Language geekiness
With all the stress from plans getting complicated, I didn't have a chance to geek out about the thing that I kind of wanted to geek out about this week. See, we've been listening to this audiobook in French, while I read it in English for "subtitles," and Athena reads it in French so that she can see what exactly the words are supposed to be, to help her comprehension. (I'm not going to say what book it is, but longtime readers can probably figure it out.)
The thing about our listening session this last Sunday is that in that part of the book, the characters all went to Quebec, so there was some dialogue that was in French, even in the original English version of the book. This sort of thing is relevant to our interests, because as translators, we've come across many instances where the Japanese characters are faced with speaking English, and it's neat to see how different translators deal with "translating" dialogue that was already in the target language. ...A lot of times it involves polishing up the English a bit to make it sound more natural.
With manga, we sometimes have to get creative about how to represent the English. Like, if someone comes up to a Japanese person and starts speaking English, but the version the readers are reading is already in English, you have to somehow let the readers know why the character in the story can't understand this new person who is actually speaking the same language. Recently, we changed the English to Spanish, because, lucky for us, the non-Japanese person was actually Latin American. And we think there's a good chance that an English-Spanish translator would see the dialogue we put in there and go, "Let me just fix that up for you." XD
With a novel, it's nice, because you can just add to the prose, "She said in French," and, "He said in English." What was really fun about the French version of this originally-English novel is that the narrator added commentary: "He said in English, because he hadn't had the chance to master the language of Moliere." With the translator taking liberties like that, it comes as no surprise that the French dialogue had some more polish, too. For example, when the girl introduces herself and her friend, the direct translation from the original version says, "I'm [redacted], and this is [redacted]." But the in the French version of the book, she says, "My name is [redacted], and I present to you [redacted]."
The author of book had written the French correctly, at least as far as what you'd learn in high school. Athena said she'd probably have written it the same way. And if it had been a character who learned French in high school, it probably would have been more appropriate to keep it that way. But the character was very fluent in French, so I like to think we would have adapted it similarly.
Anyway. We thought it was a neat thing to come across, because we're language geeks like that.
Today I'm thankful for work going pretty well, things like that scene in that book where we get to geek out about languages, the beauty of the French language, fixing the clerical error that had been plaguing our finances, and the rent being paid.
The thing about our listening session this last Sunday is that in that part of the book, the characters all went to Quebec, so there was some dialogue that was in French, even in the original English version of the book. This sort of thing is relevant to our interests, because as translators, we've come across many instances where the Japanese characters are faced with speaking English, and it's neat to see how different translators deal with "translating" dialogue that was already in the target language. ...A lot of times it involves polishing up the English a bit to make it sound more natural.
With manga, we sometimes have to get creative about how to represent the English. Like, if someone comes up to a Japanese person and starts speaking English, but the version the readers are reading is already in English, you have to somehow let the readers know why the character in the story can't understand this new person who is actually speaking the same language. Recently, we changed the English to Spanish, because, lucky for us, the non-Japanese person was actually Latin American. And we think there's a good chance that an English-Spanish translator would see the dialogue we put in there and go, "Let me just fix that up for you." XD
With a novel, it's nice, because you can just add to the prose, "She said in French," and, "He said in English." What was really fun about the French version of this originally-English novel is that the narrator added commentary: "He said in English, because he hadn't had the chance to master the language of Moliere." With the translator taking liberties like that, it comes as no surprise that the French dialogue had some more polish, too. For example, when the girl introduces herself and her friend, the direct translation from the original version says, "I'm [redacted], and this is [redacted]." But the in the French version of the book, she says, "My name is [redacted], and I present to you [redacted]."
The author of book had written the French correctly, at least as far as what you'd learn in high school. Athena said she'd probably have written it the same way. And if it had been a character who learned French in high school, it probably would have been more appropriate to keep it that way. But the character was very fluent in French, so I like to think we would have adapted it similarly.
Anyway. We thought it was a neat thing to come across, because we're language geeks like that.
Today I'm thankful for work going pretty well, things like that scene in that book where we get to geek out about languages, the beauty of the French language, fixing the clerical error that had been plaguing our finances, and the rent being paid.