As an avid enthusiast of Japanese literature, I often think about how much work goes into translation. I’m not fluent enough in Japanese to read works in their original language, so I’m continuously thankful for the people and publishers who take a chance on providing a translation for something that might not succeed internationally. But now I have a question I genuinely don’t know the answer to. What about works with indexes? How do those fit into the translation process? Of course, entries would require repagination and reformatting, but how are indexes treated?
One approach would be to translate the index entry by entry, checking for consistency between the terms and concepts as they appear in the work and as they appear in the index. This is probably the most straightforward approach, but it could get tricky with translating related entries that aren’t in the work but serve as access points to entries that are. For example, perhaps a work about the tourism and hospitality industry doesn’t specifically address fast food but does talk about dining in restaurants. “Fast food” could serve as an access point for directing readers towards these sections as
Fast food see restaurants
since the terms are related, but not the same. In a translation, one would have to use their best judgement to decide on translating a term that was accurate in both the literal meaning and in relation to the connections being represented in the index, even if the term doesn’t specifically appear in the work.
In addition, some concepts that appear as single words in one language can’t be reduced to a single word in another language. Some foreign words have become commonly used within certain disciplines to express these concepts, like Gemeinschaft in sociology, but more colloquial terms might be harder to contextualize. For example, the Japanese word kuchisabishii translates literally to “lonely mouth”, but it’s a word used to describe the feeling of needing to put something in your mouth even though you’re not hungry. In an English work, kuchisabishii as an index entry could be left as is, perhaps as a subentry for boredom, as the work would likely include an explanation or provide more context where this specific foreign word was used. A Japanese work, however, would use this word casually and not require explanation – it wouldn’t stand out as an unusual word to a Japanese reader, but it’s not commonly used enough in English to simply leave it untranslated. How would this be resolved as in index entry?
I won’t pretend I have the answers, as I’m not a translator, but now this is something I would like to know more about from an indexing perspective. I hope I get the chance to work on a project like this one day so I can learn more about the translation process surrounding works with indexes, but in the meantime, I’ll keep studying both Japanese and best practices for indexing so I can be prepared for future opportunities.
Do you have any thoughts on translating indexes, or insights about how it’s done? Should indexes be translated or rewritten after translation? I’d love to hear from you!
(P.S.: Kuchisabishii is actually pretty interesting – you can read more about it here.)
See also Indexing Services 