mother, may i sleep with gerunds?
Nov. 23rd, 2010 06:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
langwidereI 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.)
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, because1. 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.)
no subject
Date: 2010-11-29 02:56 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-30 09:38 am (UTC)It will give me something substantial to pine over for awhile, though :]