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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: I Can't Take It Anymore!
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
I'm taking a stand! Normally, grammar mistakes don't bother me. In fact, as translators of manga, we have to keep in mind the fact that there are a lot of people out there who don't use proper grammar all the time. We ourselves use bad grammar sometimes when we think it's funny or cute (perhaps you've noticed).
But there's one particular bit of grammar that has been over-corrected to the point of people getting it wrong in the other direction, and quite frequently. In fact, our little sister tells us people will correct her when her grammar is fine. And so we want to get the word out!
Unfortunately, I'm not really a linguist, so I can't explain it with all the right terminology, but maybe that's a good thing. The grammar in question is “XXX and I.” I remember reading a comic strip in the newspaper a loooong time ago with somebody being corrected on this point, and I also seem to remember it coming up in various TV shows and stuff. So now everybody always says, for example, “you and I.” But the problem is that sometimes, “you and me” is actually the correct way to go. I will take my examples from Kingdom Hearts II. When you're playing the balloon bouncing game with Tigger and Roo, sometimes Roo will say, “You and me are good bouncers, huh?” It's adorable, but it's wrong. Why? Because if Roo was by himself, he'd say, “I'm a good bouncer.” So the correct grammar would be “You and I are good bouncers,” but it would be wrong of Roo to say that, because it's just not as cute.
On the other hand, say Sora is hanging out with Pooh, and Tigger comes along and bounces them. In that case, Sora would say, “Tigger bounced Pooh and me,” and be absolutely correct. And Rabbit might say, “Ah ah ah! Pooh and I!” But Rabbit would be wrong, because if it was only Sora, he would say, “Tigger bounced me,” and no one would think anything of it. (And Rabbit, I apologize if you wouldn't have actually corrected Sora.)
So spread the word! “XXX and me” can be correct! It can!
Whew, I'm glad to get that off my chest. And now I have to bring it back and relate it to manga. Someone told us once that they like to see bad grammar in subtitles, because that supposedly means the translation is more correct. I used to think this was wrong, because, as I've mentioned many times before, if the characters isn't speaking as they would if they'd grown up speaking English, the translation doesn't convey what the author was trying to convey. On second thought, if we were translating a character like Roo, it probably would be a more correct translation to have him using bad grammar, at least every so often. We like to think that Kanga would make sure he's not completely ignorant about grammar.
Oy, this is a manga column; why do I keep talking about Winnie the Pooh?
It's interesting thinking about all this stuff about grammar and word choices and all the things we were forced to analyze in our literature classes in high school. I had a very nice English teacher my junior year who wouldn't get too mad at me when I kept saying, “Maybe it was just the first thing that came to mind.” But as translators, now we're always thinking things like, “Now what's the significance of using this word as opposed to this word, and how can we convey that?” It mostly comes up with particles, which are the little bitty words that are roughly equivalent to prepositions in English. They're kind of like the cement inbetween the bricks that are nouns, verbs, etc. And so we're constantly looking at sentences and going, “Now, they used 'ni' here instead of 'na.' That means it's modifying the verb instead of the noun. But that doesn't make sense! Are you sure it wasn't just a typo?” (That last half is actually pretty rare; don't worry.)
But more than the particles, we also have to think about things like, “How would saying it this way change the emphasis of the sentence?” This is especially important because of how the lines are often broken up in manga. You know how they have those really dramatic pages with only one speech bubble that has the very end of the sentence? The way Japanese grammar is, sometimes you have to flip all the words around for a sentence to sound like someone would really talk that way, but then the word that's emphasized by being in that one speech bubble all by itself finds itself in a different bubble mixed with some other words on the previous page. That's no good at all. So you have to figure out which is more important--natural sounding English or drama? Sometimes you can find a good balance, especially because people tend to wax poetic when things get dramatic, and poetry is worded in all kinds of crazy ways. But sometimes you just have to pick one and go with it.
Sometimes translating a sentence one way affects how the rest of the dialogue will go, especially when they're doing wordplay. Japanese wordplay is fun but can also be very annoying. Sometimes you get lucky, like in that one episode of Pokemon, where the Clefairies are worshipping the moon rock. Pikachu is trying to explain to Ash and company what's going on, so he pulls a hair out of Ash's head, because in Japanese, “kami” can mean “hair” or “deity.” We always thought it was very fortunate for the Pokemon writers that “hair” rhymes with “prayer.”
We heard a story once about a guy who said he never learned as much about the English language as when he learned... I think it was Spanish? It wasn't a very long story, and I don't remember why Dad told it to us because we weren't learning Japanese at the time. But it's a very true story. You learn a lot more about the ins and outs of your own language when you try to make sense of another one. I never thought that would also apply to my literature classes, and that someday I really would be carefully choosing just the right words.
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22 July 2008
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In Defense of Dubbing (Sort of)Spotlight: FullMetal Alchemist, Part One 2 July 2008
Words of Truth and Wisdom: WorkreationManga Bulletin: July 2nd, 2008
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