Content adapts as it crosses borders
Like many readers of Liu Cixin’s “ThreeBody” series of novels, I was taken aback by some of the decisions made in Netflix’s adaptation of the “3 Body Problem.” Where was Wang Miao, the character whose eyes see most of the mystery in the first book unfolds — and who was this researcher in his place? Why are the aliens no longer called Trisolarans? What’s Samwell Tarly from “Game of Thrones” doing there?!
Some Chinese netizens were also displeased with the changes, though often for other reasons — upset that the primary location was changed from China to the U.K., and most local characters diversified into other nationalities. They might have a point, though: The parts of the show truest to the book, such as the depictions of the Cultural Revolution and any scenes involving the species-traitor Ye Wenjie, are by far its strongest points, with the travails of the characters in modern-day Britain much less interesting.
The issue of how much change is acceptable or appropriate when adapting and translating material across languages or media is one attracting increasingly vocal opinion. It came to the fore at the start of the year as another round in the online culture wars, when some fans complained of supposedly “woke” localizations of Japanese video games and anime — and rejoiced that AI translation would soon allow them to enjoy more “authentic” experiences.
Some were upset with the insertion of modern-day politics into text where it previously didn’t seem to exist, such as slipping the line “all property is theft” into one game’s originally entirely nonpolitical dialogue. Assuming the original author wasn’t consulted, that’s questionable at best. But others seem upset with the very idea of localization at all, complaining for example that text in the fantasy game “Unicorn Overlord” was noticeably more flowery in English than the original’s rather prosaic Japanese.
The “Three-Body Problem” was famously translated by Ken Liu, a Chinese American, himself a multi-award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy. “My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art,” he told Wired magazine in 2016. “You take the original and try to perform it,
really, in a different medium.”
Ken Liu took Liu Cixin’s original text and turned it something different for another language. That’s been changed again for a new medium. It’s tempting to wonder what he might think of changes to his version of the text, such as the decision to call the aliens threatening Earth the San-Ti (from the Chinese San-Ti
Ren, Three-Body People), instead of the “goofy”-sounding Trisolarans as they were known in the book. Of course, television is itself a different medium, and the art must be performed differently; Trisolaran is quite a mouthful if it’s being used every other sentence.
Localization is always a problem of judging what the target audience will accept and understand. That makes the “performance art” harder and harder to pull off successfully. But changes are inevitable: One-to-one translations simply don’t work, whether because of cultural references that chime in one country but not another, differing requirements of time or space available for text or dialogue, or just the fact that some languages are too far apart.
One of the most infamous changes in all of localization was a reference in the 1990s “Pokemon” anime that changed onigiri — the everyday Japanese rice ball — into “jelly donuts.” These days, onigiri is so commonplace in English-language discourse it’s just been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, along with 22 other Japanese words like katsu and okonomiyaki. But back in the late 1990s, in a series aimed primarily at kids, onigiri would have simply elicited blank stares.
The growth of Japanese content in the past decade or so has rapidly familiarized many with concepts that would have seemed ludicrously niche. It’s not just food: the OED also just added the likes of omotenashi, isekai and mangaka. Dedicated anime fans who don’t speak Japanese would nonetheless be perfectly familiar with words yet to make it to the dictionary, like senpai, commonly used tropes that pass into subgenre slang and no longer need translation. Balanced against the needs of the hardcore fans are those of the mass audience who might not be interested — of course the reason for the biggest changes in “3 Body Problem.”
I wrote recently that among the bravest decisions made by Walt Disney’s “Shōgun” series was the extensive use of subtitled Japanese scenes. Netflix could have taken a similar route for “3 Body Problem,” setting the show primarily in China (for the first season at least), perhaps with a token Western character to guide the audience. However, this is where the creators run into another problem facing localizers: many Americans have a dim view of China right now, so a series set mostly on the mainland with a nuanced cast of Chinese characters might struggle.
Purists must accept that changes are necessary to reach a bigger audience.
These issues will only become more acute as more material is adapted across borders. Like a three-body problem, there are no simple solutions.