|
|
 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Looking Stuff Up
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
It's happened again! We have been corrected. And if there's one point I want to get across with this column, it's that if you want to ever get to a point where you're Always Right, you have to not be afraid to admit when you're wrong. So here goes.
One of our readers e-mailed to let us know that two weeks ago, when we gave our brief geography lesson, we over-simplified by classifying Kansai as “western Japan.” It's true that the Kansai region is in the western half Japan, but not all of western Japan is in the Kansai region (it's not even the most western part of Japan), and not everyone in western Japan uses Kansai dialect. So for the curious, the Kansai region is made up of Kyoto and Osaka, plus Hyogo, Shiga, Nara, and Wakayama prefectures. Also, according to Wikipedia, Mie, Fukui, and Tokushima prefectures are sometimes included as well.
This leads me to two confessions. First, we've never been that great at geography. Seriously, I think one of the greatest obstacles to my winning a million dollars on “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” (if I was ever to go on the show) would be geography. And that's elementary school level geography! Although on the other hand, the first time we saw an episode where world geography came up, I think the question was “Tokyo is the capital of what country?” If I didn't get that, then I would be in big trouble. But I might not be in as big trouble as you would think.
See, geography doesn't come up much in manga. I'm not saying it's useless to learn geography, of course. It's very, very good to know geography. All I'm saying is that you don't need to worry about the state of your manga, even if it's being translated by people like us. Even in My Heavenly Hockey Club, a self-proclaimed travel manga, we haven't run into any obstacles (as far as we know) by not knowing exactly where, for example, Iwate Prefecture is. But gaining more knowledge is always a good thing, and how much more cool would it be to be reading Hockey Club when they go to Iwate, and be able to say, “Oh! I know where that is!” That's the kind of thing we're missing out on. I've been thinking lately that it might be a good idea to get a map of Japan, with all the prefectures labeled, and put it on the wall where we can look at it whenever we want. A nice shiny one.
But more important, I think, is our second confession, and that's that we refer to Wikipedia a lot. I myself am slightly concerned about this, especially after seeing Stephen Colbert's segment on “Wikiality,” and his subsequent ability to apparently change the state of the elephant population in Africa. Though I understand that the Wikipedia people do their best to ban people like that, so maybe I'm worrying over nothing.
But anyway, the fact of the matter is, translators don't know everything. The key to succeeding anyway is to know how to use reference materials to learn as much as you can. I think I've mentioned before that, as part of the Japanese major at BYU (where we went to college), they require you to take a Classical Japanese class, and that Classical Japanese is like a completely different language than modern Japanese. The professor of that class started out by saying that the point of the class was not to make us fluent in Classical Japanese, but to teach us how to use our resources to be able to understand the old language if we should ever come across it. That's kind of what translating manga is like sometimes. All those translation notes you find in Del Rey manga? Most of them aren't things that you find in dictionaries (although some of the foods are). A lot of them come from either experience with the Japanese language and/or culture (depending on the note) or good old looking stuff up.
So, in the interest of making this column longer, let's talk about translation notes some more. We can only speak for ourselves, but the things we tend to make notes for are things that don't seem like common knowledge, or that require an explanation of the Japanese language to make sense. Anyone who reads Hockey Club will know that there are a lot of notes about food in that series. Part of that is because when the club travels, they always point out the local delicacies of the place they're traveling to, but a bigger part of that is that we're very picky eaters, so our food vocabulary is very low. That being the case, almost every dish they mention is new to us, and, since we need an explanation, we go ahead and provide the explanation for everybody else, too. Reading some of our friends' blogs lately, I'm beginning to think that more people might be familiar with the foods than we might think, but I also get the feeling that people like hearing about food, so we're not going to stop noting it.
Our favorite notes are the ones involving mythology and other languages and stuff. For example, Kamichama Karin chu is based a lot on Greek and Roman mythology, so it's really fun for us to look up the names of the attacks and find out what they mean in Greek or Latin. Atelier Marie & Elie was another really fun one, because it had a lot of German words. They weren't really important to the story, but we liked to look them up to find out how they should be spelled. That's how we found out that a lorelei is a kind of German river mermaid, like the Sirens in Greek mythology. But when we tried to find out how the heck we were supposed to spell “shubeeto” in the attack name “Schwert Streik,” we nearly fried our brains looking it up. We went to German online dictionaries and tried every spelling we could think of to see if we could get something that was a real word and made sense, but to no avail. Neither of us even remembers how we finally found it. The moral of the story is: it's really hard to convert something from katakana to German. Unless you're like fluent in German or something, which we, clearly, are not.
The other moral of the story is: Read Atelier Marie & Elie! It has lots of neat German names! And the translators worked really, really hard to figure out how to spell them properly! And it was adapted by MangaLife's own Barb Lien-Cooper! Which is super-appropriate, becase a cooper is someone who makes barrels, and Marie really likes barrels. And on top of that, it's a really fun series! Yay!
Okay, I'm done with the shameless plugging. Now I just need to come up with a conclusion. Let's see...
Try our fish and chips!
...Not sure that one works. Ah well.
: :
|
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
|
