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

[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.)