My Thesis. Let me show it to you.
In case any one was wondering what the hell I do between classes where all I seem to do is some Japanese theatrics and/or try to tie a damn obi. Inputs, insights, interests welcome. Just the preface, since the entire thing is even longer and more boring.
Preface
There’s a song in the modern American musical Avenue Q entitled Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist. The musical, particularly this song, is ripe with American stereotypes and cultural riffs that are difficult to translate to Japanese literally (‘no one’s really color blind,’) and perhaps impossible to concisely translate contextually (‘There's a plain going down. There's only one parachute. There's a rabbi, a priest, and…’, Polack jokes, Jesus’s ethnicity’s importance in debate). While each nation is ripe with stereotypes and may even share many stereotypes about the groups within the song, stereotypes are extremely cultural in not only the stereotyped element but from the culture they originate from. Social linguists have varied beliefs on the direction which most of the control flows in the circuit, but it is well supported that elements of language from vocabulary to grammar structure and beyond relate to thought. Language is a means through which thought is expressed, and some, such as Vygotsky, argue that it is through language that stimuli are categorized for memory storage at all (Maynard, 2). Stereotypes are a way of classifying something as different from the norm by connecting it with other deviating elements. Some are near universal (glasses, in most cultures, are linked to of intelligence and/or nerdiness). Some exist distinctly within a culture due to that culture’s history with the stereotyped element (Japanese stereotypical views of/jokes about Koreans or the North American southern United States redneck concept). A part of stereotyping is differentiating from the norm; thus, what the norm is will determine what is stereotyped. This is why the Japanese will have considerably less stereotypes and jokes about themselves than other nations will have about the Japanese. This is also why the Japanese alone will have stereotypes about styles of Japanese speaking, being the only major nation whose primary language is Japanese. English speakers have stereotypes about other dialects of English, but likely only their own if it is substandard to a greater cultural norm. Brooklyn English speakers may hold stereotypes about their accent, but, the standardized Midwest English holds few if any stereotypes in America. English speakers hold all Japanese language formats as so far outside of the ‘norm’ that to see deviations from a deviation from a norm would be like trying to tell the deviations in the reflection of a funhouse mirror while looking through warped glasses. The reverse is true for the Japanese of English. Through learning the ‘sub-cultural norm’ language, one can look at things besides the mirror with those glasses and get a feel for what deviations exist specifically from the glasses. From there, even if it is not a natural realization so much as a methodical break down, one is at least capable of discerning the deviations specific to the mirror, so to speak.
Translators have the task of making it such that something so substandard (the foreign language) can be related to the normal world. They must me able to provide a ‘prescription’ for flawed vision to provide something as close to normalcy as possible. But while reality is stable, what ‘vision’ is considered the ideal? If translating a line into English, which English is correct? The irony of a bespectacled lens crafter comes to mind. And, what can be considered a source of ‘normal’ to then compare to the funhouse mirror, if this is a house of mirrors? With this in mind, I would like to share with you just a few deviations of Japanese and English, as well as any deviations in understanding made by other lens’s attempts to align the two. Light, vision, is all too happy to refract and scatter, argued by super positioning to have no true transient state at all. Keep in mind this is but another lens; in the words of the song quoted in the beginning of this preface;
Everyone’s a little bit racist; it’s true / But everyone is just about as racist as you!