|
|
 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Spelling
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
The other day, we were discussing the challenges of translating Negima! with someone, and, while there are many, many, many challenging things about translating Negima!, the one we focused on most was the spells. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Negima!, basically what you need to know is that there are a lot of spells, with incantations to go with them. Like in Final Fantasy Tactics, how sometimes the characters will say a cool little chant thingie before casting magic. We used to have a few of them memorized, but we haven't played the game in years, much to Athena's dismay. Anyway, the difference between Final Fantasy Tactics and Negima! is that the incantations aren't originally in Japanese--they're usually in Latin, and sometimes in Greek. While this is exceedingly awesome, we didn't sign up to translate Latin or Greek, and thus we are woefully unprepared to do so.
Fortunately, the way Negima! and the Japanese language work, we don't have to translate the spells from Latin into English. I think most of our readers probably already know this, but since the Japanese writing system is a combination of kana, representing syllables, and kanji, representing ideas, sometimes the kanji requires smaller kana next to it, just in case not all the readers know what all the kanji means. For example, the text might have the kanji for “nazo (mystery, enigma, riddle),” but if the reader hasn't learned that kanji, it would just be a meaningless drawing, much like the entire Japanese writing system would be for someone who grew up reading English. So next to the kanji, there's little kana for na and zo, so the reader would be like, “Ohhh, nazo. I know what that means.” Only really they would just read it and not give it a second thought (although they might be able to recognize the kanji a little next time they saw it, assuming they didn't already know it). This is called furigana, and I seem to remember hearing something about it coming from “furu,” which means “to fall (as in rain or snow),” because it “falls down” on top of the kanji. But since most Japanese writing is vertical, that doesn't really work anyway, and we just looked up the kanji for “furigana” right now, and it is in fact different. So the theory must have come from fellow Japanese learners in one of our earlier classes.
Anyway. Because they already have this system in place to let people know how to pronounce stuff, they can use it for other purposes, like if a character says one thing but means another, they can put both there to clarify things for the reader. In the case of Negima!, most of the spells are written in Japanese, with furigana beside it, spelling out the Latin and Greek in Japanese characters. So, since we can translate the spell from the Japanese, really the only problem we have is figuring out how to spell everything in our alphabet. Or, in some cases, how to spell it in the Greek alphabet. (It should also be pointed out that we didn't start translating Negima! until volume 22, so the majority of the spells were translated by somebody else.)
Negima! is actually very accommodating in that regard, though, because it has handy lexicons that give the spells in the alphabet of their linguistic origin. Other titles aren't so kind. Some of our readers may remember when I mentioned the ordeal we had trying to figure out an attack name for Atelier Marie & Elie. And that was a really long walk to get to what I was planning to talk about: figuring out how to spell stuff.
Normally, when we're dealing with Japanese names, it's pretty easy. There is actually more than one romanization system, as they're called, but one of them is the most widely accepted, so that's what we go with. Plus it's the prettiest and makes the most sense. But even that isn't so simple. For example, with this romanization system, Kyo and Tohru from Fruits Basket would be Kyou and Tooru. We actually took the spellings from... I think some Japanese merchandise that we saw? Because if it's on merchandise, it's semi-official. Even Japanese merchandise can be inconsistent, though, and that causes no end of torment to those of us who are just trying to figure out the best way to spell something.
Names from other languages can be harder, especially if we don't know which language to look up. Plus we like to play with them sometimes. We translated the prequel to Aria, and we had a very small hope that they would spell Alicia's name as “Alethea.” See, they don't have a “th” sound in Japanese, so it's usually replaced with an S sound or a T sound. And actually, “Alethea” is pronounced like “Alicia,” only with a lisp. It would have been especially awesome, because we'd seen the Aria anime and knew there's another character named Athena. But I guess since they're in Neo Venetia, it makes sense to give at least one character a Latinate name. But when dealing with attack names and stuff, the manga authors tend to use real words from other languages, so it's important to look them up. Otherwise, you might guess on a spelling and end up with a word that means “elk” when you want one that means “anarchy.”
The hardest names and words to deal with are the ones the authors just completely made up. Really good examples of these can be found in The Candidate for Goddess and Elemental Gelade. There are official spellings, and they are completely insane. And sometimes the official spellings aren't revealed until three or four volumes later--after we need them. (We only recently discovered the possibility of adding a note to the scripts saying “check official spelling,” but I think for the most part editors rely on translators to spell stuff; I could be wrong though.) Elemental Gelade has a whole... species, I guess... of women called “Edil Raids.” This spelling comes from the list TokyoPop gave us so we could match the spellings in Geneon's release of the anime, which had come first. Before we got the list, we were spelling the first word “Edyll,” because it's prettier. That's the general rule when making up spellings: choose whatever looks prettiest.
We came to find out a few volumes later, when it was too late, that there's a reason the organization dedicated to protecting Adil Raids is called ARC Aile. The ARC stands for “Adil Raid Conservation.” And thus we were greatly annoyed. Oh well, these things happen.
: :
|
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
|
