|
|
 Words Of Truth And Wisdom: Japanese Terminology PART TWO
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
Some of you may remember that last time, we started a big rambling essay on whether or not it's a good idea to leave Japanese terms in Japanese, or to translate them aaaaaall into English. Just talking about titles (-san, -sama, -chan, etc.) took up the whole column, and we didn't get a chance to talk about actual vocabulary type things. Just like last time, it's important to remember that this is all our own opinion and doesn't mean that it's the only right way to do anything.
Now it's time for a story. Don't get your hopes up; it's not that great. But once upon a time, the Twins were working on the Fruits Basket fanbook. They decided that in order to better match all the stuff in the fanbook to the stuff in the actual series, it would probably help to reread the series, because it's long and therefore nigh impossible to keep every little detail stored inside their brains of arguable size. And so they picked up the English version of the manga and started reading. When they got to volume three, they read the word “onsen,” and were like, “What!?”
The onsen thing was actually completely our doing. We had different ideas back then. Of course, we've had a change of heart since, but I can imagine what we were thinking. Sometimes, when you're studying another language and partaking of the entertainment from that culture, you get so deeply immersed in it that changing certain words into English feels somehow wrong. It's like when we watch an anime series without subtitles, and then we have no idea what the English version terminology is. Like what do they call the Gurren-dan in the English version of Gurren Lagann? So we figured we could just leave it as onsen, and tell everybody what it is, and no one would be confused, and it would all be good.
But! Now we think that was kind of dumb, frankly. And that's because “onsen” is easily translated to “hot spring,” and everybody knows what a hot spring is. So these days we would tell ourselves, “Just type hot spring and deal with it!”
That being the case, our general opinion on Japanese terminology is that if there's an English equivalent, it should be translated. Of course, there are several cases where there's not an exact English equivalent, and that's where things get tricky. Now, if it's a cultural thing, or something that originated in Japan, it's probably fine to leave it in Japanese--like karate and karaoke. There are some things that Americans aren't necessarily going to be familiar with, like tabi. For those of you who don't know, tabi are the Japanese socks that are forked so that your big toe can move independently of your other toes. They're very convenient for wearing traditional Japanese footwear that has straps like flip-flops. One of our Japanese professors once told us of a translator who translated it as bifurcated footpads, which probably doesn't make much more sense than the word “tabi” itself. So in cases like that, it's probably better to leave it in Japanese and add a note. The same applies for some foods, but not all. It's a discretion thing. I think someone once said you should leave dishes in Japanese but translate ingredients. So sushi is fine, but okome (rice) should be translated. That seems like a good rule of thumb.
Then there are things like eki-ben. Eki-ben, as My Heavenly Hockey Club fans might remember, is a kind of lunchbox you buy at the train station, to eat while you're on the train. It easily translates into “station lunch,” and yet we chose to leave it in Japanese. Now why would we do that? The answer is simple: eki-ben sounds way better than “station lunch.” Also, when I hear “station lunch,” for some reason, I think about sitting down at like a restaurant at the train station, which isn't really what it is. So another rule of thumb is: if the English translation brings to our own minds a picture that's different than the one in the manga, we add a note. Whether or not we leave it in Japanese depends on what we think sounds better.
And that just leaves specialized terms, by which we mean terms specific to a certain series. When the discussion came up (as I mentioned in the last column), Bleach was brought up as an example of having a million non-English, specialized terms that you have to know in order to understand what's going on. This is where you have to look at it from the readers' point of view. From what we know of Bleach, a lot of the special terms are all explained within the series. In that case, it's not important to know what the words mean, because you still know what they are. If you can read a word like zanpakuto and know it refers to the swords the Soul Reapers use, you don't have to know that it means “soul-cutting sword.” (Incidentally, Bleach is another anime we watched in Japanese without subtitles, so we had to get those terms off of Wikipedia. We didn't know they were translating shinigami!)
But at the same time, you don't want to leave stuff in Japanese if it's going to get too confusing. There was an anime series we watched where they left a lot of terms in Japanese, and since there was a lot of narrating and exposition and stuff, we relied pretty heavily on the subtitles. Unfortunately, there were so many specialized terms made up for the series (so we didn't know what they were from our Japanese studies) that it was really hard to remember all of them. And it wasn't uncommon for us to be like, “Wait, what was that thing again?” When there was time to think about it, it wasn't too hard to come up with English equivalents, and those would have made the series a lot easier to follow.
Also, sometimes it just sounds cooler to use English (in our opinions, of course). For example, in Nabari no Ou, they use the (actually pretty common) ninja technique of konoha-gakure. It sounds kind of cool in Japanese, too, if you pronounce it right, but it's one of those things that we think is neater if you know what it is. So we translated it to Leaf Veil (which some of you might recognize as a Pokemon move). Actually “konoha” means “leaf,” and “gakure” means “hide” or “cover,” but since a veil hides things, it works. And “veil” is a cool-sounding word. Plus, it gives you the image of a leaf covering, which “konoha-gakure” (in Japanese) probably wouldn't do, unless you happen to know Japanese.
So in conclusion, it's all kind of arbitrary. The end.
: :
|
30 August 2010
MangaLife: On Culture
Share 25 August 2010
Words of Truth and Wisdom: I Put A Spell On You
Share 11 August 2010
Words of Truth and Wisdom: Filters
Share 6 August 2010
Maybe You're Not Using It Right :On Japanese Load Words
Share
|
