying” model that informs and constitutes the

surface image with which the player engages on the bottom.

Dialogue and interaction with game characters additionally supports this

characterization of each screen associated with a level of representation. Like any

investigation, ascertaining the motives and reliability of suspects, witnesses, and

informants can be a trying task as it can be difficult to get information. The role and

function of shinen in this game helps circumvent this problem by housing the ulterior

motives and thoughts of the individuals Atsuki analyzes, operating in some sense as a

mystical lie detector. So powerful is this device that Atsuki need not engage a person in

conversation; merely reading the shinen that languidly orbit his target provides access

into their inner thoughts. In the context surrounding Figure 2.7, for example, Atsuki has

been drawn to a seashore cliff side after hearing poetry being recited late at night.

Approaching the voice, he meets an unnamed man (later identified as Arthur Mays, the

first major Silent suspect) and immediately uses Lux Pain’s Sigma to scan him, revealing

the floating balls of light that represent shinen (example B of Figure 2.7). As Atsuki

removes these shinen, they turn into phrases, seen in example C, which are supposed to

represent mental anxieties or deep seated feelings about topics that the subject of the

Sigma scan cannot reconcile, feels guilty about, or doesn’t want to express. To vastly

simplify things, through the use of Sigma Atsuki appears to access the subject’s

superego. He then takes these terms and “implants” them into the subject, causing him

or her to reveal what he or she really thinks about the subject. These “true” thoughts

appear across the upper screen as fleeting fragments or phrases; after implanting the term

“that girl” into Arthur’s mind in figure 2, for example, a string of phrases emerge and

quickly recede into the wavering fog, at times overlapping and making reading difficult:

Twilight; Shines for a moment; Sparkling eyes; Won’t leave my head; Hurts more than death; Endless sorrow; Disappearing in darkness; Where is she.

37

The phrases and words typically appear in pairs, at times staggered and at times

simultaneous, the game’s attempt at stream of consciousness. While this technique is

interesting on a psychological and literary level, for the purposes of this argument the

parallels between the use of this device and the mediation of linguistic levels of

representation, especially in terms of the (lack of) translation of the word shinen, need

revisiting.

The distinction between content and how the player interacts with each of the

screens finds some interpretation in the linguistic concepts of competence and

performance. First proposed by Noam Chomsky to offer an analytical focus for the study

of linguistics, the categories attempt to describe the various levels on which people

understand language. Performance in Chomsky’s use of the term refers merely to “the

actual use of language in concrete situations” while competence reflects “a speaker-

hearer’s knowledge of his language”(1969, p. 4). Performance reflects what people say,

but competence hints at the rules which govern the language; anyone can perform but

only those who understand the complexities of grammar can be said to be competent.

These two aspects of language use occupy two separate levels of linguistic

representation: the surface representation (SR) and the underlying representation (UR,

also known as “deep structure”). All speech begins at the UR level and when the

competent speaker wishes to utter something, he or she applies a series of rules which

transform the UR and generate the SR. Due to this movement Chomsky’s theory is

known as transformational or generative grammar.

In terms of Lux Pain, these general concepts manifest at the intersection of three

different presentations of the game world. The world as relayed by the upper and lower

screens marks the first two portrayals; the upper screen parallels the UR, and the lower

the SR. The rationale for this rests in the conveyance of information and interactional

opportunities afforded the player in these environments. Content on the upper screen

constructs the lower, but the reverse is not true, implying a binary in structural

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representation, much like how the UR informs SR. This is not to suggest that the SR of

language offers no analytical insight into language use; in fact, it is essential to divining

grammatical rules because we, as humans, have no direct access to the UR and can only

discover how it operates through a process of reverse engineering a series of similar SRs.

Within Lux Pain this process appears through the requisite scratching that uncovers the

shinen. In removing these shinen, Atsuki uncovers phrases and words which, when

implanted into the subject, creates a stir on the upper screen in the form of a linguistic

barrage of half-formed phrases. This interaction between the two screens, the lower-as-

SR and upper-as-UR, suggests the third fashion in which reflections of transformational

grammar may be witnessed. The process of navigating between these two linguistic

levels does not necessarily produce well-formed phrases in all instances; even the most

competent of speakers at times generates a “marked” phrase. This process happens due

to a misfire of one or more grammatical (or phonological) rules during the

transformational process. Lux Pain provides a space for this through the player’s

interaction with the bottom screen during the scratching aspect of the game. During this

phase, players reveal the underlying image of the upper screen but cannot fully or

completely succeed at this task as over time the lower screen regenerates the surface

image. Indeed, the purpose of scraping away the surface is not to reveal the man behind

the curtain but, rather, to seek and remove specific moving targets that are the shinen.

This space between the surface and underlying representations serves as a site, both in the

game and in transformational linguistics, of linguistic action.

This foray into one branch of linguistic theory, however, began with a question

over the status of the term shinen in the translation environment. The linguistic levels of

representation speak to parallel processes informing the localization process, wherein the

original language from which the new text is comprised can only be accessed through

proxy. The fact that those attempting to learn Japanese utilize games and other cultural

material as pedagogical tools (Napier, 2007) speaks, in part, to the hegemony of linguistic

39

equivalency permeating localization by foregrounding the asocial mechanism of

competence. This concern is addressed in more detail in the following pages through

criticisms of the transformational model within sociolinguistics.

Emerging from the same disciplinary crucible as its transformative cousin, the

sub-field of sociolinguistics builds on earlier asocial premises of language theory but

places primacy on language in use. In transformative grammar, the rules applied to

produce the SR are completely asocial and concerned strictly with lexical classification;

the focus is solely on competence, a fact that has not gone uncriticized (Hymes, 1989;

Labov, 1991). Sociolinguistics, however, recognizes the limitations implied by a purely

grammatical emphasis on competence, which compelled Hymes to advocate a broadening

of the term “competence”. In speaking about Kenneth Burke and the possibilities his

position on language presents to linguistics, Hymes states:

[F]or Burke the organization and selection of linguistic resources in verbal performance (action) is underlain by kinds of symbolic competence that transcend linguistic competence in its present technical sense. An extension of the notion of kinds of competence underlying linguistic performance is necessary in any case, if the convergence in outlook between much of modern ethnography and transformational grammar is to be recognized and made fruitful. (1989, p. 139 italics present)

What Hymes recognizes here is that limiting our definition of skillful use of language to

the proper articulation of sentences that are grammatically sound and how grammar

informs these sentences neglects other aspects of language use which certainly contribute

to its generative-performance. In this case, Hymes recognizes that Burke’s understanding

of language as a device to accomplish symbolic acts incorporates more than the

transformative model can adequately handle; broadening the term to include what can be

called “social rules” into the process of linguistic performance is a step that can help

legitimate sociolinguistics and mark it as different from other disciplines (as well as carve

out a spot within its own), concerns already noted previously. The inclusion of the social

in influencing linguistic performance presents some interesting revisions worthy of

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exploration. In particular, one of the more significant changes emerges in relation to the

concept of “novelty” as it relates to the translation process in Lux Pain and localization in

general. Within the transformative model of language, rules applied to the UR of an

utterance give rise to its SR, and it is a speaker’s competence that enables her to produce

any number of utterances at the SR. Chomsky explains:

The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language’, that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar’. (1966, p. 11)

The focus of linguistic activity and, hence, disciplinary interest is understanding how

competence functions, as language performance from the generative perspective is

merely a consequence of this more important process and what is at stake is how people

understand these or creative uses of language. And for Hymes (1989), “Chomsky’s

conception of the ‘creative aspect of language use’ reduces ‘creativity’ to novelty” (132).

Focusing on the utterance itself, its performance, does nothing to help us understand how

we understand what we have never heard. Returning to the example of Lux Pain and the

comparison between the Japanese and U.S. versions, one of the consequences of this

position is that we can only concentrate on the role grammatical functions play in the

translation process. In this case, the UR representation becomes the original language

and the target language, the localized and translated version, the SR. If this rather basic

rendition is accepted, two things need to be addressed. The first point, the consequences

of which will be analyzed later at a more relevant juncture, is that there should be

multiple translations that would readily address and express the main concerns of the

Japanese UR, although the possibilities are limited to grammatical variation due to the

asocial imperative of transformational grammar. In other words, there needs to be lexical

symmetry; one cannot have a deficit or surplus of, say, nouns when moving from one

level of representation to the other. Second, and more relevant here, is that the process of

moving between these levels of representation implies an equivalency between them.

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“Consequently, the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a

deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that

determines its phonetic interpretation” (Chomsky, 1969 italics present). In other words, a

sentence’s meaning originates prior to vocalization in the underlying grammar, but

remains unintelligible until modified through the appropriate transformations. The

meaning of the sentence itself does not change only the appearance it takes, like souping

a Pinto: its status as a car liable to explode when rear-ended remains constant, but its

outward form may radically change. This general position seems to be confirmed by

common sense; after all, what use would language be if the transformations we applied to

the UR produced significantly different relationships than we intended? There is a

correspondence between the levels of representation, grammaticality, and

comprehension.

Due to this, if we view translation as expressing characteristics to transformative

linguistics similar to UR and SR, we take on faith that the translated language, the SR, is

an accurate grammatical and semantic representation of the original UR language. While

not all items are visibly altered by the rules applied during the transition between

representational levels, there are at least rules that govern this behavior. When

confronted with translation, however, we encounter a problem that cannot be adequately

resolved in using this model. The term shinen in the example is not translated—and this

is not due to the fact that there is no translation for it. In fact, if we view translation as

bearing similarities or parallels to the transformational model, then we would expect that

the term would be rendered into its English counterpart because the rules which govern

translation within the market context imply an equivalency between languages; as this

model assumes no social elements factor into the application of rules, the lack of

translation of shinen cannot be to maintain and express any cultural element unique in the

Japanese. Due to this restriction, the novelty or creative aspect of language which

Chomsky notes is the locus of language is confined, and much like Hymes in suggesting

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a broadening of the term competence, many sociolinguists have called for a re-

envisioning of what constitutes transformational-performance in order to account for the

very real variation of utterances within the same speech community. It is within this

domain that that some of the issues regarding translation and its assumptions—

assumptions that appear easily swept away or dismissed due their grounding so far—

become more clearly focused.

If in the transformative model we can make parallels between translation and the

representational levels of language that are at least intriguing, it must also be recognized

that an asocial approach to translation can only take us so far and is not terribly

convincing on its own. But it presents us with one way in which the concept of creativity

in language use can be framed within the translation environment, and the integration of

the social into the realm of language investigation has given rise to a broader definition of

what may be constituted as the creative use of language. If Hymes is correct in his

criticism of Chomsky, then creative language arises only through innovate or novel

grammatical combinations—semantics and other novelties centered on the meaning of

the words is excluded—and in this can become limited in the translation environment.

Rather, two premises within sociolinguistics become useful in broadening the concept of

the creative use of language. The more traditional sociolinguistic approach deals with

variation within speech communities. As Labov states, “it must be noted that the very

existence of the concept ‘idiolect’ as a proper object of linguistic description represents a

defeat of the Saussurian notion of langue as an object of uniform social understanding”

(1991, p. 192). The acceptance of the idiolect as an analytical category suggests that the

rules which govern language are not uniform and that variation or novelty can result from

situational factors as well as the grammatical environment. This understanding is useful

in terms of understanding creativity within the translation environment as it establishes

cultural factors or even translator bias as potential contributors. The second premise

broadens the lens of the creative use of language further by approaching all language as

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having “an esthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimension” (Hymes, 1989, p. 133). As we

enter this realm, the land of genre functions and ritual, what constitutes creativity within

language is broadened immensely, although we are saved from infinite scope by the fact

that these categories and what constitutes proper use of them is constrained by the rules

of the speech community or given discourse.

In one sense, then, Lux Pain actively engages this concern between the surface

and the underlying representations of language and the world as premised in linguistics.

From the analysis so far we can see how the interface of Lux Pain functions as a parallel

to linguistic discourse on the structure and function of language: the (mis)application of

transformative rules operates in the liminal realm between competence and performance,

much like the player-controlled Atsuki must engage language as it floats about in the

lower, post-scratched screen that occupies neither world. Pushing this interpretation,

however, only allows for the examination and evaluation of the actual accuracy of the

grammar in the translation as well as the discussion of parallels in terms of structure and

organization between the game’s interface and theories of language. The more

interesting and potentially problematic issue, which is the lack of translation for shinen

and what can be generalized from this about the aesthetics of translation, remains salient.

Rather than being saddled to grammatical analyses and, in the case of translation

the additional requirement of lexical symmetry, the “creativity of language” involves

recognizing how the same string of banal words are given new meaning and function

creatively in different environments. Literature on the subject of reclaiming words, such

as in the radical feminist tradition, demonstrates a partial application of this concept with

its emphasis on referential reclamation, but sociolinguistics additionally seeks to discover

the underlying grammatical, phonological, and social rules that govern linguistic output.

“Sociolinguistics…is an attempt to delineate social structure and linguistic structure more

clearly by correlating these independently measured variables; and to detect and changes

in these structures through changes in the correlated measures” (Gumperz, 1971, p. 223).

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Referring obliquely to “the social” dimensions of language to derive an answer to

the status of shinen in the English text presents problems of its own. What, in particular,

constitutes these so-called social aspects? How wide of a net do we cast? Labov calls for

studies of language to focus on a “speech community” defined as “participating in a set

of shared norms” regarding language use (1991, pp. 120, 158), while Hymes offers a

broader approach, suggesting that “sociolinguistic systems may be treated at the level of

national states, and indeed, of an emerging world society” (1989, p. 44).

Internal Gameplay and the Limits of Lux-Pain

In terms of translation and the overarching discussion so far, the integration of the

social and other factors into what can constitute the “creativity of language” allows for an

almost dialectical relation between the translated languages. At one moment, the ways in

which we can move from L1 to L2 and express ideas has been broadened, but

concurrently this broadening more tightly confines what meanings are possible by

fostering increased tailoring to a specific audience, more liberty and leeway in the

localization process No matter how one approaches localization (see Chandler, 2005;

Kuzimski, 2007) the underlying impulse of the practice relies on manipulating the rule-

based foundations of the symbolic system whose combination forms the building blocks

of story and character development prized in JRPGs. With this in mind, the lack of

translation for the term shinen can be understood not as a failure in the rules governing

transition between the UR and SR—a failure only if we ascribe to translation as a

mechanistic process of exchange based on equivalency of words—but rather quite the

opposite, as a means of conveying culture in a marked fashion; it is an overt display in

the breakdown of language, a failure in the localization process to frame local identity (a

point explored in more detail in Chapter IV).

In the case of Lux Pain both may actually be accurate, but immersive dissonance

resulting from grammatical readability—instances where, for example, the main

45

character is referred to as “she” are not uncommon—do not contribute much to language-

as-gameplay given their rarity in the industry. A more useful approach flirts with the

semantic component of language as it constructs the game world, as meaning is generally

seen as emerging from specific situations and speech communities (Hymes, 1989; Labov,

1991). Fortunately, Lux-Pain provides both obvious and subtle fissures from which we

can see how gameplay is impacted by language, and I intend to tease out the implications

of this through repeatedly returning to the question of where the game takes place.

Obvious examples of language impacting gameplay stem from the differences

between the written and audio channels of the game. These differences first appear at the

end of the prologue which orients the player to the game mechanics and basic points of

the plot. Atsuki contacts FORT’s recon and intelligence officer, Natsuki, to ascertain the

location of some odd shinen and she mentions that her job would be easier if she was in

Kisaragi City. The exact location of Kisaragi City, however, depends on whether one

listens to the audio or reads the text:

Natsuki dubbed: “I wanted to go to America, too….using viewing is easier at the actual scene.”

Accompanying text: “I actually also wanted to check out Japan but…the actual place is easier for viewing.” (Killaware, 2009)

This mismatch is not a minor concern, both in terms of the game itself as a marketed

product and, more germane here, in terms of its navigation of tensions between the

linguistic and ludic games. This disjunction between the written and aural channels

continues through the entirety of the game, and the accumulation of these errors stress the

ideological veneer placed upon localization as an accurate representation of the original

text by revealing how language operates behind the proverbial curtain to craft part of the

gaming experience. Through these errors, we witness how language interacts with,

engages and alters the world. Natsuki’s complete monologue, provided on the following

pages, provides insight into these processes; some examples of these errors can be seen in

Figures 2.8 and 2.9:

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Figure 2.8: Localization errors in Lux-Pain.

47

Figure 2.9: Localization errors in Lux-Pain.

48

Natsuki’s audio:

1a) I wanted to go to America, too…

2a) using viewing is easier at the actual scene.

3a) But the chief says ‘no’.

4a) How mean, really!

5a) “I know why, you just want to see Atsuki, right?”

6a) That’s what he said; what do you think?

7a) Oh, I wanna go to L.A. and I wanna see New York.

8a) Also, I really want to try the food there.

9a) I’ve never tired it before.

10a) I said so, but he ignored me.

Accompanying text to audio:

1b) I actually also wanted to check out Japan but…

2b) the actual place is easier for viewing.

3b) Yeah, but the chief said no.

4b) You’re quite the bully…

5b) I get your alterior [sic] motive. You just wanna meet Atsuki.

6b) The chief actually said that. What do you think, Atsuki?

7b) You’re wrong. I wanna go to both Akiba and Genjuku.

8b) Well, I also really like Sushi and Tempura.

9b) …But I haven’t exactly partaken in either yet.

10b) Well, forget I said that…

(Killaware, 2009)

Natsuki’s monologue is of special interest in that it manages to distill in ten lines most of

the faults reviewers and fans point to when they explain “how an entire experience can be

ruined by poor localization” (Shau, 2009). Scanning the few lines in Natsuki’s

monologue reveals quite a bit of evidence to support the claims of Shau and others

regarding the localization being “poor;” the rather large leap in setting between (1a) and

(1b), inconsistencies in spelling as seen in (5b), confusion over addressee as in (6a) and

(4b), and general illogical statements such as in the pair of (8b) and (9b) demonstrate that

the released product still requires some polish. What we read creates a different world

and set of expectations that conflicts with what we hear, and while minor errors such as

misapplied pronouns and other grammatical issues certainly contribute to this failure,

more troublesome are those moments in which referential knowledge of the game world

breaks down. Natsuki’s desire to eat sushi and tempura can make sense regardless of

whether or not the game takes place in Japan or America, but the problem emerges from

49

the fact that both of these locations are simultaneously presented as valid constructions of

the game world.

The divergence in game world constructed by the two channels additionally

impacts her character. Grammatical and semantic consistency in Natsuki’s voiceover

suggest nothing dramatically marked about her speech, and this finds support with the

inflection and other auditory cues provided; the written gloss, however, contains a

number of issues that may strike the native speaker as odd. Line (4b), for example,

points to an ambiguity in addressee. Given the nature of the speech, the second person

pronoun should be understood to refer to the chief and her outburst more of an excited

statement than direct address, but the ambiguity arises from the fact that Atsuki is present

and there are no other cues to facilitate the intended reading. The rather interesting

semantic logic between lines (8b) and (9b), where Natsuki complains that not going

prevents her from eating the sushi and tempura she likes so much and immediately

reveals that she’s actually never tried them, further contributes to her puzzling

characterization offered in the two channels and potentially interrupts the game

experience.

This interruption of game experience, I propose, orients language in a fashion

akin to more familiar aspects of ludic gameplay in that it directly impacts a player’s

ability to become immersed in the game world, a condition that many players see as

constitutive of the JRPG genre. The localization problems with Lux-Pain do not severely

impact one’s understanding of the plot—the overall story is readable and relatively

coherent—but the grammatical and semantic potholes consistently serve as reminders

that the game is a construct and a translation. McLuhan’s (1994) speculation that media

are co-constituted by other media explains the divergence between the audio and written

gloss as symptoms of the operations of language embedded within different media, but

this implies that the medium—in this case video games of the JRPG console variety—

regulates or somehow constrains language.

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To some degree this is true, as technical limitations imposed by the DS cartridge

prevent, for example, Lux-Pain from accompanying all written text with audio. But these

limitations do not necessarily impact the rules by which language operates, and my claim

that language can be approached as gameplay arises from its properties as a rule-based

system. Unlike more traditional or conventional aspects of gameplay, however, linguistic

gameplay derives from mechanisms both internal and external to the game. A brief

overview of how simulations function will help ground this tension before an extended

discussion of the prescriptive functions of language and the properties of naming.

Simulations and Names: Lux-Pain’s Inscrutable Location

In arguing that games structure simulation, ludologists implicitly tip their hats to

Baudrillard (1994) who, building off of McLuhan’s theorization of media, notes “it [the

object] has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (p. 6).

Games, in other words, are discursively self-contained and though they may draw upon

resources external to them for content, these resources operate according to internal rules

structured by the game—referential meaning included. This is a basic premise of so-

called “suspension of disbelief” and from this perspective we are able to overlook errors

in location, logic, and the like, writing them off as idiosyncrasies tied to the game world

itself. Natsuki’s desire to go to “Genjuku” in (8b) and shown in Figure 7 can plausibly be

seen as an actual place in Japan (or America!) rather than a misspelling of “Shinjuku.”

The term shinen, and untranslated words in general, reflects how the game structures

pragmatics in a limited sense. From the perspective of simulation, at most that can be said

about the lack of translation of shinen in the U.S. version is that it must have some

semantic or other social function or meaning within the game world. It is a referent

whose meaning is supplied from within the specific situational context of the game.

The tension I allude to at the end of the previous section, however, lies precisely

with the properties of language as a rule-based system that includes how words are

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pragmatically conceived beyond the individual morpheme. As Lyotard (2002; 1999) and

Austin (1975) note, language emerges as a response to specific, pre-existing discursive

conditions. Austin speaks of this in terms of commitment and obligation: “if I have

stated something, then that commits me to other statements: other statements made by

me will be in order or out of order” (p. 139). It is not just that language in certain

contexts can establish and alter world relationships but also that these bonds imply

specific obligations that continue to exist after the ephemeral speech context has been

completed or even forgotten. Lyotard (1999) speaks of this obligation in terms of

language’s prescriptive functions. “An utterer is always someone who is first and

addressee, and I would even say one destined. By this I mean that he is someone who,

before he is the utterer of a prescription, has been the recipient of a prescription, and that

he is merely a rely; he has also been the object of a prescription” (p. 31). In a ludic sense

Lux-Pain and video games in general simulate language’s prescriptive and obligatory

functions through their demand in interactive response to drive gameplay. One must, for

example, push buttons or touch the DS screen to move the game forward and

acknowledge that the text was received. In addition to this type of interaction, Lux-Pain

presents players with moments where they must select a response from a small pool of

choices. These choices are constrained to what the game provides, and the player’s

ability to create alternatives outside these choices impossible. The game, in short, strives

to simulate the limiters discourse places upon linguistic response through constraining

interactive alternatives. The obligations and prescriptions Austin and Lyotard allude to,

however, encapsulate more than “response” in the semantic sense of the term, suggesting

instead the role discursive systems play in pragmatically shaping the world and our

rejoinders to it. The tension, then, lies with the extent to which games can govern

pragmatics motivated by discursive prescriptions.

The character of Aoi Matsumura, self-described within the game as “the language

teacher” at Kisaragi High and viewed by the students and other teachers as a model of the

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profession, provides some insight into this process. She is the first teacher Atsuki meets

when he arrives at school to search for leads on Silent, and her class is also his first

experience with how academics operate at the school. Atsuki enters the classroom and

Matsumura-sensei introduces him to other students; the bell rings and class begins.

Through the dialogue box, Matsumura-sensei asks the students get out their textbooks

and the following conversation begins:

Aoi 11) This is your first time, so I’ll go slow with you. 12) Here we have Shimazaki’s A Collection of Young Herbs. 13) Know [sic] for it’s [sic] 5/7 syllable 14) form, it’s called Japan’s own romantic anthology. 15) It’s been a popular one since last week. 16) The anthology also contains the well known First Love 17) Perhaps you’ve come across it before? 18) It’s [sic] goes, “You swept back your bangs…” 19) Well? Nothing? 20) This next novel should come with ease. Here’s a hint 21) It deals with the Spring, starting anew, the joys 22) and sadness of youth.

Student A (Mika) 23) Well, there are tons of ways to explain 24) Yeah, so should we get on to our homework as usual? Student B (Rui) 25) Yeah there are. Aoi 26) Hmm…such a wonderful love as this… (Killaware, 2009)

Within the classroom environment, Aoi Matsumura’s position and responsibilities at

Kisaragi High amounts to reading and explicating literature. Reading and even

translating literature may plausibly be part of an advanced language class, and given

Atsuki’s age of seventeen it is equally plausible that he has the language background to

succeed in such a class. Based solely on this very small and isolated context within the

game, little appears amiss; however, interactions with Matsumura-sensei are not limited

to the classroom, and Atsuki frequently encounters her in various locations throughout

Kisaragi City either checking up on students she is worried about or gauging the

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suitability of popular hang-outs where students gather. In one of these encounters she

confesses to Atsuki that she does this because “a teacher should protect and guide their

students.” These encounters emphasize the prescriptions placed upon the profession as

constructed by the internal discourse of the game world, but they must be read in concert

with other similar discursive prescriptions to establish said world as coherent. In this

case, the issue of Lux-Pain’s fluid location once again emerges to disrupt a pragmatically

coherent environment: minor inconsistencies become compounded, and the question as

to where the game takes place emerges as a central concern.

One possibility places Kisaragi City within America, and from this vantage we

can most clearly see how inconsistencies within the gaming environment collude to

destabilize the gaming performance and pragmatic construction of the world. Aoi

Matsumura’s specialization as evinced from the dialogue above is Japanese. Based on

how she conducts the course, her pedagogy challenges students to explicate literary texts

rather than study the grammatical, semantic, or phonological characteristics of the

language. All of these features appear plausible given some latitude and generosity with

how the game constructs secondary education in America; indeed, from the perspectives

of gaming and aesthetics, the text itself has been argued to be not a representation of the

“real” world but, rather, suggesting potential of how it could be (Frasca, 2001). Lux-Pain

offers for players’ consideration a high school where the study of Japanese amounts to a

cultural immersion: in addition to the study of Japanese literature, other courses such as

Reiji’s history course also revolve around Japanese cultural products. In essence,

Kisaragi High amounts to an otaku magnet school.

Even with this rather lenient reading of the world Lux-Pain constructs, however,

certain aspects do not add up. While Atsuki encounters a number of minor characters, he

interacts with roughly twenty on a regular basis throughout the course of his

investigation. Two of these characters have already been introduced: the language

teacher Aoi Matsumura and FORT’s resident psychic tracker Natsuki. Other characters,

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such as Atsuki’s classmates and the residents of Kisaragi City, bear strikingly similar

names. Prominent classmates include Akira, Rui, Shinji, Sayuri, and Yayoi; residents

include characters such as Nami, Yui, and Naoto. Through these names, the question of

location demands scrutiny as we are presented an America that boasts the existence of not

only Japanese magnet schools but, more puzzling, an America in which the residents of at

least one town reject Anglo naming practices.

This puzzling state of affairs certainly contributes to problems of immersion that

disrupt the gaming experience, but in different, more subtle, ways than the obvious

localization gaffes noted in the beginning of the chapter whose disruptive epicenter can

be located in purely internal linguistic mechanisms (i.e. the game as simulation). The

disruptions associated with naming conventions and the location of the game’s events,

however, appear to be motivated by prescriptions external to the game.

One approach to this puzzle can be found within the performative function of

naming itself. According to Lyotard (2002), “to learn names is to situate them in relation

to other names by means of phrases….A system of names presents a world” (p. 44).

Tracing the relations between characters provides insight into one aspect of the game’s

narrative dimension—its plot—but the schema of naming, taken in conjunction with the

prescriptive function of language, reflects discursive relations. Some of these are driven

by the internal mechanisms of the game world, as the expectations of Kisaragi High’s

language classes and the extra-scholastic responsibilities of teachers intimate. These two

examples form part of the larger system of relations that constitutes the fictive game

world, and through interaction with the game—obliquely referred to in ludic terms as the

“learning curve”—the player gleans how this system operates. Working in tandem with

internally-driven naming schemas, however, are terms which derive their prescriptive

power from external discursive systems. The “America” in which Kisaragi City is

potentially located receives no description beyond the name itself, leaving the player to

supply the referent with relevant pragmatic content, an attempt drawn upon the

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audience’s beliefs in constructing the game world. The problems with immersive

dissonance emerge from reliance on external prescriptions to construct an internal world.

The implications of this position for the structuring of simulations are far

reaching, as the rule-based ludic aspects of language appear capable of penetrating the

closed system of simulation, consequently generating a gameplay that potentially

continues after the video game ends. While specific terms may generate their meaning

from within the game itself—the untranslated term shinen referring to swirling orbs of

concentrated emotion, for example—the text itself cannot be constructed solely from

words of this type for both practical and theoretical reasons. Much as we may push for a

reading built upon what the game provides, the building blocks of Lux-Pain, when push

comes to shove, are individual morphemes already empowered with signification by

social decree. To create a text whose meaning derives solely from itself would

necessitate the creation, essentially, of another unfamiliar set of symbolic chains that the

audience would need to decipher and encode with meaning as it progressed through the

game; in this sense, perhaps, playing the Japanese version with no knowledge of the

language would be the closest parallel. Such an endeavor would be impractical to say the

least, especially when we consider the purpose of Lux-Pain as a localized product aimed

at the generation of profit and the emphasis on the JRPG genre on story and character

development. Lux-Pain employs English to establish some symbolic common ground;

rather than reinventing the links between the chain of signification, Lux-Pain alters

specific referents whose meaning becomes “clear” throughout the course of character

interaction. In short, players bring discursively prescribed assumptions to the game and

utilize them to navigate the simulacral waters they structure; at the same time, players

may take with them referents generated in game for play in other contexts.

The gameplay of language, in other words, lies in the ability of players to divine

the semantic scope of referents and actively figure out if they operate purely internally to

the game or are drawn from external discourse. It continues to function after the video

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game has ended, allowing for the creation of new, unique games. This last feature,

explored more in depth in the next section, provides a critical dimension to approaching

language in a ludic capacity by linking aspects of gameplay to ideological critique.

The Unintentional Return of High Modernist Aesthetics

The immersive dissonance generated by the Lux-Pain’s inability to ground itself

in a stable semantic environment does not necessarily mean that this game—or other,

better constructed ones—is without critical potential. The frustration evinced by the

reviewers and their inability to access the game in their customary fashion reflects, in

part, ideological conditioning that a ludic interpretation of language, with its ability to

move freely in and out of the confines of simulation, appears exceedingly capable of

engaging; this should not imply, however, that this is an easy or common task.

Critics generally focused on the “failure” of the localization process in Lux-Pain

by pointing to grammatical flaws that were symptomatic of a larger issue of

representation. Voicing his inability to “get into” the game, Acaba (2009) complains:

If that isn’t bad enough there were a few times that I couldn’t help but start snickering during really inconvenient time. When dealing with topics this mature it’s a really bad sign for you to start laughing because a girl was referred to as “he” or general Engrish popping up. It kills the mood and destroys any immersion in the story which is all a game like this really has.

Acaba may be hinting at the tension between the two radically different registers of

knowledge players must supply to position themselves within the game environment.

Whether Natsuki wants to go to Japan or America makes a lot of difference as most

players will be much more familiar with the cultural tendencies of one location over the

other, a fact that has a direct impact on how much fiddling with the prescriptions

generated by signification Lux-Pain can plausibly get away with. Due to this, the

existence of a city in America populated almost exclusively by Japanese nationals whose

idea of language study is to read and translate ancient Japanese literature gives one pause

in its sheer absurdity. But it is exactly within this absurdist realm brought about by the

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infelicitous meeting of our expectations between the discursive prescriptions supplied by

the game and the discursive prescriptions we bring to the game that Lux-Pain points to

the aesthetic potential—and here I mean the older sense of the term invested with

political overtones—of embedding a game within a game.

In a very general sense, Lux-Pain can be read as confrontational and antagonistic,

disrupting embedded practices and ideologies. Derived through Lux-Pain’s amateurish

localization, this aesthetic impulse within the game owes its origin to linguistic issues that

complicate the construction of a coherent world, either on its own terms or in its

intersection with surrounding social discourses in which it is embedded. Exemplified by

the game’s ambiguous setting, these linguistic issues have the potential to fashion new

relationships and understandings of the world in which the player resides. Although

speaking specifically about Dada, Tristan Tzara (2003) writes that art “introduces new

points of view, people sit down now at the corners of tables, in attitudes that lean a bit to

the left and to the right” (p. 25). For Tzara, new points of view emerge organically from

the irrational, and part of his articulation of the Dadaist project revolves around breaking

free from rationalist, scientific frames of thought. “What we need,” Tzara says, “are

strong, straightforward, precise works which will be forever misunderstood. Logic is a

complication. Logic is always false” (pp. 10-11). Art, then, plays with the ordering and

structure of the world as mapped by specific ideologies, attempting to offer alternate

modes of envisioning the world predicated upon contradiction.

Lux-Pain enacts this process through language, albeit unintentionally. The world

Lux-Pain presents to players certainly bears similarities to the one external to it, but

inconsistencies in the performative construction of the virtual environment the gaming

experience. A conflict between multiple competing constructions of the same world that

ground the player’s social, cultural, and ideological assumptions in different ways

emerges; instead of asking why a town such as Kisaragi city would exist in America, the

more fruitful way to approach the game’s performative inconsistencies according to the

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aesthetic map offered by Tzara would be to ponder why America cannot have such a city.

In this vein, the contradictions and confusions circulating the game express not liabilities

but, rather, a new vantage from which to engage ideological networks such as nationality

and identity. This approach applies equally to more polished games, although the manner

in which they engage ideological apparatuses is less evident; after all, ideology operates

best when hidden, and the position of video games within the popular arena as

entertainment media coupled with a lack of linguistic ruptures to draw attention to the

prescriptive underpinnings of language obscures how they function as the potential world

Tzara and Frasca note. Lux-Pain is like the friend who can’t keep a secret: its linguistic

slippage reveals how language constructs more respected games.

Along these lines, then, even the grammatical and pronominal inconsistencies that

are the subject of re\viewer consternation suggest ideological revelation. Similar to the

case above regarding the aesthetic potential housed in the ambiguity of the game’s

location, the grammatical errors often cited by the reviewers point to a breakdown in

representation, a disjunction between signifier and signified that scholars have argued

shape our approach to the world. Attention to language, in fact, figures prominently into

Dadaist literature, where discussion and implementation of it aims at reframing the chain

of signification. In the “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love” Tzara (2003)

glibly remarks that “the good Lord created a universal language, that’s why people don’t

take him seriously. A language is a utopia” (p. 47). The polemic nature of this statement

enacts the Dadaist position over language; in articulating language’s link to the divine

problems over commensurability appear all the more poignant. At the heart of Dadaist

theorization on this subject beats the arbitrary nature of signification; poised against

bourgeois art and academic criticism, Dada revels in incommensurability by stripping the

status of the artwork of communal interpretation. “The bourgeois spirit, which renders

ideas usable and useful, tries to assign poetry the invisible role of the principle engine of

the universal machine: the practical soul…In this way it is possible to organize (sic) and

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fabricate everything” (Tzara, 2003, p. 73). In dissolving, refiguring, or altering the way

in which specific words are understood through either grammatical rearrangements or

semantic/pragmatic reconstitutions of words, the mandate of the market to render all

things equivalent and into use value becomes stymied, momentarily arrested in its course

of world domination like a super villain without henchmen.

Lux-Pain’s overlooked grammatical inconsistencies parallel the spirit of the Dada

aesthetic in that the slow dissolution of referents in the game affects the cultural

understandings of the words, revealing ideological structures the potential for alternate

symbolic configurations. The clearest case of this potential rests with the intermittent

application of incorrect pronouns to the game’s characters, a potential bolstered by the

ethnic character of their names: players face being kept in a state of flux, constantly

reconfiguring their perceptions of characters as they try to ascertain with certainty which

gender box they belong. Naturally this does not happen with every character, and in

many cases a given character’s gender can be based on vocal or visual cues. However,

not every character is given audio or visual “screen time” in every interaction. Coupled

with the androgynous Japanese animation style and unfamiliarity with the gendering of

Japanese names, a player must be hyper-aware of who is doing and saying what or risk

confusion.

Problems over the U.S. localization of Lux-Pain have been traced to

inconsistencies between the sub and the dub facets of the game which contribute to

differing performative constructions of the game. Positioned within an analytical

framework sensitive to inconsistency as aesthetic, the problem emerges due to the

simultaneous existence of these features producing a performative inconsistency in the

construction of the world. As discursively closed systems, simulations require that the

performatives through which the world is constructed be consistent within that world, a

feat which requires a modicum of suspension of disbelief. In the case of Lux-Pain,

however, disbelief remains elusive due to competing versions of the world that can be

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traced to mismatches between the written and aural texts. This aspect is typically the

focus of fan discontent, but such discourse tends to remain isolated to the grammatical

realm and overlooks a deeper interpretation for fan discontent rooted in how language co-

constitutes the aesthetics.

Loose Ends and Unresolved Tensions

In this chapter I have argued that language should be treated as a form of

gameplay driven by linguistic rules ranging from the grammatical to the semantic,

sketching out how these rules intersect with, operate within, and even exceed the

organizational rules imposed by the structuring of simulations known eloquently as

“games.” In this vein I have made three arguments, although I feel that the second is

more significant than others due to their larger theoretical implications for ludology as a

whole. My first advocates that in the context of JRPGs language should be treated as a

component of gameplay due to its ability to prevent immersion or engagement with the

text in question. My second point builds upon this claim and argues that these moments

of immersive dissonance arise from both internally and externally driven linguistic rules;

this is particularly significant as language appears capable of escaping the event horizon

that keeps simulations self-contained and self-referential. The final argument asserted

that this ability of language to persist outside the simulation (or enter it, as the case may

be) offers a unique opportunity for ideological criticism surrounding a game and

represents an approach not necessarily beholden to discussions of game plot.

Naturally, as JRPGs rely heavily on language, particularly stories, to carve out

their identities, using them as a starting point to theorize the ludic dimensions of language

may seem counterintuitive given the tendency in the literature to conflate language with

narrative. Their status as translations, however, provides particular opportunities in this

regard not commonly found in their less travelled and monolingual brethren, and the

insights garnered here can offer a basis for more generalized study of the chimeric

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qualities of language, particularly the contexts in which it operates as a narrative device

and when it operates ludically.

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CHAPTER III

THE MEDIUM IN TRANSLATION: OR, THE MEDIUM STRIKES

BACK

Introduction

The core assertion of ludology maintains that a game’s rules structure interaction

and guide experience. In general, these operational rules derive from a combination of

social agreement and medium specific properties. Although theoretically the rules of a

game and the medium in which it operates are separate (whether ones plays baseball in

the dirt lot with friends or at home on a gaming console the rules of baseball stay the

same), in the case of video games the two tend to be interwoven as such games heavily

rely on the operations of the medium in order to structure the gaming experience. In this

case it is not too bold to generalize that the medium facilitates the structuring of

experience. Building from McLuhan’s claim that the “content” of any medium is another

medium, however, I argued in the last chapter that language as a ludic device complicates

the structuring of experience by showing how another, subordinate, medium exceeds the

parameters of its “host”. This realization, however, is only problematic if we assume a

hierarchical order of operations to the exercising of rules, and I argued that the ability of

language to exceed the parameters of the host medium represents a ludic moment itself

and should be approached as a game in its own right. Over the course of the next two

chapters I develop the implications of this line of thought, arguing that language and the

medium are symbiotic and mutually informative, constructing a multifaceted rhetorical

space exploited by fansubbing organizations in their construction of Japanese culture and

the construction of cultural credibility.

The complexity of such interactions more clearly crystalize in what I term

“container media”—a catchall term that for now I will define as video files meant for

viewing on digital devices—as the variety of formats boast subtle differences in the ways

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fans can interact with them. Key to understanding these differences is McLuhan’s stance

on media, which I extend further by arguing that the formal properties of any given

medium are shaped by the intersections of the formal properties of the media that

comprise the main object, what I refer to alternatively as “component media” or

“compositional media.” The medium guides—but does not determine—the available

means of fan engagement vis-à-vis these “inherited” formal properties and their related

restrictions. Understanding fan engagement with media, anime or otherwise, necessitates

an analysis of the compositional structure of the medium in question, as the novel forms

of fan engagement lauded in fan studies emerge only through reworking, stretching, and

very rarely breaking the rules that structure a media text. In this respect fan production

itself operates as a state of play—fans work within a system of rules meant to guide and

structure the experience—and in no case is this clearer than in the case of anime fandom

and fan creation, where fan consumers and producers must navigate the various rules of

language while negotiating the strictures of the container media they use to create and

distribute their translations.

These issues are increasingly important given the—deserved or not—emergence

of anime as a vehicle of Japanese soft power (formalized most explicitly in June 2010

with the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s establishment of the “Cool

Japan” campaign). While there is an ongoing conversation as to what constitutes anime

in scholarly and fan circles, its deployment to the political stage has spurred analyses of

the genre and its relationship within the social systems in which they operate. Literature

in this regard has tackled fan practice (Napier, 2007; Patten, 2001) and even produced

cultural-historical analyses of the roots of anime fandom’s more ardent supporters, the

otaku (浩紀, 2001). So-called “media” approaches merely rehash narrative analyses in

vogue with film studies (Lamarre, 2009; Napier, 2005). None provide a serious

discussion of the role formal media properties play in the development of fan culture and

engagement despite a robust and varied literature in these fields noting the perceptible

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impact media properties and ecologies play in shaping perception (Baudrillard, 1994;

McLuhan, 1994; Schiller, 1992).

This chapter expands upon the literature on anime and anime fandom by arguing a

constitutive relationship between formal media properties and fan engagement with

respect translation and corresponding intercultural perception. Understanding the ludic

parameters of container media more broadly informs fan studies by incorporating the

negotiation of media specifications into the generative practices already associated with

fans. As my focus rests with fan translations, I specifically engage the menagerie of

digital video media that fans create for consumption through computers or associated

devices with microprocessors.

Due to the importance container media play in this argument, a discussion of their

properties foregrounds this chapter. In this first section I sketch how container media

operate by parsing their compositional elements, discussing how they function, and

demonstrating how the manipulation of their technological specifications represents one

facet of the ludic quality of the medium. The next section introduces the use of “linear

notes” by fansubbers as a paradigmatic example of ludic engagement with container

media, arguing that their inclusion represents a challenge to translation ideology

emergent from the potential of container media. The final section develops the role

container media play in translation more fully, arguing that the convergence between

translation ideology, language, and the properties of container media should be

considered critically due to the polysemy of meaning emergent from such play.

Container Media: Definition and Practice

Before beginning an analysis of how fans interact with container media, it would

be prudent to clearly define the genre. This is actually a more difficult descriptive task

than it sounds, as the media I am describing do not have a single generic categorization

into which they can be lumped. What I am speaking about, though, are multimedia files

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that are commonly meant to be played on a computer or other similar device (now

smartphones, tablets, portable gaming devices, and so forth) and appear in a plethora of

formats: avi, ogm, mkv, mpeg, and mp4 files. I distinguish these from streaming video

(formats such as flv, 3gp, asf, for example) and DVD/Blu-Ray as qualitatively different

due mainly to differences in distribution mechanisms and standardization of playback

devices which undercut the ludic potential of the medium from the position of fan

consumers. Container media as I define them are additionally different in that, despite

the common file formats noted above, the manners in which they can be encoded vary.

Differences in standard definition (SD) and high definition (HD) video and audio

motivate part of this, but so does the desire for greater compression in the file itself—the

file size. This necessitates a range of decoders known as codecs to ensure effective

playback. One’s group’s mkv file may not be playable on different systems, but more

importantly that same group’s file may be drastically different internally from another

group’s. The final characteristic of container media is that the preferred fan method of

distribution is through P2P and file sharing sites; this characteristic implies a correlation

between the file size of container media and Internet technologies.

These features, expanded upon below, can initially be used to define container

media as a subset of multimedia formats, predominantly distributed online, whose non-

standard encoding methods restrict playback to specific computer media. I have

intentionally left this definition vague for now, but of imminent relevance now is that the

non-standard encoding and decoding practices directly contribute to the ludic framing of

this media via multiple dimensions of fan interactivity.

An encoded video consists of three parts: the video codec, the audio codec, and

the wrapper (also known as container, hence my descriptive label of “container media”).

While technically separate elements, confusion can arise as some standards refer to both

codecs and containers (the MPEG family being the most relevant here). Regardless,

these three elements combine to determine file size. All digital multimedia consist of

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these elements: standard definition DVDs, for example, are typically encoded with the

MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio codecs placed within an VOB wrapper; the process of

ripping the same DVD may produce an AVI wrapper in which the video and audio are

encoded with in Xvid and mp3 formats, respectively. Codecs merely compress the video

and audio, enabling dramatic reductions in file size while still maintaining respectable

quality. In the case of standard DVDs, which range from 4-9GB in size, compression can

reduce size to less than an eighth of that.

This reduction in file size, while dramatic, would be meaningless without the

Internet technology to efficiently distribute it. The music industry cracked down on file

sharing in the early 2000s because the technology allowed relatively small file sizes to be

transferred quickly; movies, too, were being downloaded but transfer rates were too slow

to encourage rampant piracy of these large files, not to mention that the quality of such

captures were less than spectacular. Consider Figure 3.1, a screenshot from the anime

The Legend of Basara (1999) encoded with Divx and mp3 and wrapped in the AVI

format. According to the website of Anime-Keep (Anime-Keep, n.d.), the fan translation

group for this anime, the project was completed in August 18, 2002; the lag between

broadcast time and project completion is probably motivated by the group getting access

to analogue copies of the show (the ecology was different then, suffice it to say

differences in source material used, video capturing technologies, and Internet speeds are

motivating factors), but more importantly it represents three years of potential evolution

in codec compression and quality. While only 180MB in size—a fraction of what a DVD

would be—Figure 3.11 demonstrates that the quality resulting from the confluence of

analogue and compression technologies leaves much to be desired.

Compared to contemporary encoding developments, however, file size appears to

1 Figure descriptions will be in the following format: anime title, episode, fan group [abbreviation if relevant], format. If relevant, the program used to play the file and/or other relevant information will be provided.

67

be increasing: a typical 23 minute anime episode can range from 180MB to 340MB

depending on how it is encoded (larger sizes are becoming more frequent, too, as storage

media produce larger capacities more cheaply and Internet speeds continue to increase).

Two factors, however, must be considered in this regard: the quality of the encodes and

Internet speed. Much of contemporary anime is distributed in HD format as the initial

Japanese broadcasts are digital, and when Blu-Ray versions are released it is not

uncommon to find True HD variants (1080p). Higher quality naturally produces greater

file sizes, but these increases are offset by developments in Internet data transmission.

According to the International Telecommunications Union (International

Telecommunication Union, 2010), Internet use grew from 44% in 2000 to 77% in 2010;

Figure 3.1: The Legend of Basara, Opening Credits, Anime Keep [A-Keep], avi

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The Pew Internet and American Life Project (Horrigan, 2009), offers roughly similar

numbers nothing that the majority of connections in 2000 were dial-up; broadband

connections accounted for less than five percent of home Internet usage. By 2009,

broadband dominated the market-share and in 2010 ITU notes that roughly 85 million—

35% of users—utilized broadband. The Pew Center paints a rosier picture, with over

65% of connections being broadband. The discrepancy can be chalked to divergent

methodologies and data collection, but the important generalization gleaned from these

trends is that broadband has increased its presence, particularly, as the Pew study notes,

in more affluent demographics. Faster speeds translate to faster distribution of files,

alleviating one major concern over the distribution of “large” file sizes. Fans have taken

advantage of these speeds to leverage P2P networks in the distribution of these files as

such networks are generally superior to traditional direct downloading.

While Internet distribution technologies play a role in the distribution of anime

and have impacted the ecology in terms of how files are distributed, the ludic qualities of

container media rest predominantly with how fans interact with them, the choices they

make with respect to encoding and wrapping their work. Two features in particular

demonstrate these ludic qualities: issues with playback and subtitle rendition. Playback

issues reflect the diverse means of encoding and decoding container media, with ludic

interaction centered on the (in)ability to successfully render files. Subtitle rendition

presents another means of ludic engagement in that fansubbers and end users can

manipulate the markup to suit their own needs.

The lack of standardization for container media gives rise to a variety of encoding

possibilities. Fansubbed anime currently appears in one of three formats: Audio Video

Interleave (AVI), a Microsoft-developed container; Moving Picture Experts Group or

MPEG-4 (MP4), utilized most familiarly in Apple devices; and Matroska Video (mkv),

an open-source container. The relevant differences between these containers are related

to the resolutions they support and the hardware that supports their playback. AVI

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fansubbed anime appears with SD video while MP4 and mkv fansubbed anime can also

appear with HD video; although theoretically AVI could be used with HD steams, the

requisite resolution and bitrate to support HD video would make the file size too

cumbersome for efficient distribution. This feature is largely predicated upon the choice

of video codec used in encoding the video.

While the codecs used to encode the video and audio steams in these containers

can vary, anime fansubs typically utilize one of three video codecs depending on the

container: AVI appears with DivX (a proprietary codec) or XviD (an open-source codec

based off of DivX) video streams, both based on MPEG-4 part 2, while MP4 and mkv

almost always utilize h.264, also known as MPEG-4 part 10 or AVC, for encoding video

streams (a new encoder based off of h.264 called Hi10P has recently emerged). The

major difference between these video encoding methods, once again, lies in the file sizes

they produce with respect to video compression and quality: h.264 can encode HD at

higher bitrates than its DivX or XviD cousins with analogous file sizes. In addition, the

devices upon which such encoded content can be played vary, and in some cases may

require the installation of specific decoders to ensure that the video plays properly, even

if the media device can play back the file type in question.

Because of the variability in encoding, playback of content can be a problem.

Almost every forum contains a help page that discusses common issues, recommends

specific players, and/or provides links to codec packs. Open source community

developed programs such as Media Player Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC) and codec

packs of the same pedigree such as the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) tend

to be community favorites, and discussions of how to render files, convert them, or

extract subtitles are also common. The (in)ability to play files becomes an exercise in

customizing video players to a specific user’s needs or, at worst, changing the container

or re-encoding it so that it can be meet a user’s specifications.

In addition to these common elements shared by all container media, fans must

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additionally contend with choices specifically centered on how to embed what is

probably the most important and definitive aspect of their work—their translations—

within container media. The rendering of subtitles, predictably, varies with container and

choice of player, ensuring that visual standardization of playback of fan translated

content nearly an impossible task. The variability in rendering subtitles and their

playback forms part of container media’s ludic potential on two fronts: from that of the

fan subbers, who must navigate multiple choices to embed their translations into the

medium, and from that of the fan viewer, who can—in certain contexts—rework the

choices of fan subbers through their choice of playback programs.

In fan engagement with anime, the ludic dimensions of container media appear

predominantly in subtitle choices. Two strategies exist for embedding subtitles into

digital video: hardsubbing and softsubbing. Hardsubbing simply merges or burns the

subtitle into the video stream(s), making it an inseparable part of the video; softsubbing,

in contrast, relies on a separate set of instructions (markup) read by a player to generate

the subtitles. Like codecs, there is a variation in subtitle markup formats, with certain

containers functioning only with certain markups. Whereas hard subtitles cannot be

altered, soft subtitles can experience variation in color, font, size determined by the end

user. Additionally, since hard subtitles embed the translation into the video image itself

they cannot, like their soft cousins, be turned off. Typically an anime episode will

employ one or the other subbing styles; the only exception is for opening and ending

sequences which, depending on the fan translation group, may be hardsubbed for

karaoke-style rendering of text. While all of the common containers support both subtitle

formats, anime in AVI wrappers typically utilize hard subtitles.

Each subbing option presents consequences for playback. Hardsubs, as in Figure

3.2, allow a group to integrate specific fonts, colors, and movement to their text. Due to

the text’s integration into the video stream, the text itself is subject to distortion if

upscaled or played at a higher resolution than initially streamed (e.g. running a SD anime

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episode at full screen on a monitor set at 1080p). Softsubs, due to their rendering by the

player itself, circumvent this problem but cannot always provide the variations in font

and color of hardsubs. They offer the additional perk, as Figures 3.3 through 3.6

demonstrate, of allowing the end user to alter the font in various fashions (and in some

instances actually allow for alteration of the translation).

The potential for the end user to alter the subtitle display (and potentially the

subtitles themselves) differentiates container media from its other digital cousins by

transforming the viewing experience into one of potential ludic interaction with the text.

The potential to alter subtitles reflects the impact the medium has on translation in that

the dynamic alteration of softsubs theoretically affords groups greater negotiation of the

screen space in their translation choices (e.g. translating dekai as “humongous” instead of

“big”; the former takes more screen space than the latter) and their layout of text.

Consequently, even written Japanese presents fan organizations with choices for

translation, as the medium allows for text to be positioned almost anywhere on the

Figure 3.2: Fairy Tail, episode 93, Kyuubi Fansubs, mp4, hardsubbed

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Figure 3.3: Nurarihyon no Mago Sennen Makyou, episode 04, WhyNot?, mkv

Normal rendering


Larger font size

73


Smaller font size, mirrored


Smaller font size, italics, screen top

74

screen, akin to a canvass. The use of text in the upper part of the screen seen in the

karaoke-style openings and endings of some anime (e.g. Figure 3.13) demonstrate a

common example of this, yet as noted in Figures 3.7 and 3.8 the medium itself affords

much more possibility that fan groups take advantage of.

The placement of text in Figures 3.7 and 3.8 represent another dimension of the

ludic strictures of the medium separate from language play. Not only can written text be

translated, but such translations can exist simultaneously with dialogue, which as shown

in Figure 3.7 need not be positioned bottom center. As a dynamic multimedia space, the

potential to incorporate multiple translations on screen at once—whether this be through

written translations or the translation of overlapping dialogue or background

conversation—forces the viewer to selectively choose which aspects of the content to

engage, paralleling the native experience of viewership. The truncated sign in the upper-

left (i.e. Fruits) of Figure 3.8 reflects this sense of native experience by literally

translating the visible orthography. Simultaneous overlaps in conversation need not,

contrary to conventional practice, proceed linearly and be timed to prevent significant

overlap; likewise, written text (no matter how insignificant) can be rendered onscreen to

approximate native viewing experience. The ability of hardsubs to embed specific fonts

and colors into the video means that groups can even present the translations of text in the

same style and layout as in the original ensure that the end user will view them as

intended. The potential to interact with the medium as a canvass represents one ludic

feature of the medium, although this feature is theoretically shared, but not practiced, by

its other televisual cousins.

Rather, container media differentiate themselves ludically with respect to the use

of subtitles. Consider the following screen shots from the anime Nichijou with respect to

such rendering; figures 3.9 and 3.10 show how different players render soft subtitle

markup differently and ensure variation in viewing experience. Despite the potential for

both translators and viewers to engage the medium dynamically, the rules by which these

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Figure 3.7: Tokyo Majin Gakuen, episode 09, Shinsen-Subs [SHS], mkv

Figure 3.8: Ah! My Goddess Goddess, episode 04, AnimeONE and AnimeYuki [AonE-

AnY], avi

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Figure 3.9: Nichijou, episode 16, Coalgirls, mkv, KMPlayer

Figure 3.10: Nichijou, episode 16, Coalgirls, mkv, VLC

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Figure 3.11: Beelzebub, episode 23, Shogakukan Fansubs & Tomodachi [SGKK-TMD],

mkv

Figure 3.12: Deadman Wonderland, episode 02, Shogakukan Fansubs & Ruri Subs

[SGKK-Ruri], mkv

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interactions operate are generally more fluid than those by which ludology traditionally

defines them. In this case, very real technical limitations surface to destabilize play: the

plurality of programs fans may use in the playback of anime and its translation markup

can compromise the use of screen space and the handling of text by the group. These

differences in playback can cause minor annoyances, such as the doubling of text in

Figure 3.11, to major problems, such as obscuring of the anime itself in Figure 3.12.

Figures 3.13-3.15 offer variations in the interpretation of subtitle markup, which

in turn force the viewer to approach the viewing experience differently. Figure 3.13,

hardsubbed in avi, provides the most stable experience as content will be rendered

similarly across players due to the integration of the fan-provided text into the video

itself. More interesting, however, is the softsubbed mkv: despite no alteration of the file

itself, the subtitle rendering experiences variation in size, font, and layout distinctly

different from the hardsubbed iteration. All screenshots come from the opening credits of

the anime High School of the Dead subbed by the group gg. The embedding of the text

into the video with hardsubs ensures homogeneity of experience across players and

devices that cannot be guaranteed with their softsub cousins due to how players and

devices interpret the markup dictating the rendering of the subtitles.

Softsubs, despite their potential for alteration during viewing, are not without

problems because the rules governing their expression can vary based on playback

method and capabilities of the viewer. Essentially, container media allow for certain

“moves” but these are superseded by the end user whose playback application of choice,

codecs, and device specifications serve as referee in regulating how these rules are

enacted.

In general, then, the ludic dimensions of container media most clearly appear in

the rendition of subtitles. Fansubbers engage in play through their layouts and choices in

fonts, colors, and size; fan viewers, the end users, do likewise through the manipulation

of translations. But while the potential to alter the rendering of text in softsub fan

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Figure 3.13: High School of the Dead¸ opening credits, gg Fansubs [gg], avi, KM Player

Figure 3.14: High School of the Dead¸ opening credits, gg Fansubs [gg], mkv, KMPlayer

80

Figure 3.15: High School of the Dead¸ opening credits, gg Fansubs [gg], mkv, VLC

translations represents one aspect of how fans interact with the rules that scaffold

container media, the differences in how players interpret subtitle markup speaks to how

the medium itself regulates play. In other words, while fansubbers may intend for their

translations to appear in specific fonts, locations, and colors, the medium remains the

ultimate arbiter of how their choices are interpreted. End users may override some of

these choices as well, although their choices remain constrained to the options afforded

by the video players themselves. To ensure that their translations are viewed in the

manner they intend, fansubbers must constrain ludic play by closing off these options

through hardsubbing. Ludic play, however, is not limited to the technical dimensions of

the medium; linguistic play, the subject of the next and subsequent sections, combines

with the technical potential of container media to provide fansubbers additional ludic

opportunities.

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Linear Notes: The Translator’s Visibility

Undoubtedly language remains the primary vehicle through which fans present

interpretations of anime characters and representations of Japanese culture.

Sociolinguistic perspectives articulate the connections between language and cultural

representation as derived from a series of contexts, ranging from ideological to

situational, that underlie conversational choices. In translation, the larger ideological

contexts informing the show may not necessarily find purchase within the receiving

culture, giving birth to strategies of localization meant to maintain the ideological nougat

of the original within an ideological wrapping more familiar to the new audience. Venuti

(2008) refers to this as the “translator’s invisibility” and argues that Western translation

practices view texts that hide the translator’s presence and strip it of foreignness are

treated as skillful adaptions of the original. The types of play afforded by container media

with respect to subtitles in the process of translation, however, destabilize this ideological

position through their integration into the anime text itself. The presence of the translator

or foreignness associated with lexical material becomes reframed in this context as

essential to narrative engagement with the anime. An examination of the localization

strategies between two fansub groups, YuS-SHS and Rumbel-sMi, of the anime Gintama

broaches the discussion of translation practice within fansubbing contexts. In this section

I parse fan strategies that appear to violate the translator’s invisibility with respect to the

translator’s presence, leaving the issue of foreignness to subsequent discussion.

YuS-SHS and Rumbel-sMi exercise the “translator’s invisibility” in their

translations to varying degrees. The differences between the translation styles and the

localization strategies can be seen in the following exchange in the beginning of episode

79 between Gin (the main character), Kondo (leader of the Shinsengumi and a caricature

of the historical Kondo Isami), and a character never named but identified as Kuubei’s

grandfather (a master swordsman who appears only in the four or so episodes that

comprise this story arc). Each character has answered the call of nature only to discover

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that because of the remote location of the facilities there is no toilet paper; Gin’s

commentary on the situation is subtitled as follows:

YuS-SHS Rumbel-sMi

Gin: Don't talk about God, even the Devil's disappeared.

Both paper and ghosts have forsaken this place.

This example is fairly representative of the differences in localization strategies

between the two groups. Understanding the depth and ramifications of these differences,

however, necessitates a discussion of the original Japanese in which Gin says, deadpan,

“kami mo hotoke mo nee, yo” (神も仏もねぇよ; literally, “neither the gods nor Buddha

are here”). The statement itself is a pun on a Japanese saying essentially meaning that the

gods have deserted a person, and the heart of the joke lies in the fact that “kami”

possesses two meanings: 紙 (paper) and 神 (god); in this case, there’s no toilet paper. Of

minor note, but of little significance to the pun, is that hotoke can refer to the Buddha or,

more generally, the dead.

Semantically, kami serves as the translation fulcrum upon which localization

strategies depend. YuS-SHS has opted to translate the word as “God,” and this choice

points to localization for a Western audience through the liberties taken with the

translation of the term hotoke. Strictly speaking, kami originates in Shinto practice and

refers to the innumerable local divinities who inhabit natural objects and phenomenon.

While not unheard of to refer to the Judeo-Christian God, use of the term in this fashion

typically contains the honorific suffix -sama (様). Using “god” while maintaining the

literal use of the term in Japanese, however, would not convey the same sense to a

Western audience as the term has been stripped of most religious context in the modern

sense of the term: gods are something belonging to the mythologies of pagans and

pantheistic whimsy but of little protective value today. The localization to “God”

maintains the original’s sense of divine protection through the alteration of one simple

character, for while many in the West may shirk off “gods” as antiquated stories of a less

83

enlightened time, most are fluent in the discourses concentrating power into one

monotheistic being even if they don’t believe it. The choice to localize kami as “God”

spurs the rather large disjunction between more mainstream translations of hotoke and the

one offered by YuS-SHS. To maintain the localization and spirit of the original, hotoke

must be transformed into a term clearly recognizable by the target audience.

Yet localization strategies are not the only way in which fans engage translation

ideology; the ludic dimension of container media with respect to layout employed by

fansubbers to explicate their translation strategies (or lack thereof). In so doing,

fansubbing practice confronts the translator’s invisibility through in medias res “linear

notes” (LN) leveraging the ludic potential of the medium; I define “linear notes” in these

contexts as any on-screen transcription external from dialogue or translation of written

material (i.e. signs, letters, etc.) meant to explain lexical, cultural, historical, or social

phenomena. They typically appear at the top of the screen paired with the subtitles to

which they refer and as such become integrated into the viewing and experience, as seen

in figures 3.16-3.25.

Although all of these notes share a common trait with respect to their placement

on screen, the processes by which they actually appear and their format serve as

differentiation points. The identifier “note” or some variation of it (e.g. N, TL note) may

or may not appear to offset its appearance, although the fact that they tend to appear in

different styles, colors, or fonts than the translated dialogue ensures that they are not

confused with each other.

Despite these common elements, how linear notes appear or screen varies

between groups, highlighting the different ways in which fan organizations can interact

with the possibilities of container media. Figures 3.17 and 3.21, for example, offset the

appearance of their notes through a drop down box seconds before the note in question is

triggered. While by far the most common positioning for these linear notes remains the

top of the screen, variations in placement do exist as demonstrated by figures 3.22-3.25.

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Figure 3.16: Otogizoushi, episode 02, Anime-kraze [Ani-Kraze], avi

Figure 3.17: Genshiken, episode 03, Solar and Anime-Faith [Solar & Faith], avi

85

Figure 3.18: Hakuouki, episode 01, DatteBayo [DB], avi

Figure 3.19: Keroro Gunsou, episode 06, Hitoribochi Fansubs [HB],avi

86

Figure 3.20: Scrapped Princess, episode 14, Anime-Keep & Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu

Butai [Keep-ANBU], avi

Figure 3.21: Shuffle!, episode 01, AnimeUniverse Fansub Group [AnimeU], avi

87

Figure 3.22: Keroro Gunsou, episode 47, Doremi Fansubs & Keroro Fansubs [Doremi-

keroro], avi

88

Figure 3.23: Nagasarete Airantou, episode 03, Ayako Fansubs [Ayako], mkv

Figure 3.24: Toaru Majutsu no Index, episode 16, Eclipse Productions [Eclipse], mkv

89

Figure 3.25: Deadman Wonderland, episode 12, Shogakukan Fansubs & Ruri Subs

[SGKK-Ruri], mkv

90

next to the translation conserves space and prioritizes the visual dimension of anime,

which ostensibly is a visual medium. The similarity of the font to that utilized for the

translation—despite its offsetting by parenthesis, brackets, or other mechanisms—

conflates the narrative elements of anime with translator commentary, reflecting the

general purpose of linear notes: to integrate into and become inseparable from the

narrative of the anime.

Whether appearing on the top of the screen or elsewhere, the logic of linear notes

engages the narrative of anime by functioning in concert with specific words and timing.

This behavior, as intimated by the host of examples provided above, is not limited to a

specific fansub group or genre of anime but, rather, pervasive within this community.

How these notes operate, their grammar or taxonomy so to speak, bear relevance to how

the parameters of container media function in concert with language to define the larger

ludic vehicle through which fansubbers articulate their visions of Japan. I return to

episode 79 of Gintama, provided in Figures 3.26 and 3.27, to demonstrate how the logic

of linear notes operates in tandem with translation strategies, specifically emphasizing

their relation to the role of the translator in translation ideology.

The linear notes appearing at the top of the screen with Gin’s line support these

localization strategies, but as the linear notes that accompany Gin’s pronouncement

demonstrate, they also function as a justification of each group’s localization strategies.

The effects such localization strategies have will be discussed in depth in the next

chapter, suffice it to say for now their inclusion challenges the invisible role of the

translator in the Western logic of translation. Apropos for now, however, is the function

of linear notes within the context of localization strategies. The YuS-SHS approach

emphasizes the denotative meanings of kami and reduces the breadth of the word to its

qualities as a signifier in the Sausserian sense of the term, wherein linguistic symbols

stand in for abstract ideas and concrete objects (which, in this case, kami does both) .

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Figure 3.26: Gintama, episode 79, Yuurisan-Subs & Shinsen-Subs [YuS-SHS], avi

Figure 3.27: Gintama, episode 79, Rumbel Subs & so Many idiots Fansubs [Rumbel-

sMi], avi

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Through this note, the differences between languages become fixed as merely a change in

the symbolic signifier and parallel the ideology of market localization. This strategy is

not without problems, however, as even with the linear note explaining the homophone

the localization choice to utilize “God” is a stretch given the context of the scene. In

contrast, the Rumbel-sMi linear note moves beyond denotative meaning and explains the

usage of the phrase within a limited cultural context. While not identifying the specific

religious origins of the term, the group does attempt to explain the pragmatics of the

saying that derived the pun and includes that contrast within their translation.

These translation choices coupled with the content of the linear note identifying

the polysemy of the term kami, reinforce the translation provided by the group. The

combination of practices in this example of YuS-SHS’s translation strategies parallels

stereotypical localization techniques aimed at stripping foreignness from a text, and the

linear note referencing semantic properties of words parallels the ideological discourse on

language and translation as transparent and exchangeable emerging from business and

technical contexts.

The Rumbel-sMi approach, however, differs in both localization practice and

method. The translation of Gin’s lament flirts with being a literal rendition if we recall

the secondary meaning of hotoke as “the dead” which in Buddhist practice refers to

ghosts. The choice to translate kami as paper, though, might initially seem strange to the

Western audience even within the context of the plot as the pun potentially goes over its

proverbial head. In this case, familiarity with the cultural context of the pun—in this case

Japanese proverbs—emerges as a prerequisite to fully appreciating Rumbel-sMi’s

translation. Most serious anime fans will know a little Japanese, and many will probably

know the double entendre created by kami but linking that comprehension to hotoke

requires something else, a surplus of meaning beyond the semantics of the term. The

linear notes supplied by the group provide just that: they explain the cultural significance

of the statement while noting the polysemy upon which the pun draws strength. These

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elements synergistically combine to provide the audience with the tools needed to

understand the pun and its origins, and in so doing simultaneously cast linear notes as

inseparable from the narrative.

While the inclusion of linear notes into anime appears to conflict with translation

ideology in terms of the presence of the translator, this prohibition emerges from a

general ideological aversion to narrative disruption and the maintenance of the illusion

that the translated text appear non-translated. The presence of linear notes in anime,

though, blurs any such disruption by integrating comments into the anime in such a way

as to become inseparable from the narrative dimension tasked with advancing the story.

The position of notes, their visual appearance, and even their content converge to

promote their presence as essential to the text, and the manipulations of these dimensions

by fans represents one major aspect of the ludic potential of container media. These

areas, however, are not he only ways in which container media guide translation

strategies that potentially destabilize translation ideology; the next section approaches

linear notes and translation strategies from the other facet of Venuti’s “translator’s

invisibility:” the extirpation of foreignness from a text.

The Medium in Translation: Foreignness as Translation

Strategy

The translation approaches adopted by YuS-SHS and Rumbel-sMi provide some

insight into the strengths and weaknesses of translation strategies but additionally hint at

the potential uses for these strategies. YuS-SHS opts for a literal localization wherein the

heart of the original beats within a new, foreign body. It is, theoretically, a cosmetic

alteration. In this case, the pun takes a back seat to the overall pragmatic impact of the

utterance which resonates without recourse to cultural education and, consequently,

implies commensurability based on a linguistic standard wherein words convey mere

informational content. Rumbel-sMi, on the other hand, engages the word as inseparable

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from the cultural context through its linear notes and almost literal translation of terms.

This group, however, takes the nexus between language and culture to the lexical level

through its reluctance to strip “foreignness” from texts via translation into more familiar

English terms.

Episode 73 offers one of many examples of how both groups deal with individual

lexical items that carry sociolinguistic implications within Japanese culture. In this

episode, the ever-broke Yorozuya formulate a plan to collect matsutake mushrooms so

that they can sell them and afford something other than plain rice. Matsutake are

extremely rare and expensive mushrooms; within Japanese culture they are highly prized

and viewed similarly to Beluga caviar within Western culture. Each group, however,

differs in their approach to the term: YuS-SHS localizes it to “pine mushroom” while

Rumbel-sMi leaves the word untouched without even a linear note describing the referent

(an interesting choice considering that later in the episode the much more familiar

shiitake gets a linear note stating it is a lower quality mushroom). For comparative

purposes I provide an example of these translations in use below, where Kagura has

discovered what she thinks is the fungus in question and seeks confirmation from Gin:

YuS-SHS Rumbel-sMi

Kagura: Is this the pine mushroom?

Kagura: Is this a matsutake mushroom?

Gin: No. That's the "kid" size.

Gin: No, no, this is the kiddie size.

YuS-SHS again provides a literal rendering of the term matsutake which, while

accurate, performs a function more attuned to a descriptive task than hinting at

sociolinguistic nuance. This is not to suggest that the decision by Rumbel-sMi to leave

matsutake as is accomplishes anything different; without the proper cultural knowledge

of the mushroom and its value in Japan the word does not even serve a descriptive

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function. It is merely foreign, exotic. At least in the YuS-SHS translation we could

make connections through the established referents we already knew, even if they were

combined in new ways. Rumbel-sMi, however, offers nothing save a string of phonemes

cut loose from any convenient semantic moorings. Left without referential support, we

experience a linguistic version of Otherness that, in this case, conveys the rarity and

exoticness implied in the original better than localization or linear notes could provide.

Rather than domesticating the foreign to be palatable to Western sensibilities—

which the market ideology motivating localization accomplishes through the erasure or

expiration of foreign content—the choice to leave matsutake standing on its own fosters a

linguistic analogue to Said’s theorization of Orientalism through its evocation and

maintenance of an imaginary cultural hemispheric divide. The fascination with

“difference” and “otherness” in Western culture is inextricably linked to the globalization

of American economic, political, and cultural might (Said, 2002), complicating

Iwabuchi’s (2002) observation that the export and circulation of Japanese cultural media

serve as grounds for “recentering globalization.” While the demand for Japanese cultural

media have certainly increased exponentially in the past twenty years, particularly in the

United States, their deployment by the Japanese government as a form of soft diplomacy

and use by fans as receptacle of Japanese culture reaffirm the ideology of Orientalism

that articulates an essential or inherent difference between the West and the East. As Ivy

(1995) and other scholars discuss, the notion of a Japanese cultural and racial

homogeneity continues to reverberate today as an underlying, albeit subdued, ideological

pulse upon which national identity is predicated. The affirmation of a cohesive and

national “Japanese” culture, first deployed by the Meiji government to forge a modern

nation-state through the creation of a singular Japanese body politic has been exported,

exteriorized, with governmental sanction to preserve the fictionalized sense of Japanese

mythic uniqueness.

The choice to leave matsutake in Japanese extends the ideologically constructed

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differences between East and West to the level of language, implicitly extending

essentialist discourse on the performance of culture to the level of language. The lack of

translation in this context suggests that there is no equivalent term in the target language

(in this case English) that, in ironically challenging the market perspective on language

equivalency, reinforces Orientalist discourse. Without a referential anchor, an aura of

exoticness is conjured about the term—supplemented, in part, by the fact that the group

searches for this elusive Japanese referent in a mountain forest, another Other positioned

against Western narratives of progress and modernity (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002) and

part of the mythic construction of Japan in both the American and Japanese imaginaries.

Language and culture intertwine in this process, leaving localization of terms or concepts

anemic specters of what they signify in the original.

Each group engages in the practice of leaving terms in their original Japanese to

some extent, either with or without support from linear notes; the guiding rule appears to

be that the more integrated or used the word is in the English lexicon the more likely it

will appear untranslated. But there are terms that don’t easily fit into this categorization,

as the Rumbel-sMi example of matsutake implies, suggesting that each group translates

with particular audiences in mind. While these translation choices certainly reflect

differences in style, they additionally suggest that each group expects divergent levels of

cultural/linguistic familiarity with Japan from their audiences. One function of linear

notes, then, is to provide cultural knowledge necessary to more completely appreciating

the cultural context of Gintama. The implications of these practices will be discussed in

more depth in the next chapter, suffice it to say that for now these strategies stretch across

fan subbing communities as demonstrated in Figures 3.16-3.25.

Two very general approaches to the inclusion of cultural notes can be seen here,

what I call “denotative” notes and “explanatory” notes. Denotative notes function

essentially the same as notes explaining the denotative operation of individual linguistic

words such as kami in Figures 3.26 and 3.27; the linear notes in Figures 3.16-3.25 are

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also examples. Notes such as this are explanatory to the extent that their purpose largely

identifies the cultural referents addressed in the dialogue or displayed on screen; they

supply no moorings beyond the identifications they provide. In this case, the notes above

merely descriptively identify the referents and they are by far the most commonly seen of

the two notes. Explanatory notes, in contrast, attempt to anchor the note and translation

within a particular cultural practice. The linear notes in Figures 3.28-3.30 reflect this

practice; note that while they frequently contain denotative notes it is not a requirement.

It is important to emphasize that while fans utilize linear notes in these fashions,

they are only able to do so due to the digital medium of the computer and the

democratization of video editing tools designed for this platform. Linear notes as used in

this medium function much like a hybrid between the annotated translation and editor’s

notes of the print medium, but their utilization and impact significantly differ. Linear

notes and even translations themselves can appear anywhere on the screen—it is not

uncommon for notes to appear on the side of the screen or, when translating written

characters such as shop names, letters, and the like, for the notes to appear alongside the

text in question. Layout, in other words, is fluid although convention dictates that verbal

communication appears at the lower half of the frame while extra-textual material such as

linear notes stake out a similar share of the top frame. Exceptions do occur, but these

layout practices are by far the most common. Additionally, unlike its print cousin, font

size, style, and even color can, and often do, vary to distinguish characters and different

modes of communication: opening and closing credits typically differ from the font size,

color, and style of character speech; linear notes can appear in different sizes and colors

from character dialogue; overlapping character lines tend to be in different colors. While

these features are not exclusive to the visual channels embedded within container

media—one could imagine a book or magazine utilizing their layouts in a similar

fashion, and translated manga very well way—the operation of these features within a

dynamic multimedia space are subject to constraints not encountered by kami— however

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Figure 3.28: Keroro Gunsou, episode 09, Doremi-Keroro, avi

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Figure 3.29: Tokyo Majin Gakuen, episode 07, Shinsen Subs [SHS], avi

Figure 3.30: Ah! My Goddess! Everybody has Wings, episode. 11, AnimeONE and

AnimeYuki [AonE-AnY], avi

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the word is translated. Notes, and the translations themselves, must fit within specific

time constraints and must be tailored to fit the screen so as not to obscure the visual

component. Consider the following exchange, with the time stamps at which dialogue

and linear notes appear:

Time YuS-SHS Rumbel-sMi

16:40 Matsudaira Let me explain: This game is based on drawing lots with the chopsticks we have here written with one Shogun and the rest numbers on it.

Matsudaira Allow me to explain.

16:41 The Shogun-sama game is one where straws are made from chopsticks with a number or a Shogun on them.

16:46

The one who draws the Shogun stick gets to command the others with dirty decrees and other humiliating orders.

16:49 If someone draws the "Shogun" lot,

16:52 he has the right to command the number he wishes to do as he says without objection. It's this sort of adult game, or should I say "King" game.

16:53

So it's an adult game version…

16:54-16:57

LN The Ou-sama game is basically the same game as this except the orders tend to just be humiliating like in Truth or Dare

16:55 Matsudaira …of the Ou-sama game.

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16:57

Otoe Really, Matsudaira-san,

16:58 Otoe Oh my! Isn't Matsudaira-sama just using this game as an excuse to do sexually harassing stuff?

17:00

you're just using this game to cover up the fact that you're doing perverted things again, aren't you?

17:02 Matsudaira No no, I will only be the judge this time around.

Matsudaira Not at all! After all, I'm just gonna be the silent observer this time.

To address these issues of timing and screen visibility, each group adopts a different

strategy to deal with the rapid dialogue and inclusion of linear notes. SHS-YuS includes

no linear notes, allowing for more room on screen and prioritizing the translation. The

length of their translations is offset by the durations they are allowed to remain on screen.

One significant point is the onset of Matsudaira’s second line, which is timed to start at

16:49, because the start of the dialogue which corresponds to this translation actually

begins three seconds earlier. Rumbel-sMi, in contrast, bombards the viewer with text.

The translations of dialogue, while required to fit in the same span of time as SHS-YuS,

are broken into sections for easier comprehension in conjunction with the linear notes

which, in this case, preempts the dialogue that prompted it. There exists, in other words,

an “economy of phrase” permeating the medium, one that is built upon the intersection of

speed and comprehension. Of course, concerns over timing and layout will be shared by

any televisual medium attempting to render text on frame, but the interactive potential of

container media with respect to the rendering, creation, and layout of subtitles during

playback frames these media as cousins rather than siblings to cinema or television. The

logic of linear notes in the formal operation and experience of the text—the subcultural

motivations and impact will be analyzed in the next chapter—additionally factor into

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container media’s divergence.

Within these contexts, the “economy of phrase” presents some interesting

technical repercussions with respect to translation and cultural perception. The

frequency and type of linear notes provided speaks to an audience’s cultural

competence/familiarity, while (non)translations of individual lexical items—as in the

discussion of matsutake—influence cultural perception. Couched within the context of

container media, these translation choices are influenced by the spatial/temporal sensitive

nature of the medium. The layout and word choices of Figures 3.31 and 3.32

demonstrate offer more examples of this strategy.

Figure 3.31: Gintama, episode 80, Yuurisan-Subs & Shinsen-Subs [YuS-SHS], avi

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Figure 3.32: Gintama, episode 80, Rumbel Subs & so Many idiots Fansubs [Rumbel-

sMi], avi

These issues appear in varying degrees within the following scene from the

Gintama. The scene, a flashback demonstrating Okita’s dislike for Hijikata, takes place

in a soba restaurant. The characters are young, and Okita—a genius in swordsmanship—

is merely a child on not yet in his teens. Mitsuba, his sister, has overloaded her soba with

ichimitougarashi (一味唐辛子; ground red pepper flakes) to the point that a small

mountain covers her meal. Kondo protests, mentioning it’s not good for her health and

turns to Hijikata for support. In response, he overloads his soba in a similar fashion with

a mountain of mayonnaise and begins to calmly eat. Kondo voices disgust and shock,

while the camera shifts to Okita, contempt etched across his face. As he internally voices

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his disgust, the camera switches to Hijikata. The dialogue for each version appears

below:

YuS-SHS Rumbel-sMi Mitsuba: You must be one of those people who want

to buy insurance! I want to bring down public health insurance with what I eat.

Kondo: I don't understand what you're saying… Eh? I don't get it!

What's that?!

What is that anyway?!

Hijikata: You must be… Inside your mouth, it's… …the climax… …rat-ta-ta-ta-ta, wonderful. Kondo: Whose lines are these? Are they Kinoko?

They are disgusting no matter who you are trying to copy them from!

Now who is it?

Hiroko? Masami?! Either way, it's disgusting!

Okita: He pisses me off. I can't stand it.

While the apparently minor differences between the two translations suggest that both

groups are working from the same source material, and that the differences between them

products of dissimilar cultural needs, Ventui (2008) notes that the semantic instability

between referents does not invest a translator with a linguistic impunity to translate

however he wishes and speaks to a more moderate approach to translation: “the

translator’s interpretative choices answer to a receiving cultural situation and so always

exceed the foreign text” (p. 31). Rules govern translation, and the most readily visible

stem from linguistic and cultural scaffolds.

Examination of the translation differences in the YuS-SHS and Rumbel-sMi

versions of exchange between Hijikata, Kondo, Okita, and Mitsuba points to how rules

governing language guide characterizations. From a strictly semantic perspective there

is nothing amiss in either dialogue set; the overall exchange can be understood despite

some fissures in referents in Hijikata’s and Kondo’s lines. Okita’s line follows a similar

grammatical pattern: the YuS-SHS version positions Hijikata as the subject whereas the

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Rumbel-sMi translation affords that honor to Okita himself. This difference in agent

contributes to a pragmatic difference over subjecthood and responsibility that becomes

clearer through an examination of the thematic roles of the sentences. Thematic roles

identify the semantic relationships between a sentence’s argument and the predicate; they

play an important role in Theta Theory, which postulates a connection between lexical

case assignment, the verb, and the arguments said verb can take. The connection

between the three is frequently discussed in terms of a verb’s theta roles. The verbs used

in the YuS-SHS and Rumbel-sMi translations above take, at minimum, two theta roles

and hence need two arguments to ensure their grammaticality—they are transitive verbs.

Removing an argument in these cases alters the semantics of the sentences and

grammaticality can only be achieved if the verbs are understood as intransitive (he pisses

off, i.e. he leaves; I can’t stand, i.e. I am unable to be upright).

Additional conditions include that argument positions be occupied by noun or

inflectional phrases and that semantics further narrows what type of nouns can occupy

specific theta roles. To be pissed off in the manner used in the YuS-SHS translation

requires identification of cause of the ire—the agent—and a recipient—the experiencer.

The verbal arguments in the Rumbl-sMi seem to flip these roles. Based on these roles,

only certain types of nouns can grammatically occupy these positions in English and

make sense. “He pisses me off,” makes sense due to the fact that the nouns occupying

the agent and experiencer roles are capable of agency and emotion, whereas “he pisses

books off” does not as books cannot experience any emotional state. In essence, Theta

Theory notes that verbs require arguments, that these arguments must be filled by nouns,

and that these nouns must make semantic sense.

Thematic roles share similarities with theta roles in that they are tied to the verb’s

arguments. Unlike theta roles, however, an argument may possess multiple thematic

roles. Carnie (2002) explains the difference succinctly: “theta roles are bundles of

thematic relations” (p. 169). While both verbs in the translations carry the same theta

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roles, the thematic roles of the nouns diverge which, in turn, shapes our understanding of

the characters. The YuS-SHS version contains the theta roles <agent, experiencer>

which are occupied by the nouns <he, me>, yet the thematic role of the second argument

can plausibly include “goal” if we ascribe some malice or intent to the agent. In the

Rumbel-sMi case potential candidates for the first argument include “experiencer” or

even “theme.” Ascribing thematic roles to the second argument presents a greater

challenge due to the fact that the lack of referent for “it” broadens the list of thematic

candidates—possible thematic roles are location, cause, perhaps even time. The

multitude of possibilities in assigning a thematic role to the pronoun underscores the fact

that the word itself is carries ambiguous pragmatic content and therefore forces attention

to the only other noun in the utterance: I, meaning Okita.

These differences in the ascribed thematic roles translate to differences in the

representation of the characters. By placing Okita in the direct object position, the YuS-

SHS translation constructs a power relationship between Hijikata and Okita with Okita

occupying the subordinate position. The thematic roles assigned to him implicitly

support this: as “experiencer” Okita can only react to the stimulus provided by the agent,

and as “goal” he becomes an end result or product of the agent’s course of action. In

both cases his volition is suppressed or rendered nonexistent. If his grammatical choices

in this sentence accurately reflect a larger system of (or his perception of) subordination

to Hijikata, it is interesting to note that he does not even refer to Hijikata by name but,

rather, relies on the third person pronoun, a strategy of ambiguity often seen as a

mechanism employed by those under the thumb of subordination to recoup power. In

other words, by expressing his anger through the third person pronoun Okita can credibly

deny he is referring to Hijikata; it is a strategy of indirectness. When used as a strategy

by men in American culture, indirectness carries connotations of untrustworthiness and

even deception. The grammatical choices offered by the YuS-SHS translation, then,

present a representation of Okita as a disgruntled subordinate incapable of actualizing any

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change in his position. The fact that Okita’s line is repeated much like a refrain

throughout the entirety of the episode as he reflects on Hijikata’s actions reinforces an

interpretation of him as a passive, ineffectual complainer.

Rumbel-sMi’s translation of Okita’s line offers a fairly different interpretation.

Instead of necessitating an agent, the chosen verb requires an experiencer to occupy the

first argument which shifts the illocutionary force of the utterance by foregrounding the

psychological state of the subject rather than highlighting the cause of this state. In this

case, then, Okita does not overtly blame Hijikata for his frustration but his lack of

attribution does not necessarily absolve him of the subordinate representation suggested

in the YuS-SHS version. The conjugation of the verb in its potential form implies an

ability or inherent characteristic that is beyond the control of the subject—it’s not that

Okita doesn’t want to be able to endure whatever it is the Hijikata does that angers him

but, rather, that he simply doesn’t have the capacity to do so or the ability to change his

threshold. In this sense, his subordination rests not with Hijikata but perhaps his own

passions. The fact that the only pragmatically stable nominal in his utterance is the

nominative first person pronoun portrays Okita as egotistical and self-absorbed. The

ramifications of this difference in representation of Okita’s character reach beyond the

localized context of Gintama and speak to larger issues of cultural representation that will

be taken up in later chapters.

Conclusion

In the case of container media, the wrapper guides but does not determine the

types of codecs that can be employed in its construction. This top-down hierarchical

examination can be reversed, and it's is equally plausible to state that the choice in codecs

determines the possible containers in which we must ultimately wrap our video. The

inclusion of subtitle files, not the subtitles themselves but the text file that contains the

instructions for embedding, can be viewed in this fashion as well given the fact that

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specific containers support different file formats. These relationships between the

wrapper and codecs draw attention to the relational quality between media and their

compositional ones, a position that equally applies to "content" in the traditional,

representational and narrative senses: language choices in the case of anime fansubs

reflect both limitations of container media and the possibilities afforded by them.

The potential for end users to manipulate the translations of fansubbers, whether

this be through cosmetic alterations such as the manipulations of color, size, or

positioning of text, or whether this be through more radical alterations such as the

modification of words or addition of linguistic material, speaks to the ways in which the

operations between media can be conceived as play. The impact container media have on

the realizations of translations, whether this be through the “economy of phrase” or linear

notes, demonstrates another realization of this play, although the consequences of such

interaction bear ramifications for the perceptions of other cultures.

Of course, play can only exist when there is a player, someone or something

capable of reconceptualizing the existing structure of rules, and in the interactions

between language and media I have articulated so far I have only discussed the role of

human agents within these interactions insofar as they demonstrate larger perceptual

implications of these media interactions. My choice to do so certainly reflects my main

argument that we should be cognizant of the role media artifacts play in shaping

translation, but more importantly the discussion has limited the context of the translation

game to one of personal interaction by the fansubber or fan consumer with container

media. The next chapter expands these corners by analyzing how such play takes shape

within anime fan communities, specifically arguing that the ideological position fans

adopt with respect to anime--its function, its purpose--comprise a facet of the translation

game that fansubbers exploit in their interactions with container media and the

development of their translations.

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CHAPTER IV

OF FANSUBS AND CULTURAL CREDIBILITY

Introduction

In the previous two chapters I have touched upon translation as a means of

broadly arguing that language and container media operate ludically. The immediate

consequences of this approach speak to the role media play in guiding fan interaction

with texts, but more importantly it represents an alternative generative position from

which we can theorize fan relationships to both texts and their communities, a premise

that has been implied up until this point. This chapter enacts such a ludic approach by

analyzing how fans navigate the rules of container media and language in the

development of fan translations of anime. Of special emphasis is how these fans, who

typically operate in fan translation groups or fansub groups, leverage these media to

gather a following. The act of translation, I argue, represents a rhetorical move, a

response, to the convergence of various rules that structure equally various experiences

comprising the translation game: the rules of language as articulated in Chapter II, the

rules of container media as parsed in Chapter III, and the rules governing fan ideologies

that serve as the basis for this chapter’s analysis. Successful moves in this game result in

the accumulation of subcultural capital and can only be achieved through understanding

how each component relates to each other.

A brief overview of subcultural capital as applied to anime fan communities

foregrounds the analysis, and I frame these communities in terms of counterpublics in

order to differentiate between different anime communities and, ultimately, different

fansubbing communities based on their purpose and methodological approaches to

subtitling. These differences allow me to extend the analysis of fan responses to the

“translator’s invisibility” via linear notes and the incorporation of foreign elements into

their translations introduced last chapter by developing a taxonomy for them located in

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their subcultural functions within anime communities. These strategies, to generalize,

reap subcultural credibility through the demonstration of Japanese cultural and linguistic

prowess, areas of particular concern to anime fan communities who relate to Japanese

cultural media as pedagogic devices.

Fandom, particularly status within a given community, is generally marked by

how much one knows about the text itself and its surrounding discourse. General

knowledge, however, is not enough to guarantee status as different groups recognize

different types of knowledges; Fiske (1992) notes that general knowledge on a text

separates fans from non-fans, but within fan communities themselves specialized

knowledge distinguishes levels of fandom. Thornton (2005), building off of Bourdieu’s

(1984) theorization of cultural capital, discusses the circulation of such bodies of

knowledge and the distinctions they invoke in fan communities as subcultural capital.

For Thornton, subcultural capital operates performatively through either material objects

or practices but, definitionally, relies on media for circulation. Within these contexts, it is

not enough to possess knowledge but, rather, its demonstration within appropriate

cultural contexts that determines one’s position within fan networks. For anime fans,

familiarity with not only the Japanese language but also the country’s social, cultural, and

historical histories affords a level of credibility within those communities (Napier, 2005,

2007), hinting that these arenas demarcate normal, run-of-the-mill fans from the upper

echelons of the communities. Despite the importance anime fans place on these

discourses, however, the role media artifacts play in the construction of subcultural

capital—particularly how fans utilize them—produces no ripples in the literature, a

curious fact given the defining role such media play in subcultural capital.

This chapter broaches this concern by tracing how one segment of anime

fansubbing communities—those who produce original translations, not those who re-

encode video or alter existing, quasi-corporate translations—engage container media to

generate and establish subcultural capital via the performance of Japanese linguistic and

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cultural prowess. The fact that many anime fans utilize the medium as a pedagogical tool

places them, as Sakai (1997) has noted with respect to language learning in general,

within subordinate relations of power with respect to teachers, in this case the fansubbers

whose translations serve as linguistic and cultural study aids. While use of specific

containers and codecs contribute to a group’s credibility as noted in the last chapter,

subcultural capital within anime communities lies in the interaction between these formal

features and group-specific translation strategies that appeal to different segments of

these communities. Two mutually reinforcing strategies encapsulate how linear notes

circulate subcultural capital within fansubbed anime: translation choices, and internal

consistency.

A Quick Primer on Fansub Groups: Evolution and Current

Status

No extended description of the anime fansub community exists, and such a task

here would be impossible. That being the case, a rudimentary outline of the types of

groups engaged in fansubbing will serve as a foundation to both the complexities of the

communities and their motivations. More relevant to this chapter, though, such

taxonomy rationalizes my choice of specific fan translation groups.

Much like the theorization of public spheres (Fraser, 1999), fan communities are

varied and the anime community is no different. Anime as a term has been used as a

categorical label to describe a host of divergent genres and anime fandom includes a

surprising catholicity of divergent practices, making more useful to think of the anime

community in plurality: as anime communities. These communities may be accurately

called subcultures, but this ascribes to such groups an oppositional dimension to the

primary culture that may simply not be warranted. In the case of anime fansubbing, the

divergent interests of groups speak to different strategies of engagement with the

discursive concerns of the larger, mainstream culture. With respect to intellectual

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property, Dattebayo, one of the oldest groups around, only works on unlicensed anime

and advocates fans buy DVDs when they appear in local markets; HorribleSubs, by

contrast, only provides rips from anime streaming sites, stating that their motivations

emerge solely to annoy streaming sites that control content.

Engagement with container media and strategies of translations serve as

additional dimensions by which groups can be examined. Some groups, notably THORA

and Coal Girls, specialize in upscaling standard definition anime into high definition;

such groups extract existing fansubs (the group doing the upscaling functions as the

arbiter of what a “good” translation is) and embed them into video ripped from Blu-Ray

source. No original translation is done by these groups—the emphasis lies purely with

re-encoding. Another category of fansubbing concerned with re-encoding exists,

differing from the upscalers in that they draw their video and subtitles from corporate or

quasi-corporate sources and re-encode them. HorribleSubs rips material directly from the

site Crunchyroll, and many popular and obscure groups (Kanjouteki, Tsuki, Color Me

Subbed) in turn re-encode the HorribleSubs rips. Most changes are cosmetic, although at

times these groups will reword and provide minor alterations to translations. They do not,

however, engage in any substantive original work of their own—at best they can be

classified as technically savvy content editors. A third category of fansubbing practice,

the one this chapter is concerned with, produce their own original work from translation

to encoding; this category has suffered attrition from democratization and

despecialization of encoding technologies and the relative speed at which pseudo-

translation groups such as in the second category can release their work. Dattebayo,

Shinsen Subs, Rumbel, and SGKK represent a few groups in the contracting membership

of this category (and some, like Shinsen Subs, no longer exist).

The reasons for the decline of original fan translation groups represents an

argument in and of itself beyond the scope of this chapter as I hesitate to engage in

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traversing a theoretical rabbit hole unrelated to fan uses of container media2, but

understanding some of the historical context in in which these organizations operated

provides a modicum of grounding in terms of the evolution of fan communities and their

shifting priorities. While evolutions in Internet technologies, specifically distribution

networks and network speed, play a large role, they have not killed fan groups who

engage in original translations so much as provided fertile soil in which groups of the

second category mentioned above can flourish.

The restrictions placed on distribution discussed in the last chapter restricted

distribution online to a very small group and limited file formats. Real Network’s rmbv

file format was popular, as it allowed content to be streamed and boasted relatively low

file sizes. The tradeoff was in quality, although this was not entirely the fault of the

encoding process as the technologies involved in capturing TV broadcasts, not to mention

the analogue quality of the broadcasts themselves, were equally poor compared to

contemporary standards. Dial-up dominated the Internet industry, and max speeds of

56.6Kbps severely impeded the downloading of large file sizes—especially since

resumable downloading technologies were still in their infancy and not every server

supported the technology. Additionally, dial-up connections shared the phone line, so

using it to go online tied up other communications and, in part due to this, the connection

itself was tenuous: merely picking up the phone interfered with Internet connectivity. In

short, a dropped connection represented a waste of hours of download activity as it

rendered the file unusable—a particularly frustrating occurrence when the file was 90%

complete.

This was the turn of the millennium, where VHS still reigned supreme as a cheap

method of recording, and video capture cards produced monstrous file sizes when

2 Specifically, I am referring to the connections between technology and speed endemic to late capitalism that Virilio theorizes.

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converted to digital stream. In part because of these limitations many groups distributed

VHS copies of their work, which in turn were copied and sold—to those who knew

where to ask—in local video and hobby stores. The community of fansubbers was small,

and the quasi-underground nature of the industry fostered a sense of elitism and

community typical of fandom. Those who viewed these fan translations, in other words,

were already “in the know” and possessed a modicum of Japanese cultural knowledge.

With the democratization of broadband in the early- to mid-2000’s (Horrigan,

2009), distribution of large file-size anime rapidly receded as an impediment to fan

communities and, spurred by the Japanese government’s adoption of its popular cultural

products as a form of soft power—Cartoon Network’s Toonami, airing weekdays in the

late afternoon and the precedent to Adult Swim—more people became exposed to anime

with the resulting, predictable, increase in public exposure facilitating an increase in fan

base. The rapidity in which modern distribution networks can stream data means that

fans can view anime hours after they are aired in Japan, creating a rift in fan communities

over speed versus quality. Capitalizing on these network advancements, sites such as

Crunchyroll and Anime News Network (ANN) have forged agreements with Japanese

producers and broadcasters, along with American distributors, to provide legal

alternatives to fan distribution of Japanese animation intellectual property.

Of course, one defining characteristic of fandom—at least from fan perspective—

is its outsider status, and corporate leveraging of Internet technologies has met little

success within established fan communities. Resistance to the steaming model of anime

distribution takes shape in current fan practice by technologically inclined fans ripping

the streamed content from these licensed sites and distributing the files via the older,

established fan networks such as BitTorrent or direct download (DDL) file storage sites,

although the latter are now unreliable. These rips provide the base for many other fan

“translation” groups (the second category noted earlier). This trend, however, tends to

apply mainly to currently airing anime where fans prioritize speed. Technical advances

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have also altered the sources from which fans draw upon for their video, with rips from

Blu-ray and DVD sources not uncommon due to their higher quality when compared to

television or Internet streams. The utilization of such sources, naturally, is a consequence

of advances in capture quality, but also indebted to evolutions in network distributions

speeds—while a single mkv episode may push 400 MB, its lossless Blu-ray ripped cousin

may boast a bandwidth clogging 2.5 GB. Whole disks, which typically contain four

episodes on a Japanese Blu-ray, can reach excesses of 16 GB.

In short, the prevalence of anime online and particularly the speed at which

translations are available, whether it be via licensed sites such as Crunchyroll,

HorribleSubs rips from these licensed sites, or other venues, have impacted fan subbing

groups predominantly through fragmentation of their fan bases. As digital media are

compositional to the display and distribution of subcultural capital, understanding how

anime fansub groups engaged in original translation employ container media to these

ends. Particularly relevant to the core claims of this chapter is how this segment of the

fansub community interacts with the larger ideological mechanisms of translation within

container media in order to stoke subcultural capital. Some groups adopt a position

affirming what Venuti (2008) describes as the “translator’s invisibility,” not disrupting

the viewing experience with linear notes or foreign elements at all, while others adopt

various practices that attempt to minimize such intrusion by placing extended notes at the

end of the anime (Figure 2.29 from Shinsen Subs’ work on Tokyo Majin Gakuen in the

last chapter), and/or replace foreign characters with English translations (Figures 2.8 and

2.10 in the previous chapter). Rather than discuss a range of groups, I focus primarily on

how two groups, Rumbel-sMi (Rumbel) and Shinsen Subs-Yuurihan Subs (SHS-YuS)

engage container media in their translations (technically, the two groups are actually four

separate groups, but it is not uncommon for groups to combine resources or even share

members). As groups, membership constantly changes and as a result the translation

strategies enacted by the same group between different anime may also be different

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(compare the SHS practice of placing linear notes at the end of an anime referenced

above versus the strategies that I will discuss in this chapter); due to this, I focus

exclusively on the anime Gintama.

My rationale for this choice is twofold. First, the show’s penchant for cultural

and historical parody through postmodern signification lends itself to explication via

linear notes. As a result, there is more material, on average, to draw upon compared to

other anime, which in turn offers a less occluded view of how fansubbers navigate the

linguistic, container media-specific, and discursive games with respect to subcultural

capital. My second rationale for choosing Gintama lies in the fact that it is one of the few

anime series to experience overlapping fan translations, which allows for convenient

comparative analysis when necessary. In so doing, I can more clearly articulate how

different strategies function.

Language and Linear Notes: Subcultural Capital

Thornton’s (2005) theorization of subcultural capital combined with Napir’s

(2007) observations regarding anime fan communities offers an adequate starting point

from which to engage the uptake of linear notes and their relation to translation choices.

Building off of Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, Thornton defines subcultural

capital as “objectified or embodied” practices largely circulated by media and confer

“status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder” (p. 186); subcultural capital is

laden with power relationships and exercising these objectified or embodied practices

enables one to speak with authority and presume the inferiority of others. Napier (2007),

too, speaks of subcultural capital in anime fans, noting that knowledge of anime and

Japanese culture drives part of its construction: “In the case of anime fandom, once can

argue that learning about Japan (as opposed to knowing about anime) added to the fan’s

cultural capital. Mastering a foreign language or simply gaining knowledge of a foreign

culture can be a genuinely empowering activity” (p. 186). Fan use of anime as a tool to

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learn both Japanese culture and language positions proficiency in one or both domains as

facets of subcultural capital in the arena of fan translation, particularly given the

skepticism and unease with which fans treat corporate renditions due to mainstream

ideologies of translation that impede their pedagogical consumption of Japanese cultural

media. Less important to the development of subcultural capital is a group’s proficiency

with media technologies and their ability to rapidly release episodes in specific formats.

Understanding fan translation and consumption practices in this fashion offers an

explanation of fan engagement with computer media as well as their rejection of the

“translator’s invisibility” through linear notes: for fansubbing groups, linear notes

operate as embodied practices demonstrating their linguistic aptitude and cultural

prowess.

This operation can be seen in both the denotative and explanatory varsities of

linear notes, which derive their legitimacy through overt integration into the narrative of

the anime. Gintama’s status as a cultural provides numerous examples of this process, as

much of the content—from plots to jokes to character names—originates from current

and obscure cultural history. Episode 74 demonstrates the range of ways linear notes are

approached by fan groups to foster cultural explication; the plot of this episode relies on a

series of jokes and references to the manga Kochikame, and can be read as a tribute to the

series which was celebrating its 31st anniversary at the time the episode aired. While

popular and known in Japan, it has not been licensed in America and not familiar to

mainstream American audiences and perhaps even younger generations of anime fans.

As a result, many of the jokes and references may well be lost on the American fan base.

Figures 4.1-4.4 provide a sample of the linear notes given by Rumbel-sMi to supplement

this episode.

The notes provided comprise both the denotative and explanatory types defined in

the last chapter; in this context they primarily function as a means of deepening viewer

understanding of the context of the show. Their integration into the text with this

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Figure 4.1: Gintama, episode 74, Rumbel-sMi, avi

The LN reads: Ryo-II = Ryotsu, the main character of the Kochikame manga.

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Figure 4.2: Gintama, episode 74, Rumbel-sMi, avi.

The LN reads: B-Super5963 = Pronounced "Buchou, gokuro-san," or "Nice work, chief,"

is a phrase often heard in Kochikame.

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The LN reads: The manga chapter corresponding to this episode was written a year

previous. Thus, when this episode aired it was already the 31st anniversary.

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The LN reads: The characters in Katsura’s hair = LaSalle, as in LaSalle Ishii, the voice

actor for Kankichi Ryotsu in Kochikame.

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presumed purpose fosters an apparent paradox: in identifying cultural referents and

parsing linguistic jokes, the linear notes facilitate narrative engagement and thereby

become integrated into the text, yet in so doing they diverge from ideological practices of

“good” translation. To quickly summarize these tensions, translation ideology effaces the

role of the translator in the West largely due to lingering Romantic notions of the author

and status of the text itself (Venuti, 2008). This is exacerbated by similarly lingering

modernist conceptions of the transparency of language and adopted within market,

scientific, and legal systems. These systems imply that the text remains the same across

languages and that the role of the translator relegated to the background of the text. First

and foremost, linear notes in anime grate against both by explicitly drawing attention to

the translation itself as a construct subject to variation and, additionally, the role of

translators in this construction.

But the subcultural needs of the various anime viewing communities suggest that

the visibility of the translator functions with a similar telos: namely to provide

readable,smooth texts. Both denotative and explanatory notes justify the translations

offered by different groups and rationalize divergent translations choices by smoothing

over translations that would appear unnatural or stiff without them. The dialogue

excerpt between Hijikata, Kondo, Okita, and his sister discussed in the previous chapter

can be further explicated within the context of these linear notes. When first introduced,

the conversation did not include the linear notes; I repeat the conversation here with the

liner notes:

Yuurisan Subs and Shinsensubs

(YuS-SHS)

Rumbel Subs and sMi

(Rumbel-sMi)

Mitsuba: You must be one of those people who

want to buy insurance!

I want to bring down public

health insurance with what I

eat.

Kondo: I don't understand what you're saying… Eh? I don't get it!

What's that?! What is that anyway?!

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Hijikata: You must be… Inside your mouth, it's…

…the climax…

…rat-ta-ta-ta-ta, wonderful.

LN: Hijikata is making a reference

to "Sailor Suit and Machine

Gun." Hiroko and Masami are

the names of the two actresses

who played the main character

in the 1981 movie and the 2006

drama

Kondo: Whose lines are these? Are they

Kinoko? They are disgusting no matter

who you are trying to copy them from!

Now who is it?

Hiroko? Masami?!

Either way, it's disgusting!

Okita: He pisses me off. I can't stand it.

Without the linear note, Rumbel-sMi’s rendition of Hijikata’s lines appeared out

of place, a non-sequitur within the overall exchange. Viewed with the linear note,

however, Hijikata’s reaction appears smoother even if we do not necessarily understand

the context in which the original was produced. The linear note itself is a good example

of a denotative one as it merely states the links in the cultural chain of signification; in

this fashion the linear note becomes integrated into the translation itself and its presence

essential to maintaining the smooth and readable translations Western audiences expect.

This process is particularly important when the translation itself appears to contain errors.

Consider the translation offered in Figure 4.5: what might be viewed as a typo and

disruptive to the viewing experience, much like the errors of Lux-Pain discussed

previously, is transformed in this instance into a demonstration of Rumbel’s linguistic

aptitude. The explanation of Toujo’s irregular pronunciation demonstrates the group’s

phonetic prowess in differentiating between morphemes which within the context of the

consumption of anime for pedagogical purposes assists viewers in training their own ears.

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The LN reads: Toujo says "wakarimoshita," instead of "wakarimashita," which would

mean, "I understand."

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Equally important, however, the inclusion of the linear note reinforces the

translation provided and justifies the group’s choice, articulating a symbiotic relationship

between the two. Essential to this relationship, and the establishment of subcultural

capital in container media, is the visibility of the linear note as without it the group can

neither show its skill with language nor assert that its translation is faithful.

The use of linear notes in this fashion, however, is paradoxical to the expectations

of Western audiences and the ideology of translation reflected in “the translator’s

invisibility.” Skillful translations, defined primarily by readability approximating a

native text and the extirpation of foreign elements, erase the translator from the product,

but in the case of anime fansubbing their inclusion serves very real subcultural needs: for

fan communities who utilize anime to learn about the Japanese language and culture,

removal of foreign content itself is tantamount to executing the cultural and linguistic

heritage that defines anime. In order to accommodate this preference, the translator must

make his or her presence overtly known through linear notes and in so doing, their textual

additions become intertwined with embodied subcultural capital due to the fact that many

fans are in the process of learning the Japanese linguistic, cultural, and historical maps

and therefore in a restricted position to challenge the narratives provided by fansubbing

organizations.

The types of knowledges fan translation groups choose to visibly demonstrate

through linear notes in their works are varied, ranging from what many fans may consider

obvious to the relatively obscure. The plurality of topics on which fan translation

organizations offer linear notes reflects, in part, the requirement of visibility in staking

out subcultural capital, but given that members of fan communities carve their identities

out of specialized knowledge the explication of generic, readily identifiable popular

cultural icons appears counterproductive to gathering subcultural capital within these

specialized communities. YuS-SHS, for example, includes a note in episode 73

establishing that “Luigi is from Super Mario Brothers,” and Rumbel-sMi points out that

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the monsters in episode 82 “are a parody of Pokémon.” Both groups take the time in

episode 79 to note the origins of Yamucha and Tenshinhan of Dragonball Z, deigning to

explain the origins of Yoda or Bigfoot referenced 30 seconds prior. Each of these

references have met with commercial success in the U.S. and certainly have recognition

within anime fan communities such that explication or identification of the references

serves little pedagogical function and does not even establish the group as competent to

navigate the currents of Japanese culture (see Figures 4.6-4.9 for examples). Rather,

practice in this vein may be construed as a means of establishing their role not as fans of

one particular anime but instead a series of anime and their communities. After all, the

anime fan “community” is not a singular entity: it is a varied and diverse collection of

groups whose interests are equally varied and diverse.

Those who watch Gintama may not be fluent in the icons of other anime or

Japanese media such as video games, a rationale that offers justification for the breadth of

linear notes across diverse forms of Japanese cultural media such as video games, anime

and manga with which fans commonly engage. Through identification of these specific

media circulating in varying fan circles, fansubbing groups can begin to carve a niche

within multiple fan communities. This explains one function of linear notes identifying

references in other, older anime such as Mobile Suit Gundam3 as well as those

identifying more recent series such as Bleach, Naruto and One Piece4. Notes on manga

further embody their Japanese cultural prowess with animation and drawing, but

demonstrating intimate knowledge of anime and other closely cognate Japanese cultural

media does not guarantee an invitation to the upper echelons of any given anime

3 Series aired in Japan in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s; it appeared on U.S. shores in

2001 on Cartoon Network but was cancelled before the entire series ran. Both YuS-SHS and Rumbel-sMi explain the reference in episode 79 of Gintama.

4 Rumbel-sMi notes in a series quick notes in episode 86 the origins of a number of items Gin and Okita are wearing and carrying—all from series currently airing and popular in both America and Japan.

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Figure 4.6: Gintama, episode. 73, YuS-SHS, avi

The LN reads: TL notes: Luigi is from Super Mario Brothers

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Figure 4.7: Gintama, episode. 82, Rumbel-sMi, avi

The LN reads: Gintoki’s line and the monsters themselves are a parody of Pokémon

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Figure 4.8: Gintama, episode. 79, YuS-SHS, avi

The LN reads: TL note: Another reference to DBZ

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Figure 4.9: Gintama, episode. 79, Rumbel-sMi, avi

The LN reads: Tenshinhan = Another character from the Dragon Ball series.

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community; rather, due to the common utilization of anime as an entrance into larger

historical, cultural, and social discourses of Japan a working knowledge of these non-

popular cultural discourses is equally necessary. Fansubbers, in essence, strive to

demonstrate equal fluency outside the anime kingdom, constructing themselves as more

broadly informed “renaissance” fans. The types of referents that appear with linear notes

are varied, as shown in Figures 4.10-4.16 on the next pages, with Table 4.1 below listing

the linear notes for ease of reference:

Table 4.1: List of LN topics in Figures 4.10-4.16

Figure Episode Linear Note

4.10 84 Nico Nico is a popular video streaming site in Japan, and "Rumi" is a popular cat name.

4.11 80 A Narita divorce is when a couple divorces after they arrive home at Narita International Airport from their honeymoon abroad.

4.12 82 "Ramen with rice" refers to putting rice in the leftover soup for the ramen noodles. Chikara udon is a hot udon dish that is topped with mochi rice cakes."

4.13 84 TL note: Hard Boiled is a 1992 Hong Kong film featuring an undercover cop and a gang shootout, and can also take to mean a "tough attitude"

4.14 75 TL note: Princess Kaguya is a legendary fairy who resides in the moon

4.15 79 "Benjou Warashi," translated as "Toilet Child," is a play on the "Banchou Sarayoushiki" folktale, also used in Episode 68.

4.16 4 Note: Red Circle probably refers to an off-brand imprint, as started by Archie Comics

As demonstrated in the last chapter these practices are not isolated to Gintama,

although the show’s penchant for postmodern referential play ensures liberal dispersion

of linear notes as fans struggle to demonstrate the reserves of their linguistic and cultural

fonts in even the most obscure of contexts. The range of topics covered by these notes—

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133


The LN reads: A Narita divorce is when a couple divorces after they arrive home at

Narita International Airport from their honeymoon abroad.

134


The LN reads: "Ramen with rice" refers to putting rice in the leftover soup for the

ramen noodles. Chikara udon is a hot udon dish that is topped with mochi rice cakes."

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Figure 4.13: Gintama, episode 84, YuS-SHS, avi

The LN reads: TL note: Hard Boiled is a 1992 Hong Kong film featuring an

undercover cop and a gang shootout, and can also take to mean a "tough attitude"

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Figure 4.14: Gintama, episode 75, YuS-SHS, avi

The LN reads: TL note: Princess Kaguya is a legendary fairy who resides in the moon

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The LN reads: "Benjou Warashi," translated as "Toilet Child," is a play on the "Banchou

Sarayoushiki" folktale, also used in Episode 68.

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Figure 4.16: Gintama, episode 04, SHS, avi

The LN reads: Note: Red Circle probably refers to an off-brand imprint, as started by

Archie Comics

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Japanese myth and fairy tales, popular cultural trends, foreign films, and food— offer a

glimpse into the latitude fans take with supplying information to fans and positions the

practice as an almost textbook example of postmodern signification. Identifying and

articulating connections between various cultural referents across media and across

decades, these notes perform cultural finesse via the selective repackaging of Japanese

(pop) culture to be consumed by fan viewers; the emphasis on cultural prowess

differentiates credibility within non-Japanese fan communities from that of their Japanese

otaku cousins: while Japanese fans fetishize the visual aspects of anime (Lamarre, 2009),

they have little need of cultural linear notes, being absorbed in the culture in question.

For non-Japanese fan consumers of anime these notes facilitate their goals of learning

both the Japanese language and the culture, and a group’s silence on cultural referents

implies—legitimately or not—a lack of familiarity with source material to engage in this

signification game.

Indeed, as a text that integrates popular cultural material into its jokes and plot

lines, Gintama challenges viewers to identify the references embedded within the show,

rewarding those who can keep up with that very sense of superiority that serves to

separate casual fans from those “in the know.” As embodied practices, credibility is

largely derived from the perspective of the viewer, and the appearance of Japanese

linguistic, cultural, and historical proficiencies is all we can glean from these linear notes:

whether or not these groups can freely utilize these knowledges is secondary, as the linear

notes themselves carry the burden of credibility by virtue of being the only means

through which fans can interrogate a group’s or individual’s prowess. Visibility, then, is

an essential part of credibility in the fansubbing context and motivates the practice’s

resistance to mainstream translation ideology with respect to translator presence.

While linguistic discrimination establishes groups as capable translators, anime

fans equally hunger for cultural and historical nuggets to broaden their perspective.

Given the currency fans of anime place on cultural prowess, linear notes of both varieties

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function as a means of legitimating the group’s status as proficient and capable

translators. Drawing strength in part from the syntax of the linear notes themselves and

their function as a justification of the translation provided, the utilization of linear notes

offers a demonstration of both the linguistic and cultural prowess of the group.

Foreign Words: Selective Fissures in Translations

While the demonstration of knowledge integral to subcultural capital in container

media must be explicitly visible in order to indicate one’s proficiency, this needs not take

place exclusively via linear notes. The refusal to purge foreign elements from a

translation presents another opportunity, albeit one often used in tandem with linear notes,

to mark one’s credentials. Within the context of anime fansubbing, however, the choice

to leave untranslated islands of Japanese words in English translations speaks less to a

rejection of such ideology as it does to the discursive concerns of anime viewing

communities. Given the status linguistic and cultural performance afford within anime

communities, lack of translations may been seen as an extension of the gambit for

subcultural capital predicated upon linguistic differentiation between audiences and

between individual lexical items. This differentiation, as with linear notes, operates only

through visibility.

The first and most obvious claim that can be made with respect to audiences is

that the use of Japanese terms in English translations functions to separate and categorize

divergent levels of knowledge. As seen in the last chapter’s discussion of the search for

the elusive matsutake, not all Japanese words are rendered into their English equivalents

or provided with explanatory linear notes. Like the grammatical ruptures associated with

Lux Pain, these foreign elements produce a degree of immersive dissonance related to the

breakdown in linguistic referentiality; the absence of linear notes operating in

conjunction with the translated narrative leaves the viewer, particularly one whose

Japanese linguistic and cultural knowledge remains budding, without a capable cognitive

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map to effectively link the referential chain of signification. This almost certainly

comprises one facet of why “good” translations are deemed to be ones stripped of

foreignness, as they avoid such disorientation by linguistically sanitizing the text to

promote homogeneity of referential access. Refusal to localize, in contrast, implies that

these referents do indeed carry specific baggage rendering them untranslatable. In so

doing fansubbing groups position themselves as arbiters of multiple nodes of proficiency

ranging from linguistic to cultural to historical that collectively comprise Japan as an

object of study within the fan community and serve as the nexus from which hierarchical

power radiates.

One translation in particular provides an archetypical example of how

untranslated terms operate on multiple levels to identify varying knowledge skill sets:

Rumbel-sMi’s use of the term joui in episode 86. The term refers to a belief system

originating in the bakumatsu that advocated the expulsion of foreigners from Japan; like

many Japanese terms, there is not an easy, succinct translation that captures the gravity of

what the word implies. YuS-SHS translates the term as “nationalist,” a choice most

American fan viewers could readily identify with due to twenty-first century conservative

discourse linking “nationalism” with the expulsion of illegal immigration, but the

differing historical contexts construct “nationalism” in these periods quite differently, and

the utilization of joui by Rumbel-sMi, instead of a translation, explicitly demarcates

divergent significations and implies a familiarity with Japanese historical and cultural

trends that, coupled with a lack of linear notes explaining the choice, are shared by a

specialized segment of the fan community. Uncommon in general usage, the choice to

leave the word in Japanese demands a similar background from fan audiences if they are

to fully appreciate the nuance of the term’s use.

Any choice to not translate a term experiences a similar intersection of these

discursive dynamics, although not every instance carries the same discursive weight. It is

one thing to claim that joui or even matsudake carries culturally-bound significations best

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left wrapped in the original, but it is admittedly harder to practically resolve how the

refusal to translate tonkatsu as “pork cutlet” (as in the translations offered by Rumbel-

sMi and Yus-SHS episode 75) operate on the same plain as more historio-politically

laden terms such as joui. With respect to the flow of subcultural capital within the anime

communities, however, judgment with respect to the efficacy of Japanese terms,

regardless of the (lack of) discursive relationships percolating underneath, rests with the

individual viewers: subcultural capital is conferred, Thornton notes, through perceptions

of fans. Different fans will react differently to the use of Japanese words without gloss

based on their own Japanese skill sets, but there is the additional caveat that, in general,

fan communities prefer lingering Japanese referents in their anime as it facilitates their

learning and maintains a semblance of Japanese-ness to the anime.

A more significant corollary to the perceptive characteristic of subcultural capital,

then, affirms that fansubbing groups need not actually possess the knowledge they offer

but, rather, effectively demonstrate it. Whether or not Rumbel has an encyclopedic

knowledge of the historical context of joui is irrelevant: what matters is how the group

utilizes container media to give the appearance of knowledge. Linear notes—whether

explanatory or denotative—justify translations and give the appearance of knowledge,

allowing fans to consume these works to facilitate their own learning. Leaving terms in

their original Japanese operates in a parallel fashion by demarcating hierarchical group

statuses based on sociolinguistic proficiency.

Concluding Remarks: Subcultural Capital and Perceptive

Plurality

If we understand language, particularly translation, as a ludic practice and if we

frame fan engagement with container media in the same light, then differences between

fansubbed texts represent plurality—different methods by which distinct translation

groups navigate multiple, intertwining rules of play emergent from multiple media. In

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this respect, linear notes represent one aspect of this play and serve to reinforce or justify

translations provided by groups which, in turn, operate as a means of subcultural capital.

In garnering subcultural capital, then, the accuracy of translations is not as important as

the way in which fansubbing organizations leverage container media.

Different fan organizations approach anime and the processes of translation—

which as I have argued necessitates consideration of the medium as part of this process—

differently. These differences emerge from differences in their ideological outlook on

translation as well as the discursive priorities of the communities for whom they envision

themselves translating. The relationship between these communities and their work in

container media, however, should not be construed as a causal one; while discursive

forces certainly play a role in shaping fansubbers’ interactions with container media, I

have been arguing that these factors are but one constituent force in human interaction

with them as such interactions emerge from a relational engagement with how we

perceive media artifacts in conjunction with what the artifact is capable of doing. In this

respect, the synergistic function of linear notes with the translations in conjunction with

the appearance of terms in their original Japanese reflects the fact that fan communities

approach anime for linguistic and cultural developmental purposes but only achieves

efficacy within the potentiality of container media.

The interplay between the two fields implies plurality in how Japanese culture can

be represented and perceived through anime. While the differences can at times be minor,

as noted in Chapter III even these subtle differences at times provide radically different

constructions of the characters. The inclusion of linear notes and foreign words into

translation practices further fractures the singular narrative portrayal of anime in that their

integration into the anime alters the viewing experience by attempting to provide a more

native experience. As different groups cater to different communities, viewing two

different translations of the anime episode will result in a narratively similar but

representationally and perceptually different experience. These differences set the stage

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for different relations, personal and perceptual, to Japanese culture. In the face of such

plurality, we are no longer hostage to the hegemony of singular representations—the case

most relevant to anime being the market ideology of licensing that legitimizes one

voice—and can freely challenge stereotypical and Orientalist constructions of Japanese

cultural practice.

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CHAPTER V

EXPANDING THE FIELD: CONCLUDING REMARKS ON MEDIA

COMPOSITION AND ENGAGEMENT

I began this dissertation from the rather casual position that the different

translations to Kondo’s “problem” offer glimpses at the individual strands comprising the

larger discursive webwork of anime, specifically the relationships between the medium

and language as it relates to translation, fan engagement with these two fields in the

production of translations, and the subcultural reception of different translation strategies.

While I have done my best to parse these themes for individual attention and analysis,

one unifying theme in this dissertation is the reality that they operate in tandem--to

demarcate and compartmentalize them overlooks how each of these strands co-constitute

media engagement, and these interactions between media, fans, and subcultures should be

viewed as a ludic endeavor.

With respect to interactions with media, ludic engagement occurs as people

encounter and, most importantly, respond to the strictures imposed by the technological

and formal properties of the medium upon unfettered free play. Naturally, as with all

games human interaction defines engagement, but this is because of the possibility—nay,

the predilection—of human agents to change the rules, redefine the parameters of

interaction, as engagement unfolds. But the potential to do this, however, is not

absolute: formal properties of the medium guide, and quite frequently limit, the types of

engagement possible. It is the struggle to overcome such limitations, to invent novel

ways of interacting with a medium to meet our needs, that motivates my position that

ludic practices in this vein are generative, productive affairs. So, in keeping with the

dissertation's argument that ludic tensions generate novel forms of engagement, I

conclude with some observations over the potential this theory of media has in the larger

realm of media studies, along with some reflections on the developmental challenges it

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must face to succeed. Two very broad applications to the study of media seem apropos:

first, how my taxonomy of media facilitates our understanding of new media

technologies and second, how adopting this categorization offers a subtler understanding

of the complexities of media engagement, particularly as the relate to translation and

cultural representation.

Understanding of how media and fans co-construct translations and textual

engagement establishes a beachhead in differentiating related families of media, offering

a theoretical rationale for distinctions circulating in various public spheres regarding

closely related media objects. Such an approach emphasizes not the purpose or use-value

of the medium in question but, rather, how tracing the intersections between the

properties of a medium’s compositional media elements differentiate similar media

artifacts. Video game remakes provide a case in point: the original Final Fantasy, first

released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), has been ported to the Nintendo

DS and iterations can even be found on mobile phone platforms. Narratively and

ludically they are similar games, as the story and internal gameplay function roughly the

same despite minor alterations to both systems. These two features construct the

operational definition of the medium of the video game, but there is something

qualitatively different about playing Final Fantasy on the iPhone, the DS, or the original

8-bit system—and those who play video games recognize this difference.

At its core this approach to media relies on analyzing configurations: of rules, of

interactions, of structures. Much like Lyotard’s theorization of language games, one can

conceive of this approach as guided by conflict in which the generation of novel

approaches or interactions with media comprises the important analytical threshold. We

must be wary, however, of devolving into endless regression in our pursuit of

understanding how media co-constitute other media, and I admit little practical reflection

on this problem at this stage. After all, language is composed of individual words, which

in turn are comprised of morphemes, which derive existence from phonemes. Or the

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dialogue we hear in a video game or anime—particularly when coupled with subtitles—

finds prior purchase in the medium of writing, which can endlessly digress in

compositional media until we reach whatever obscure origin we want. To make a

mathematical comparison, medium X is comprised of a number of X’ media, of which a

number of X” media form their constituent parts, and they themselves are comprised of

X”’ media and so on. Theoretically and abstractly this regression makes sense, but at

some point a line must be drawn to prevent any analysis from becoming too obtuse.

After all, the more levels down one progresses the more potential media exist, presenting

choices over analytical paths laden with power relationships. Furthermore, it is almost

certain that the same compositional media will appear at different derivative levels, and

should these be treated as similar or different? My earlier statement comparing media to

apples complicates this here by suggesting they are different, at least qualitatively, and I

can see how language comprising audio differs from that in writing. But what about

moments when the “same” medium appears? I do not have the answers to these

admittedly narrow and hypothetical cases, but details do matter and the topic should serve

as one of many starting points into the compositional theorization of media. That said, I

have arbitrarily drawn it at the X’ and X” stages as my larger concern is with advancing

how a compositional approach to media would work, itself a necessary step prior to the

hashing of minutiae; I leave it to others to theorize and practice more regressive cyclical

approaches.

Analyzing the formal properties of media, given form via the configurations of

their compositional media, offers one way to understand how related families of media

qualitatively differ. The potential for haptic engagement, for example, comprises one

part of the difference between the various platforms on which Final Fantasy appears, but

equally part of the mix is the human relationship to technology, how media technologies

are understood and framed within the various (sub)cultural spheres in which they

circulate. The proportions to which these rules should be seen as comprising media is a

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difficult question, as is how far we should pursue the contributions of a medium’s

component media. While the relationships between component media motivate the types

of rules and their salience in media artifacts, we must not forget these rules only make

sense when positioned within the realm of human interaction. Shifting social and

ideological discourses shape our use of media—and, at times, impose limitations on

them—just as much as the eclectic set of rules inherited from compositional media.

Introduce subcultural proscriptions and prescriptions and we are left with an erratic

alchemical formula for predicting media engagement. Different configurations produce

different media, whether these are the somewhat rigid proscriptions imposed by the

formal properties of the constitutive media in question or surrounding social, historical,

or cultural rules associated with said media.

Adopting this position necessitates that we integrate an analysis of how a given

community understands the media object in question within not only socio-cultural

configurations, but also with respect to other media artifacts—whether compositional to

the object under scrutiny or not—and its position within discourses of technology. This

approach builds on theoretical frameworks concerned with social and cultural critiques

but, though its emphasis on relationships and configurations of media technologies

among each other and within these larger spheres, articulates how such relationships

inform media engagement in specific periods or across time.

Translation presents a clear horizon from which to enter this territory where

familiar vistas of representation, politics, and market relations overlap; while I focus on

anime, the same principles here apply to any text that operates in multiple linguistic

communities. In applying my theorization of how communities engage media as outlined

above, I have emphasized the role of language and asserted its role to be less protean and

more quantum: we cannot analyze it from both a ludic and narrative perspective at the

same time as the rules are different albeit not incommensurable.

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In approaching language as a narrative device, we prioritize its representational

characteristics that seek to forge stable relationships between words and their

corresponding concepts or real-world objects. Certain objects may boast clusters of

words surrounding them, but pragmatically and semantically they convey different

meanings as otherwise there would be little need for differential nuance. While “big” and

“humongous” or “pink” and “salmon” may refer to roughly the same concept, the

existence of different terms points to some need, cultural or otherwise, for distinction.

The difference can be visualized as being a mist versus a stream; in this light, two

different translations will speak to two different albeit similar representations—the

overall meaning (hopefully) remains in the same diffuse area, but each instance presents a

singular interpretation. What complicates this affair is, of course, the ludic nature of

language of which semantics and pragmatics play one part.

Language choices made in translation are influenced by the medium in which the

translation appears. Video games, for example, operate with limitations of screen size

and file size while container media carry additional considerations of encoding and

timing. Understanding media engagement as a series of tensions between formal

properties and socio-cultural discourses, however, we must reconcile the process of

translation as engagement with not only the medium in which it appears but also the

contextual discourses in which the medium itself occupies. A translated book, for

example, is constrained not only by page sizes but also word counts mandated by

publishers to ensure a more marketable product; different broadcast media ecologies

impact translations program length and commercial interruptions.

Regardless of the focus, constraints in this vein can impact the representations

offered in these media by forcing the use of cognate words or grammatical patterns that

result in a generally similar meaning across different versions of the same text. When

one begins to alter language to fit the constraints of another medium, then one begins to

engage the ludic dimensions of language as fidelity to the source takes a back seat to

150

playing with the intersections between media rules the navigation of which informs the

narrative dimension of language.

As I reflected in the conclusion of Chapter IV, such divergence is not necessarily

a bad thing as it promotes a perceptual range of cultures that may challenge cultural

stereotyping. Unfortunately what has been assumed in this conversation is a relative

fidelity by fans to the original Japanese, some liberties with localization aside; more to

the point, that while fansubbing organizations may play with the minutiae of translation

ideologies through their overt presence or inclusion of foreign elements in their

translations, they do play by the larger hegemonic rules that position the move between

languages as roughly cognate. Deviating from the established rules too drastically

facilitates problems that may grate against larger political realities. To more concretely

demonstrate these problems, I return to the scene from Gintama introduced in the first

pages of this project, a case where translation goes “bad.” The translation, recall, comes

from SHS working alone; each line appears as it does on screen, and the linear note at the

end appears simultaneous with the last line.

SHS Translation

Kondo: I'm just such a pitiful wreck…

There's no way any woman would go for me.

I'm just no good…

Tae: That's not true at all.

You're so manly… It's nice

.

Kondo: Then, Otae-san,

if your boyfriend…

What if he were impotent?

Tae: Then I'd love him, impotence and all.

Kondo: She's so calm. She just accepts it, like the Buddha!

LN: Note: this line is a play on the words for "marry" and "sex"

Let's do it at the altar!

151

The translation moves smoothly, particularly with the addition of the linear note

explicating the play on words that is so common in Japanese. As argued in Chapter IV,

the linear affirms the translation and provides a consistency that appears to confer

credibility. Without comparison to translation from other groups—which beyond being

generally non-existent except in the case of the most popular anime is additionally a

rarity as fans, much like in other, more market-driven contexts, tend to confine

themselves to specific groups’ translation brands and so don’t explore alternate

translations—or a working knowledge of Japanese nothing appears amiss. The

translation, however, is a literal rendition of the dialogue accompanied by both the

original Japanese and the SHS rendition; I have chosen my own translation instead of one

from Crunchyroll (the only other translation I have seen and provided in Chapter I)

because it is a corporate, not fan, translation.

Literal Original Japanese SHS

Kondo: Why do I have such a

hairy ass?

douse ore nante ketsuge

booboo dashisa

I'm just such a pitiful

wreck…

I don’t know how I’ll get

a woman.

onna ni moteru

wakenaindayo

There's no way any

woman would go for

me.

I’m useless… dame dana ore wa I'm just no good…

Tae: It’s not like that. sonna koto nai desuyo

That's not true at all.

Isn’t it wonderfully

manly?

otoko rashikute suteki

ja arimasenka

You're so manly…

It's nice.

Kondo: Then I’ll ask you, jaa kikukedosa

Then, Otae-san,

What if your boyfriend… moshi otaesan no

kareshi ga saa

if your boyfriend…

What would you do if he

had hair all over his butt?

ketsu ga kedaruma

dattara dou suru yo

What if he were

impotent?

Tae: I’d love him, even with

his butt hair.

ketsuge goto aishimasu Then I'd love him,

impotence and all.

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Kondo: A buddha…she’s a

buddha who draws in all

the impurities around her!

bosatsu… subete no

fujou o tsutsumikomu

marude bosatsuda

She's so calm. She

just accepts it, like

the Buddha!

LN: Note: this line is a

play on the words

for "marry" and

"sex"

Butt…butt…butt…please

marry me!

ketsu…ketsu…ketsu…

ketsukon shite kudasai

Let's do it at the

altar!

In this case it is arguable if even the spirit of the exchange remains intact in the

SHS translation, although the operation of the linear notes in this instance renders their

liberties in translation irrelevant. As a state of play—between Japanese and English,

between language and container media—variations in fan engagement in these spaces

materialize a wide realm of possibility. Such engagement with media must, in addition to

the constraints placed upon it formally via the media in which they work, be tempered

within the meta-discursive and (sub)cultural currents in which they operate. While media

indeed guide the types of moves possible when tinkering with a text, the palatability of

these moves takes shape within specific socially constructed discursive situations or at

the edges of overlapping ones. The distinction is more of species than genus, as socially

discursive prohibitions may be as inflexible as limitations imposed by media artifacts

themselves.

As fans struggle with parsing translations and wrestling with the encoding process

of container media, they are additionally subject to the expectations of other institutions

and communities, the most relevant here being the anime viewing communities. In this

case, the pedagogical function many fan communities imbue upon anime necessarily

limits the types of moves that fansubbing groups can make with respect to their

translations; SHS’s rendition above proves a flawed vehicle by which to learn Japanese

due to its liberal translation, and therefore does not meet the expectations of the

153

community despite the deployment of linear notes in a fashion aimed at the generation

subcultural capital. The role of student that many fans adopt in approaching anime places

them in a power dynamic that limits the types of critique in which they levy within

communities, if they by some chance possessed the competency to identify the issue to

begin with.

The potential impact such translations have on the perception of Japanese culture,

too, must be considered as fans utilize anime to gain cultural proficiency in addition to

linguistic knowledge. Although Napir (2007) notes that many fans critically consume the

images provided in anime, she does not address how fans understand the role of these

anime within Japanese culture, nor does she discuss how fans address differences in

translations. It is one thing to point out that fans place critical distance between

themselves and stereotypical tropes that circulate within anime genres, but it is a different

matter to ask how they interpret anime within social structures such as Japanese and

American media. Azuma (浩紀, 2001) theorizes some of these issues, but from the

perspective of Japanese fans and, of course, without a discussion of fansubbing. Fans of

all varieties, in other words, approach anime not as wholly simulacral texts but

selectively approach portions of these texts as representations of larger socio-political and

cultural discourses.

Different configurations, in sum, foster different representations. In a mediated

global culture, the importance of representational management is particularly pronounced,

especially when the stakes are political or economic. Japan’s use of anime and other

cultural media as a form of soft power certainly falls into these categories, and the

existence of multiple translations for such media amount to multiple mediations through

which Japanese culture gets framed. Such diversity is not necessarily a bad thing and

certainly does expand the shores of Japanese culture through what amounts to fan

crowdsourcing. The problems with this model, however, run the risk of articulating

discourses at odds with what the Japanese government may wish to promote.

154

These reflections on language and other media speak not only to our conception

of media as a whole on a theoretical level but also reflect practical concerns over how

communities interact with and deploy media. Within the context of fan studies,

particularly anime, the overall theme of this dissertation draws attention to the central

role media objects play in the articulation of fandom by demonstrating how concrete

practices both shape and are shaped by media. What fans do with media is as important

as which media they use. This distinction should help discriminate between different

types of anime fandom, a current lack of which is sorely lacking in both popular and

academic conversations.

155

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