a minor linguistic oddity in Code Geass episode 5 (ie, Liz blathers about justified text)
Completely random observation from episode 5 of Code Geass:
I presume that the graphics were done in English to start with, since the conceit is that Britannia is... well, an unholy combination of the British Empire and American Manifest Destiny gone wild. This makes sense, actually, because the web search results and the magazine articles in episode five are very obviously not written by a native English speaker -- the gist comes through, but the phrasing is stilted at best and borderline unintelligible at worst -- and one would expect that if they'd been translated from kanji/katakana/hiragana/romanji/whatever into English as part of the subtitling process, the translation would read more smoothly.
Even worse than the phrasing, though, are the line breaks in the magazines. Someone was trying to justify the text into nice, even columns, but that person had absolutely no idea of how English words are split. Instead of breaking them at syllabic break points and marking the breaks with hyphens, they are broken at random letters with no punctuation marks to show what's going on.
In other words, instead of a column
of text that looks something like
this, with rational line breaks and
occasional use of hyphens to signal
the division of any words that ex-
tend beyond the right margin (with
said divisions occuring at a some-
what natural break point)...
You get a column of words that look
s something more like this, with li
ne breaks in the middle of words wi
th no punctuation signals whatsoeve
r, which is damn confusing to read.
It may line up more neatly than syl
labic breaks would, but no native s
peaker would EVER write that way!
...
That has no real relevance to anything. It's just interesting to note that while word-breaking at syllabic joints (or component word joints) is something that I had never really thought about -- probably because native speakers and readers pick it up by osmosis -- it's apparently not obvious to people who use a notably different writing system.
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I presume that the graphics were done in English to start with, since the conceit is that Britannia is... well, an unholy combination of the British Empire and American Manifest Destiny gone wild. This makes sense, actually, because the web search results and the magazine articles in episode five are very obviously not written by a native English speaker -- the gist comes through, but the phrasing is stilted at best and borderline unintelligible at worst -- and one would expect that if they'd been translated from kanji/katakana/hiragana/romanji/whatever into English as part of the subtitling process, the translation would read more smoothly.
Even worse than the phrasing, though, are the line breaks in the magazines. Someone was trying to justify the text into nice, even columns, but that person had absolutely no idea of how English words are split. Instead of breaking them at syllabic break points and marking the breaks with hyphens, they are broken at random letters with no punctuation marks to show what's going on.
In other words, instead of a column
of text that looks something like
this, with rational line breaks and
occasional use of hyphens to signal
the division of any words that ex-
tend beyond the right margin (with
said divisions occuring at a some-
what natural break point)...
You get a column of words that look
s something more like this, with li
ne breaks in the middle of words wi
th no punctuation signals whatsoeve
r, which is damn confusing to read.
It may line up more neatly than syl
labic breaks would, but no native s
peaker would EVER write that way!
...
That has no real relevance to anything. It's just interesting to note that while word-breaking at syllabic joints (or component word joints) is something that I had never really thought about -- probably because native speakers and readers pick it up by osmosis -- it's apparently not obvious to people who use a notably different writing system.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)