#art prompt feel free to use this (and show me when you're done hehe)

[that-foul-legacy-lover]

*wakes up in a cold sweat*

Melusine Foul Legacy........

[aer-in-wanderland]

hello! i see you're often dissatisfied with the official translations for tale of the nine tailed. i also always want to know exactly what the characters are saying and it saddens me to see changes in the translations. are there any translations of lee yeon/nam ji ah dialogue that you thought were particularly inaccurate? how would you render them?

Hello! I’m afraid you may have opened Pandora’s box with this one haha

First off, most (if not all) of the subs you’re seeing going around aren’t official translations but rather fansubs. Because fansubs go up as fast as possible there’s no time for review or editing, and this often means they leave a lot to be desired. As someone who has done a good amount of professional translation, I tend to put a lot of thought into ensuring that not only the content, but also the context and tone of my translations are accurate. It’s an art, not a science. 

To answer your question, though, there are a few Yeon/Ji Ah interactions I can think of where the subs particularly bugged me.

The first is from EP05, when Ji Ah presses Yeon to tell her how Ah Eum died. 

Yeon tells her, ‘It has nothing to do with you’ (or even more neutrally, ‘it’s unrelated to you’ but that’s an uncommon phrasing in English). The sub here was, ‘It’s none of your business,’ which is another way you could translate that, but it’s both less literal and also more callous than I felt Yeon was being here. 

In response, Ji Ah insists she knows it does (have something to do with her). Yeon’s response was subbed, ‘At times, it’s better to be in the dark. So live your life as the clueless person you have been.’ This is taking a lot of license and not in a good way. I would have translated Yeon’s response as follows:

Yeon: At times...there are times when knowing something becomes poison. Please just keep living as you are now, not knowing.  

First off, to my thinking there’s a big difference between ‘being in the dark’ and ‘knowledge can be poison,’ which is actually what he says. Second, he says absolutely nothing to the effect of ‘clueless person.’ He does literally say ‘not knowing anything,’ but I would have left out the ‘anything’ because it changes the tone of the sentence. It’s technically correct from a one-to-one translation standpoint, but ultimately wrong in terms of communicating what he means and how he means it. Finally, while he doesn’t literally say ‘please,’ what he does say (‘살아주라’) is the imperative form of the verb (to live) + ‘ju-da’ grammar pattern, which holds the implication that she is doing it for his sake. 

The sub here really bugged me because it made it sound like Yeon was condescending to Ji Ah, saying that she should just keep on being ignorant, when in fact he was asking her very plaintively to trust him and accept not knowing. Overall, I thought it misrepresented his character in an unflattering light so it stuck with me. 

Another example of a sub that bothered me is from EP12, when Ji Ah’s parents ask Yeon what he likes about Ji Ah and Yeon tells them being with her comforts him (paraphrasing). The translation of Ji Ah’s line that followed that was a bit problematic for me. The sub here read, ‘But Yeon made me realize...that we’re supposed to live in the shadows...of the people we rely on. I wanted to be that kind of person too.’ I would have translated this as:

Ji Ah: But I met Lee Yeon and came to understand: people live their lives in the shadow of someone they can depend upon. I have to become that type of person too.

You can see there’s not too much difference (other than the ‘supposed to’ and the ‘wanted to’ - not sure where they got that) and that’s because the main issue here is actually cultural. In English, if we say you’re living in someone’s shadow it’s a negative thing, but Ji Ah is actually making a reference to traditional Korean wedding vows, in which the groom pledged to become a tree and the bride his shadow. That’s obviously a carry-over from a more antiquated time in gender relations, but the image of the tree remains that of something that provides shelter from the elements. So, to live in someone’s shadow in this case actually means to live being protected and cared for by them. This is in direct contrast to her telling Yeon in EP06 not to be too good to her for fear that she’d come to depend on him. It shows character growth. And Ji Ah is saying that she also wants to be that someone for Yeon. 

Since there’s no way to explain that context in the subs, though, I might have taken some creative license and changed ‘shadow’ to ‘shelter’ or something to that effect. It would be more of a departure from the literal, but somewhat closer to the intended meaning. 

Another exchange that I felt could have been translated better was from the night scene on the beach in EP13 when Ji Ah asks Yeon if he remembers the first time he met her. 

Yeon: Of course I remember. I spent my life working to catch others, but you were the first person who chased after me so ferociously saying they were going to catch me. 

Ji Ah: At that time I should have just confessed ferociously. If I had, the time we could have spent being happy not knowing anything would've been just a little bit longer. 

I don’t remember exactly what the sub said, only that it left out the word ‘ferocious,’ which they both used. I thought it was a very Ji Ah thing to say - that she should have confessed ferociously instead of chasing him ferociously, and you can see Yeon look at her when she says it.  

Another thing that dropped out at times was the humour. One recurring joke they use plays off the word for ‘bastard,’ which translates literally as ‘baby dog’ or ‘child of a dog’ (kae-saekki). Putting ‘kae’ (dog) in front of anything turns it into a curse word actually. [Edit: It’s also used as an intensifier in modern slang similar to how the f-word is used in English]. As you might imagine, this gets a lot of mileage in relation to Rang, our resident 600-year old baby fox. So in EP03 when Yeon and Rang fight on the island, Yeon makes this joke:

Yeon: They say you’re supposed to raise wild children* with a firm hand (literally: hit them as you raise them), but I couldn’t do that, so I ended up raising a baby fox into a bastard (baby dog), didn’t I?

Rang: And who was the jerk who kicked that baby (saekki) to the curb? You treat me like a stray dog any chance you get. 

Yeon: My little brother, I’ll have to gift you a muzzle this Christmas. 

Because the dog jokes dropped out ‘muzzle’ became ‘mouthguard,’ which is less funny and also makes no sense out of context. [*Edit: Also, thinking about it again, I still would have used ‘muzzle’ since that implies that Yeon means to protect the world from Rang whereas ‘mouthguard’ is more about protecting Rang.]

[*Edit: the word used here is 호로자식, which many Koreans understand to mean something like a barbarian child, but the true origin, as it turns out, is a parentless child. It’s also used predominantly by grandpas/old men hehe]

Another funny moment came when Ji Ah asks Yeon for his phone number in EP04:

Yeon: Nice. Your character is very consistent. 

Ji Ah: I get that a lot.

There’s no good way to translate Ji Ah’s line, but she literally says ‘I hear that curse (yok) a lot,’ implying that people say this to her and mean it as an insult/in a ‘goddamn you’ sort of way...to which Yeon nods as if to say, ‘makes perfect sense.’ haha

Finally, there were times when the subs were just straight-up wrong. When Yeon is telling Ji Ah about how he met Ah Eum in EP05, he says she was so cute he hit her once and then sent her on her way. Ji Ah prompts him saying, ‘And then?’ To which Yeon responds that she went down the mountain in tears but then returned to chase after him with her bow in tow. The subtitle said something like ‘she left and returned within the day,’ and I honestly can only assume whoever was translating it wasn’t sure what was said and just wrote something likely based on context because it’s such a loose estimation.

Sorry this is so long. It’s nowhere near an exhaustive list, but hopefully it gives you an idea of some of the things that catch my attention when I watch the subbed version. If there are specific scenes you’d like to see me translate, feel free to send me another ask. =)