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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Think, Think, Think
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
Lately I've been remembering college, and thinking of a classmate we had in our Japanese classes. We would get together to work on the homework a lot, and she would sometimes express her frustration that she just couldn't think in Japanese. At the time, for some reason, all we could tell her was "that's okay, you'll get it eventually." What I really wish we could have said was: “Of course you can't. We're only in Japanese 102.” Athena puts it like this:
Think of a sentence. Any sentence, it doesn't matter. Now how many of the words in that sentence do you know a Japanese equivalent for? (Obviously this analogy is less likely to work if you've taken more than the equivalent of two college semesters of Japanese.) One? Less? Then of course you can't think in Japanese! You don't have enough vocabulary! The analogy also doesn't work as much if you've constantly got things like ninja on the brain. Actually, come to think of it, it might not work if you came up with a short sentence. Come up with a long sentence. Or a paragraph. You know what--never mind. The point is, if you only know a few words of a language, you can't think in that language. Or your thought process will consist entirely of things like “Can you tell me where the bathroom is?” or “Give me a red one, please.”
We personally like to think in English because we're lazy lazy slackers. And thinking in Japanese is hard. Even when we're watching anime or playing video games in Japanese, we'll yell at the characters in English. This probably has a lot to do with why we had such a hard time getting into Japanese speaking mode when we were in Japan. We thought about it before we left. Athena was like, “If you're so worried about being able to talk to people in Japanese, maybe we should, y'know, practice,” and I made that whiny noise that little sisters make when they don't wanna do stuff. I have no idea how it's spelled. Something like, “Aehnh!” only angrier and whiny. But I think in the case of translating, this can be a very good thing. You see, if you're too far into “Japanese mode,” your English start not turn out so good.
One of the things we liked to joke around about in our advanced Japanese literature class was how living in two languages at once can mess with your brain. Our professor told a story of when he came back to America and started reading stuff in English for the first time in a while, and he thoroughly confused his wife by wandering all around the house trying to reason out why on earth he would do it for her saké (rice wine). Okay, so maybe that one doesn't work as well unless you're saying it out loud. Suffice it to say that the accent mark wasn't there in the book that he was reading.
A classmate had an even better story. He was serving as a missionary in Japan and writing a letter home to someone who had been sick for a while, and he asked something like, “How was your recovery interval?” I'm sure you can guess that that grammar construction works perfectly well in Japanese, but not so much in English. (Incidentally, if either of you (professor or classmate) happen to be reading this, first, I'm sorry for using your anecdotes without permission, and second, please feel free to clear up the details.)
On the other hand, by stubbornly thinking in English, sometimes we come up with some really awesome (in our minds) translations. I kind of think of translating manga as quoting movies, only it's the whole thing. But I mostly only think of it that way when we get to the more quotable parts. When we get to a scene we think is really funny, we'll repeat the lines (like quoting movies), only in English because of our bad habit. So, for example, when we got to the part in +ANIMA where Husky is complaining to the circus leader guy about having to wear cheap fake pearls and says more literally, “They lessen my value as a princess!” we thought that part was hilarious, so we quoted it a few times, only it came out as, “I'm supposed to be a princess!” Purists that we are, we left the original translation with a note, and we were happy to find that the second line was the one chosen. We think it gets the same message across; hopefully all you fans agree.
You do have to be flexible. If you get too stuck on English, sometimes you interpret things wrong. We've seen it happen, and hopefully we caught all our mistakes when we did it ourselves. It's all about balance, really. You kind of have to walk the line between English and Japanese. But if you're studying Japanese and you're stressed because you can't think in it yet, don't worry; you're in good company.
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