"An emotionally unstable dish who's on the skids"

[rachelmanija]

I have been practicing my reading on a copy of the manga Saiyuki number five, which is not yet available in English. Most of it is an extended flashback to the first meeting of Hakkai and Gojyo, and how the two of them met Sanzo and Goku

Comments

[telophase]

This makes me even less impressed by all those fangirls and fanboys who complain about the translations done by the US companies -- while I like getting fan translations of stuff because I dislike delayed gratification, on the other hand I like dialogue that sounds like actual English dialogue, too, and there are very few fan translators out there who manage to do it well. (I *really* like the few licensed manga out there where they've stuck cultural notes in the back explaining things; that feels like the best of both worlds to me.)

[rachelmanija]

I think that's the best way too. My feeling is that anyone willing to read right-to-left manga in the first place is capable to reading a glossary and learning what the honorifics and other untranslatable forms of address are. It's really not that difficult, and once you know what they all mean, then the translators don't have to tie themselves in knots trying to find a substitute for onee-chan, or explaining why it's funny when Field Marshall Tenpou tells Goku to call him Ten-chan.

[telophase]

I watched the first 3 episodes of the anime "Comic Party" ... and it drove me up the wall because they translated "doujinshi" as "fan comic" throughout the entire thing. No! "Doujinshi" is a perfectly good word! And it's not like this series is likely to get picked up for broadcast or rented by nonfans, so all you need is a quick sign on the screen right at the beginning that says "Doujinshi are comics by fans" and nobody would be confused.

They weren't trying to make it less Japanese any other way, either - it was still set in Japan with characters with Japanese names runnng around eating Japanese food and doing Japanese stuff, so why on earth would they bother to translate "doujinshi"?

[oyceter]

Gah, yes... my Japanese teacher made us do some translations for class, and it was always so frustrating to see something that made sense perfectly in Japanese become either very awkward and stilted English or become well-reading English that lost certain nuances of the original.

[rachelmanija]

I'm not terribly good at any non-English language, but even from my kindergarten perspective it's obvious that Japanese-to-English and vice-versa is particularly difficult. Simple sentences in Hindi, for instance, translate a lot more easily into English than simple sentences in Japanese do.

[telophase]

And now when skimming back through my friends list, I re-read the title of this post and was hit by a memory -- of reading a book in the library when I was 13 or 14 or so. It was fiction, from the adult shelves, and was some sort of childhood-memoir type of narrative. The narrator at one point sneaks a dirty book away from the house and she and a couple of friends look at it. Then they go get a dictionary. They eventually, after some time and much consultation with the dictionary, manage to translate "He probed her delta of Venus with his tumescent tool" to "He dug in her sandy garden with his inflatable shovel." Can't remember the author or title, and the rest of the book was forgettable, but that passage had me giggling for weeks.

[rachelmanija]

I like the section in David Sedaris' Naked where the kids find an illiterate pornographic incest novel ("Dad fingled Sissy's tots") and begin passing it around and getting obsessed with it, until the entire family has a collective nervous breakdown.