mother, may i sleep with gerunds?

[langwidere]

I know that everybody is probably pretty busy right now. And I am generally not much of a comment whore (of course I always like it if other people are able to enjoy/laugh at my posts) (although lately I’ve noticed that, after my extra-pointless entries have sat around at the top of the DW for awhile, somebody — usually starburns — dresses them up with a pretty pity comment, which is super-sweet but also makes me feel kind of weirdly guilty). But I am, like, literally begging you to comment on this post. I’m gonna leave it up for a couple of weeks, just hoping that lots of people will reply. You can comment anonymously! You can comment ten times! You can comment with a novel-length exegesis of your thoughts on yaoi! You can post three words, two of which are "fart"! I don’t care, as long as you register an opinion on these topics, because, uncharacteristically, I genuinely want to know what you think:


1. This one is not so bad: You know that I am always embarking on hopeless quests to update/poke/render less irrelevant the prose-excreting beast that is Cynn Corvus — the idea being, I guess, that I can encourage Clarke to publish further work via remote, anonymous, and subliminal fan voodoo — and so I’m thinking of maybe posting a "related fiction" book blog linked to the site. I always feel like I’m missing so much of the culture that Clarke references, and while I could never fully appreciate it even if I moved to Yorkshire tomorrow and lived there for fifty years, I think I could at least have a better grasp of the fictional landscape. Right? I would include only the books Clarke mentioned during interviews as favorites, analogues, or inspiration — like Thursbitch, The Man Who Was Thursday, Emma, Kingdoms of Elfin, The Quincunx, maybe some Sherlock Holmes stories, and Foucault’s Pendulum. And probably other stuff that I forgot about. I am not yet sure if I love this idea enough to do The Lord of the Rings again. Anyway, would you be interested in reading a site like this? At all? Once, even? (I’ve already gotten through a few of these books, and I plan to post reviews of them whether you like it or not, so this is really a lose/lose for you. But I don’t want to go to the trouble of working up a whole site, including a layout and a title, if I’m the only person who’ll ever use it. Well. Me and that weirdo who keeps Googling gay Lord Wellington porn and clicking on archived versions of my articles.)

2. This one isn’t that bad, either: I need a couple of people to read over my completed translations and make sure they flow like natural English. I know that I could probably ask any of you for help with this and you would do it, but I don’t want to unnecessarily burden anybody who has a lot going on. Ideally, I would have at least two people behind the curtain with me, so that if one (or more) editor had something happening somebody else would be available. Your primary job here would be telling me, "No, 'that child disappeared from in front of me' is not standard English, you idiot." I won’t need every translation edited; just the hairy ones that give me grief. (I also won’t need help until the first of the year.) (I think.)

3. This is the really awful one: A few weeks ago, Colony Drop posted this article about Crunchyroll (ugh) making the decision to jettison honorifics. Go read it? (Yes, that is me in the comments. More on that later.) Personally, I think the argument they use here is a little thin; mostly, it looks like an attempt to arbitrarily delineate classy, restrained, grown-up anime fans who don't care about picturesque Nippon-koku atmospherics from the annoying, cosplaying, Haruhi Suzumiya-licking adolescent kind who end every sentence with "nyaaan!~"— which is certainly an understandable impulse. A thoroughly futile and unsightly impulse, of course, but an understandable one all the same. (We aren't ever getting out of the children’s-programming ghetto, my friends. Not until this country's population is 68% Asian.) (I have a dream!)

But, let’s try out this brilliant new keigo-free translation style on some actual manga, shall we? I’m going to go with Kyou, Hana no Gotoshi, one of my favorite dadaist yakuza-fluff romances, because it has already been translated (sorta). So, per the advice of the epic Colony Drop grown-ups, we'll switch out "Reiji-san" American-style, for "Mr. Naruse." And then, when Reiji asks Kikuchi to speak to him informally when they're in bed together, do we assume that Kikuchi has been referring to Reiji as "Mr. Naruse" all along? While fucking him in the ass? For months? And, if we substitute "Reiji" for "Reiji-san" in the text of the rest of the comic (which would really be doing things American-style), what should we do with that bedroom scene? Have Kikuchi call him "Reirei"? Or "buddy"? Or "honey"?

Possibly these people are not as offhandedly knowledgeable about "keigo" as they think they are.

Also that example of formal vs. informal language is semi-comical.

Also, re: #29: I am sure this guy totally understands that, while many of those job-titles I mentioned translate one-for-one, few of them are used in the same way in both cultures. Americans, for example, seldom say things like, "Here comes Assistant Branch-Manager Smith! Look busy!" or "Teacher Jones praised me for my classwork!" But, he is sure going to snatch the pink plastic wigs right off the heads of those illiterate Gurren Lagann fans, isn't he? He will take them to school! He wants every comic and anime script to look as though it has been translated by Harold Bloom's grandmother. That will solve every problem in weeaboo fandom!

ALSO ALSO RE: #35: Translating/dropping honorifics results in a finished product which is a "transparent text"? Really? I do not think that means what you think it means, #35. Any needless grammatical/conceptual alterations you perform on any text will, by definition, begin to muddy its translation; preserving as many elements of the original work as you can will make it increasingly transparent. See? How that works? You dumbass? "Transparent," in this context, means "devoid of intellectual obfuscation or deception," not "easy to understand." School: STAY THERE. Eesh!

Personally, I've always admired the weeaboo subculture for bothering to learn honorifics and the basics of respectful/humble speech in the first place. There are millions of clinically retarded weeaboo out there, of course, but at least there's also an alienating learning curve separating them from 75% of the internet's most valuable translation resources. Unless you make an effort to learn a little something about Japanese language and culture, you will have difficulty understanding most fan translations. Awesome! Why can't everything be like that? Can you imagine what would happen if the people who love Jane Austen movies were forced to understand what conditions were really like for women during the Regency? Or, if they were forced to wear corsets and bloomers and go without bathing for a few weeks? Or, if they were forced to read the actual novels themselves? The very specific, insular, self-referencing conventions of fan translation are like a series of hurdles over which the uninitiated must leap, often blindly, because they're really into the source material. In what way is that bad? As far as I'm concerned, fan translators ought to release their projects in code. I mean, do we really want to make manga easier to read? More accessible? Are we truly, genuinely, actually aiming to attract drooling hordes of even stupider people who want to hump on our Precious? We ought to be trying to beat them, not join them.

But, again, that’s beside the point. Colony Drop et al. is right; there is no legitimate reason to include honorifics and random keigo expressions in translations other than — BAHAHA! — "tradition." I can indeed represent almost everything characterized by polite/vulgar speech in English without too much trouble. And the more I think about it, the more I realize I don’t really care all that much about this particular "issue." But, I want to know what you think. I don't want to spend five months laboriously making translations, and then have to go back and -くん them all up because everybody misses the spicy Nihongo flava. Conversely, I will be no less eager to go through three hundred pages of (literal) BL wank extracting the honorifics, just to stop the flow of whiny, thesaurus-enhanced e-mails from undereducated translation fetishists.

Itadakimasu!

NOTE: I will never, ever translate proper names. No matter what. Especially if the names originate in fantasy comics and mean "Number One Big Snake Person." Or "The Mountain." You will learn to live with it, I promise.

P.S. — Why do the uppity nigglers at Colony Drop write 'moe' like this: "moé"? That is incorrect. There are no accent marks in Japanese — possibly because there are no Latin letters in Japanese :[
ファイ・D・フローライト フラショバック!!!!!!!!


Lastly, would one of you rich, sexy, talented, physically beautiful Japanese-literate bastards like to tell me what "やったろう" means? Because it looks like the volitional case tacked onto the end of "やった," and I didn’t know you could do that. Or, is this maybe one of Japan’s many enthralling grammatical abbreviations, like "してる" or "ーちゃう," and I just can’t recognize it, because I am dumb? Thank you in advance.

Also, thank you for your comments. (Please post some!!)

P.P.S. — This has nothing to do with anything, but I thought it was really, really funny. For some reason? (I’m hoping it’s Alan Rickman, too. Because she’s probably 40, and she wrote it herself.)

Comments

[eorinni]

Kikuchi has been referring to Reiji as "Mr. Naruse" all along? While fucking him in the ass? For months?
OKAY, HI. Let me just wipe the tears from my eyes and then comment. Have I mentioned that I love you? I love you. The most.

OUCH, that article. Do you mind if I just spit some points at you? Because my immediate reaction is, "NO, YOU MORONS!!!" and I'm not entirely sure how to put that into big girl words. Let's see.

- Semi-literate, unpaid internet translators (WHO OFTEN DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH WITH ANY PROFICIENCY!!) are not professional. Admittedly, it's been a while since I visited Crunchyroll, but I seem to remember big, random gaps in subtitles where someone couldn't do their job properly, and also a total lack of punctuation??? Nice! Honorifics are the least of their problems. Should I ignore that and keep going? Okay.

- "It's important to point out that keigo, like honorifics, is thrown out the door when dealing with friends or family." Ummmmmmmmmmmm? ...Ignore that too? Right.

- These sound a lot like the arguments of people who insist that a translation isn't solid unless sentence structure is preserved when moving from Japanese to English. Goooood luck! They're very different languages. You know what's less transparent than, "I don't think you should go there, Atobe-san!"? "That place, that's where I think you shouldn't go to, isn't it, Mr. Atobe?" Maybe that's what it says, but that's not what it means.

- Crunchyroll does K-drama. Honorifics are such an integral part of Korean that I can't even guess at how they'll handle this one. Maybe something like my poor little host sisters, who would often try to explain to me in English that, "Sujin's sister? Older sister? But not real sister. Sister's friend? Friend of big sister? She will come." Oh, her! Fun!

Basically, this is a cute attempt to make fandom a little more legitimate, but for all the reasons you've listed, dropping honorifics is just more trouble than it's worth to both the translator and the reader. You yourself are wonderful and smart and speak actual, comprehensible English, so I'm sure you could cut honorifics loose and still make your way very competently. But keigo is such an important, nuanced structure, I think honorifics are a nice way of clarifying a text and delivering that nuance to the reader. It seems like the real cop-out is throwing the whole thing out and not bothering.

(On a personal level, this also makes me kind of sad because informal speech is hard-earned! Even in French, which makes a much more basic T-V distinction, it meant a lot to me, say, when I first used "tu" with my host mom and she high-fived me. Or when my Korean host brother FINALLY, after two years, called me 누나, and immediately turned bright red and clapped his hands over his mouth while my host sisters cheered. Is it essential? Maybe not. But it changes the story.)

I'd LOVE to read your translations, but it's probably a pretty selfish impulse because I might suck at it; I'm planning on leaving the country again in January. Can I raise my hand anyway? As a back-up, maybe?

やったろうぜ! Let's do it! My Japanese is terrrribly rusty, but it's volitional.

that weirdo who keeps Googling gay Lord Wellington porn
You caught me. :( That's also my postcard. If you'll excuse me, I have to go tend to the lovechild.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

[eorinni]

Hahaha, this is so long. I'm so sorry! For the record, it's because I always read your entries and have nothing smart to say, so now I've just spit up a backlog of comment love. Oh well! ♥

[langwidere]

Context!

In Japanese:


The fan translation:


The "official" release (which cost $16, btw):


So, I hope you can see why I was confused out the ass? I thought, Could it possibly mean "remember," despite not being listed in any dictionary anywhere? Or maybe "previously"? Or "already"? I got the ちいさい + はなして = as a child + telling-stem, but then I had no idea what to attach it to. And then I thought I already knew what "やった" meant, so blah. BLAH.

Can you make all past-tense verbs volitional by adding a "ろう," or is 'やった' a special case?
Like, 食べたろう = I ate, didn’t I? I suppose I ate? Let’s have eaten?
You may call me Dumbass, because that is my name :]

Thank you both so, so much for your input!

[x-posted with starlady’s comment]

[eorinni]

UMMMM, yeah, I guess in this context, it's not really volitional, right? But you can do it to any verb. I remember being taught not to bother anymore because it's outdated, and to go for 食べただろう instead. I bet starlady can be way more informative, tbh.

[langwidere]

食べただろう
YES YES THAT IS THE ONE I LEARNED. This character is an old dying guy, and I suppose he’s using outdated grammar?

(It’s called the "volitional case," but it’s used for any non-concrete suppositions or aspirations or guesses or expectations or what have you.)

(I am mostly used to seeing copula volitionalized, and sometimes the odd stem.)

Thank you very much, again!

[eorinni]

YUP, old dying guy would definitely do it. Past-presumptive tense is the term it took me all day long to remember. I've taken way too many language classes for that (and my vague understanding of the volitional case, so thank you ♥) to be excusable, yikes.

My pleasure!

[langwidere]

HAHA THREE REPLIES I BET YOU REGRET POSTING YOUR INFORMED COMMENTARY NOW, HM?

You are my first-ever long-term digital friend. I think that we have been corresponding sporadically for about five years? I would be genuinely happy to see any comment from you, including: "Hi, I just farted!" You thought I was kidding? I wasn’t even kidding.

I KNEW THAT WAS YOU! WHO ELSE WOULD HAVE A PRURIENT INTEREST IN THE HONOURABLE ARTHUR WELLESLEY? WHO ELSE?

[eorinni]

LONGER, BABE, LONGER. I'm practically a real, adult person now! You're my favorite. Cannot wait for your translations. ♥

[langwidere]

Um, so, I have at least two replies for you? Sorry. Here’s the first one:

1.) Where are you going in January??? I am very happy for you, for getting to live your dreams and ambitions — but also sort of sad for me, because I kind of want you to come live in my house with me instead. This place that you are going, it has a couple of boxes of internet Y/Y?

2.) Of course you can volunteer! Yay! ♥ I have a horrible tendency to try to pass off "incompetent translator-speak" as "translation," without intending to. I was once elaborately befuddled by whether or not English-speakers say "together with," for example. Any assistance you could ever give would be greatly appreciated.

3.) OH, SPEAKING OF WHICH: "It's important to point out that keigo, like honorifics, is thrown out the door when dealing with friends or family." Totally missed that, somehow. And that person is now disqualified from writing about anime, and also from being allowed to breathe oxygen.

4.) This sentence-structure thing — I had a surprisingly testy argument about this with the person I asked to edit my super-secret classy proper translation release (upcoming). The person was all, "But you haven’t preserved the original grammatical structures at all!" And I’m like, "I know, right? I’m a genius!" And hilarity ensued.

5.) I’d planned to start posting my translations at the beginning of summer, but I had such a problem with breaking down the Japanese structures and rephrasing them as English that in the end I back-pedalled and returned to the grammar books instead. Like, it was really hard for me not to translate every sentence that ended with "じゃん" or "じゃない" as "isn’t it?" or "isn’t that so?" or even "yeah?" Sometimes I still catch my dumb ass trying to do this! But my best one ever was continually translating "というの" or "っての" as "that which is called." AWESOME, I KNOW. "I was waiting for that which is called a train all morning!" Eventually I downgraded it to "the so-called," which helped a lot! ("I was waiting for that so-called train all morning!") Now I know that this is just an informal way to name/quote a clause so that you can refer to it in conversation, i.e. "Man, [I’m telling you,] I been waiting for that damn train all morning!"

6.) Did I have a point? Who knows?

7.) So, I will count this as one vote for honorifics/standard fandom keigo, then!

I love you, too! SNIFFLES.

♥

[eorinni]

I'm (hopefully) going to New Zealand! Does that sound crazy? I think it might. But America is really making me lose my shit lately, and I find their accent especially adorable. Also, kiwi birds! Kiwi birds are sooooo cute!!! I am entirely tempted to move into your house and make you print out your translations so I can draw hearts on them and stuff, but I should totally have internet over there. I'll make an extra effort not to suck, I promise!

Re: sentence structure - it's an impulse I can't even begin to understand. Someone that hell-bent on reading an exact copy of the original text should probably read, SURPRISE, the original text! Yes, making stuff up is bad. Referencing Britney Spears à la Tokyopop is bad. Turning Kansai-ben into mafia-speak or weird, apostrophe-populated faux-regional English, also definitely bad. But if you don't leave room for grammatical alteration, you're going to lose all tone and impact and coherency (and I won't even start on subtext)! Just run your manga through Google translator already, yeesh.

I know exactly what you mean. In a way, it's not so bad - "so-called"s and "isn't it"s tend to stand out very handily when you comb through a translation for awkwardness. The other stuff, not so much. But honestly, "so-called" is like, really really inventive? So I have a feeling you're kicking butt. Eventually (like with "っての") you just butt heads with a certain grammatical tickle so many times that you go, "OH MY GOD, OBVIOUSLY!" and everything comes so much easier after that.

And hey, I didn't mention, but I also want to vote yes on you making an infinite amount of websites. I will read anything you write. Also, your taste is much more discerning than my own, soooo. There's a good chance I will read anything you think is good. JUST SAYIN'. ♥

*cuddle!*

[langwidere]

Oh, wow! That does not sound crazy! That sounds amazing!! Although I will be very disappointed if you don’t come back speaking Te Reo. You’re only fluent in what, like five languages? Not enough :[

I don’t think they have Teabaggers in New Zealand, but I did hear that they had some kind of housing crisis? But kiwi birds more than make up for that. Kiwi birds and hobbits. And kakapo! Can I come too?

One short blogpost a month upon which I can comment in ironical all-caps should be sufficient. Don’t hurt yourself, kid.

OH SPEAKING OF WHICH: I know, I don’t get this sentence structure stuff, either. Especially because Japanese can have, like, triple or even quadruple negatives — which work out to "there’s nobody who doesn’t not never don’t do it," which actually turns out to be a positive statement when translated into English. And if you represented it literally, it would be nonsense. I think they like that, though. Reminds them of mother, probably.

Referencing Britney Spears à la Tokyopop is bad. Turning Kansai-ben into mafia-speak or weird, apostrophe-populated faux-regional English, also definitely bad.
'The Kansai-ben ≈ Robert DeNiro’s accent in Untouchables' particularly drives me insane. I just feel like… what? WHAT? If you’re going to try that (why, I don’t know): All the regional accents in the English-speaking world, and that’s the one you picked?
And TokyoPop referenced Britney Spears? That is pretty terrible, even for them.

Hey, thank you! I’m going to concentrate on BL comics for a few months, and then do my best to knock most of this project out at once.

Thank you again for all your helpful input.

*kiwi bird!*

[starburns]

Woooo here comes starburns again! (My comments are not pity comments! They are "Look, I said a thing! Was it a smart thing? Did I do good?!?!" comments.)

1. I love the idea of a "related fiction" section, although if you have a finite number of articles you'd be writing (i.e. only on the books she's mentioned in interviews) then maybe it doesn't necessitate an entire blog, with it's PHP back-end and whatnot. Single HTML files would probably save server space? (Unless you're planning on using blogspot or something, in which case, ignore what I just said.)

that weirdo who keeps Googling gay Lord Wellington porn and clicking on archived versions of my articles.
I think this may be worth a weird-face emoticon.

0_0

2. I want to volunteer, but does it matter if you clearly know more about English grammar than I do? I know about talking though! I do talking all the time.

3. I think you already know my position on the Colony Drop article, but specifically in regards to your translations:

I think, more than Colony Drop is willing to concede, this in an issue of knowing your audience. If you're translating for a mainstream audience, or a bunch of ten year-olds, dropping the honorifics would be a good idea. But you're mostly working on BL titles, right? So, kind of a niche market, and for an adult(-ish) audience. The audience in question can probably handle honorifics, and in many cases, would prefer to keep them. BL fans love their -kun's and -chan's!

[langwidere]

Woooo here comes starburns again!
That is always cause for very unironic celebration.

1. You know I think this thing is a blog, right? If I am actually capable of spackling this project together, it will definitely be flat HTML linked up on a flat directory. I wrestled with WordPress for about 3 days last summer, and that was enough for me! For, like, ever! Grandma likes her static code.

I think this may be worth a weird-face emoticon.
This person has been hitting my sites for three years. I figure it’s either a highly-specialized and very sad pervert, or the head of the All-Britain Lord Wellington Club trying to make sure dirty fangirls aren’t calling his hero out of his name. (The head of the All-Britain Lord Wellington Club is definitely a guy.)

2.) WTF, your grammar is fantastic. And anyway, what I really need is someone to call me out on crappy translator cliches. Sometimes, after you’ve seen them for a long time, they kind of disappear into the general noise of the text. And then the next thing you know, you might as well be working for Illicit Skulduggery, or whatever the hot new scanlator joint is called. This is enormously appreciated, though, and you will definitely be hearing from me in the future.

3.) That’s definitely true — but in some ways, the issue is a little more complicated than that. Like, I really don’t think Colony Drop had any good reason for propping up Crunchyroll in the first place (a good way to tell that you’re going wrong, philosophically: you find yourself propping up Crunchyroll) other than their general distaste for fandom. Speaking as a person who made it often, that is a monster mistake. Also, as eorinni pointed out, the person who wrote the article said this: "It's important to point out that keigo, like honorifics, is thrown out the door when dealing with friends or family." That is so wrong it is unbelievable, and it is also totally insane and credibility-murdering. (And I missed it the first time, ooops.) And, you know, in most cases this "honorifics" business is one little thing a translator doesn’t have to filter, because the target audience has already educated themselves about it — I think that’s wonderful, actually. Colony Drop reads that as "laziness," but to me it looks a lot like the 'transparency' that one moron was babbling about.

Also, the people who whined that they couldn’t stand to see anime Vikings calling one another "-sama" and "-kun" made me want to kill myself. If you thought they were really Vikings, bocchan, you don’t get a vote.

[starburns]

2. My grammar is fine, but you certainly know more about the technical rules and specifics than I. Anyway, score!

3. but in some ways, the issue is a little more complicated than that.
Oh yeah, I’m sure people who actually know Japanese can get into a lot more detail regarding “untranslatable” elements of the language. I just mean that, in regards to whether or not you personally ought to retain the original honorifics in your translations: the audience you’re writing for understands and would probably prefer that you keep as much of the text’s original “intention” as possible. “Translating” all the keigo is certainly possible, but you’ll inevitably loose some of the original intention and nuance by trying to come up with English “equivalents” for everything simply because exact equivalents, for a lot of this stuff, don’t exist. And then you’re left coming up with similar analogs and approximations. In some cases, that’s fine and even preferable. Here, maybe not so much.

I really don’t think Colony Drop had any good reason for propping up Crunchyroll in the first place
I think it has to do with the issue of legitimizing fandom; an issue that, I think, the staff of Crunchyroll is particularly invested in. As I understand it: Crunchyroll started off as a standard fansub production/distribution web site. So technically, everything they were doing was illegal. But through a series of (probably clever) business maneuvers, they obtained rights from a bunch of Japanese networks to sub and stream titles and started charging for "Premium Memberships". Crunchyroll one of the first groups to do something like this, and my guess is that Colony Drop sees it as their duty to maintain a certain level of perceived professionalism. Colony Drop is outspoken in their distain for the large percentage of vapid, “unqualified” translators, subbers, bloggers, etc. that populate the current anime fandom... which I sympathize with, actually. The practice of including (and fighting for the retention of) Japanese honorific/keigo strikes them as too similar to the squeeing, Wapanese-shreiking weeaboo masses they want “legitimate” fandom to distance itself from. So when Crunchyroll decided to stop including honorifics and fans objected, the folks at Colony Drop assumed the dissenters were those same weeaboo masses who a) know little about the Japanese language, and b) are keeping anime in it's "fandom ghetto" by insisting on translations that exclude non-anime fans.

That's just my guess, though.

[langwidere]

Well, I don’t want to seem particularly antagonistic toward Colony Drop — I thought this specific article was kind of shit-headed and largely incorrect, but most of their other stuff is really good! I like almost all of their reviews (I consider them largely trustworthy reviewers, which are really hard to come by in the animunga fandom; most people judge a show either by how many glimpses you get of the main character’s tits/underpants, or by how readily the secondary characters could be slashed) (guilty!) and I would totally give them the Academy Award of Animu Blogs for that tsundere/yandere essay, if there were such a thing as an Academy of Animu Blogs and I was a voting member.

I think this maybe just comes down to different schools of thought re: being an otaku. I don’t know how old the Colony Drop people are, but I started out in a world where the internet went so slow that it was really hard to download fansubs in the first place. I used to buy shit on VHS tapes. It was awesome! (At one point I had like forty purple Utena tapes, which I reluctantly gave to Goodwill about three years ago — operating under the conviction that I was performing rural outreach.) My very first "manga," as such, were the first two nightmare-inducing Viz-released volumes of X/1999. And I have all the original Escaflowne soundtracks! (And I listen to them! Still!)

So, you know, I quite literally cannot imagine paying people to watch fansubs.

Until I read that article, I had no idea that Crunchyroll had gone corporate. I’ve never used their services; I was only ever tangentially aware that they even provided any. I’ve generally thought of them as "those mildly retarded people who do Naruto," and I think I’ve visited their site about 5 times over the course of its existence. But, I find the idea that Crunchyroll has some obligation to its stupid audience — or to the Japanese language? I wasn’t quite clear on that, because it seems like most of the Crunchyroll viewers want honorifics, and the Colony Drop people were mocking them for being picky about keigo when they have no standards to begin with — ridiculous. Honestly, I kind of hope Crunchyroll subs every episode of every series with the same dialogue from an old OxyClean commercial. Anybody dumb enough to buy fansubs blind deserves whatever crap they get. Seriously! Better luck next time, dudes.

(Of course I think people should by any show they plan to watch repeatedly — I have Utena and Gankutsuou and a couple of others with rewatch potential, and the only thing stopping me from buying Mononoke is that I can’t find it anyplace — but don’t expect me to pick up a boxed set of Otome Youkai Zakuro.)

And yes, I’m sure most of the people watching Crunchyroll are total morons with no taste and no brains and no real interest in Japanese or in Japan or in anything other than what they’re wearing to the next con. But holding anime and comic scripts to the same standard as, you know, a translation of Wagahai wa Neko de Aru is quite literally insane on its own terms. My point was that the things Colony Drop picked as evidence that keigo/honorifics aren’t worth translating — there are words for that in English!/look, the grown-ups don’t do it in their big fancy books! — were standards just as arbitrary as the ones that led the weeaboo hordes to prefer them originally.

Also (nit-picking): This is how language works! It is fun and exciting! If we keep the honorifics and the hints of keigo in the translations, over time there is a vanishingly small chance that they will actually become loan-words. And how hott would that be?

I wish otaku made better choices, too. Including me! I have advocated some strikingly retarded things in my time, which turned out to be stupid or pointless or actually wrong. But, wrapping that disgust in a flag — turning it into a discussion about "language" when in fact it is actually a discussion about "we hate these stupid people and wish they liked NASCAR, like all the other idiots," not only doesn’t help, but serves to divide an already pointlessly fractured fandom further. (And advance dumb ideas!)

So, that’s me. I wish I’d had the wherewithal to include a little of that in my actual fucking comment.

[starburns]

I quite literally cannot imagine paying people to watch fansubs...Of course I think people should by any show they plan to watch repeatedly
That's pretty much my school of thought. As far as I'm concerned, I should be able to watch something to determine whether or not it's worth paying money for. I know some fans see that as a self-serving justification (and in turn, I see them as constipated, morally inflexible children), but hey: I use libraries. I don't see how watching a fansub before shelling out money for a DVD is terribly different than renting a book or movie.

(I've also downloaded and retained digital copies of shows I already legally own, so as to have easy access to a file right on my computer. If I bought the DVDs, I don't think it should be a problem.)

But yeah, I generally agree: I really like Colony Drop (they're in my top 2 anime review blogs), but that particular article painted all Japanese-English translation with an awfully wide brush and seemed motivated more by distain for a certain type of fan than by any truths of the Japanese language. (It sounds better when you say it, though, since you can actually translate Japanese. I just sound like I'm talking out my ass.)

[starlady]

Yeah, you can totally do やったろう。I don't know if I'd say volitional--the exact word is escaping me, though maybe it is volitional, but if someone asked that I'd translate it as "You did it, didn't you?"

More later maybe.

[langwidere]

Context!

In Japanese:


The fan translation:


The "official" release (which cost $16, btw):


So, I hope you can see why I was confused out the ass? I thought, Could it possibly mean "remember," despite not being listed in any dictionary anywhere? Or maybe "previously"? Or "already"? I got the ちいさい + はなして = as a child + telling-stem, but then I had no idea what to attach it to. And then I thought I already knew what "やった" meant, so blah. BLAH.

Can you make all past-tense verbs volitional by adding a "ろう," or is 'やった' a special case?
Like, 食べたろう = I ate, didn’t I? I suppose I ate? Let’s have eaten?
You may call me Dumbass, because that is my name :]

Thank you both so, so much for your input!

[x-posted with eorinni’s comment]

[starlady]

Well, やる is basically する, so it might be slightly special, but I think you can make any verb of any tense volitional by sticking だろう at the end (and that the guy here just dropped the だ because it's basically slang)--though 食べたろう gets the meaning across all the same.

One of these days I'm going to actually read my prewar grammar and learn the names for everything; my language course abhorred talking about grammar, which I abhorred.

You're welcome!

[langwidere]

Yeah, you can totally do やったろう。
I’m finding this mildly unbelievable at the moment. I know that Japanese is a portmanteau language in a lot of ways (especially when it comes to slang and informal speech) — but verb cases! Stuck together! Wow.

(It’s called the volitional case, but it seems to be used for all kinds of stuff; expectation, hope, intent, wonder, questioning, supposition, etc.)

Thank you, though! ♥

Fart Fart Fart

[ohveda]

Be careful what you wish for! Ask for farts and farts you shall get! Here are some more farts (only, I've written these ones down in the form of words. They're no less pungent though):

1. This would be cool! I'm all ears to know where Clarke gets her inspiration from. Book reviews aren't generally my thing, because my 'to read' pile is always too long for me to stick anything on the end of it, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't enjoy the site. In fact, I would probably enjoy it a lot. More content from you is always a good thing ♥

2. I'm afraid I don't have the time to help out, but good luck with the translations! I'm sure they'll go fabulously.

3. I have no personal problem with honorifics, in fact, I quite like to see them in translations. But I also have no knowledge of the Japanese language, so I'm not really the best person to answer the question. I say, go with whatever feels most appropriate to you.

Re Alan Rickman
At work the other day, we got to talking about Alan Rickman playing Snape. It went a bit like this:

Female colleague: "You know when Alan Rickman is being Snape..."
Male colleague: "Wait. Alan Rickman plays Snape in Harry Potter? I didn't know Alan Rickman was Snape."
All the women in the office, including the ones that have never seen a Harry Potter film in their lives: "OMG, you don't know that? Of course Alan Rickman is Snape! How can you not know that? Everyone knows that. God, his voice is lovely..."

I think there may be a gender divide on this issue.

Re: Fart Fart Fart

[langwidere]

Ask for farts and farts you shall get!
Good Lord, I thought that was a Dickens quote!

1. Thank you! I avoid book-review sites for exactly the same reason, so I feel your pain. But, as I was reading The Man Who Was Thursday, there was a point at which the story abruptly went from being didactic nonsense about the utterly natural sensibleness of white Christian society [?] to being a transcript of actual, physical magic — just like Strange & Norrell (without the didactic nonsense part, of course)! And I thought, Maybe people would like to know about that, because it is kind of neat, and then they could read this book themselves? And that’s where the idea started. I’m planning to start posting stuff this spring, once I get some comic scripts translated, etc.

2. No problem! I had two volunteers, and I also have a language senpai, so I should be fine :]

3. Yay! People have only voted for honorifics — which is good, because the translations that I’ve actually completed contain them and I would sure hate to go back over all that shit and do it again.

I think there may be a gender divide on this issue.
I would say having a set of functioning ovaries definitely helps, you know? Something to do with auditory sensitivity, or something.

[rengmaheloas]

Hi there! Add me to the comments list, I'll have more to say later, BUT. I think I read somewhere in the comments that you couldn't find the Mononoke DVD set? There's a super nice one here that is also super expensive:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%83%A2%E3%83%8E%E3%83%8E%E6%80%AA-%E6%80%AA~ayakashi~%E5%8C%96%E7%8C%AB-DVD-BOX-%E5%88%9D%E5%9B%9E%E9%99%90%E5%AE%9A%E7%94%9F%E7%94%A3-%E6%AB%BB%E4%BA%95%E5%AD%9D%E5%AE%8F/dp/B001OCX7FI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1238324970&sr=8-1

Um, I think that link should work. :) It comes with a lot of awesome stuff and the Ayakashi episodes are included.

[langwidere]

Holy shit! That is amazing. As soon as I find an extra $500 in my couch cushions (and probably $75 to ship it to the US), I will order that complete boxed set lickety-split!

It will give me something substantial to pine over for awhile, though :]

Purple Information

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