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kaigouThis entire project, I think, should be blamed on the combination of business trip and a new printer, which can really be the only reason I printed out the first 15 pages of a japanese-to-chinese manga and packed it, with my old chinese dictionary, into my carryon. That turned my trip (and a chunk of the time at my brother's) into long passages of page-flipping, silence, followed by a spontaneous, "ohhhh, so that's what that one is." (Not to mention gave me chance to focus on something other than business strategies for the first time in over a month.)
Why manga, and why this one? Well, the first volume's been scanlated, so I have context in terms of character names, places, conflicts. Second, manga tends to have simpler language compared to say, a novel, plus it comes with handy pictures to show you who's talking and their expressions as they do so -- more context -- and manga authors tend to use the same sentence construction and vocabulary selection repeatedly. Third, children's books have simplistic construction but are geared towards learning new words, and I want to refresh myself, not confuse myself further. Fourth, I like this author's work, so I'm motivated to finish what I started because I genuinely want to find out what happens next.And fifth, hey, PORN.
Which kinda begs the question: why learn simplified and now have to re-learn the traditional forms of the characters? (People tell me it's "easy to switch" but I think that really only applies if you're already a native reader, much like a native English speaker doesn't balk at quick/qwik, right/rite, you/u, etc.) But the only region using/writing in simplified is PRC; the rest of the world, for political, cultural, and whatever else reasons, haven't picked up the use. (Before anyone asks, my university's professors were all from the University of Beijing, so traditional wasn't even a curriculum option.) Unless I want to restrict myself to reading only novels considered suitable by PRC -- a notion I find as exciting as being stuck in the local Christian Scientist reading room -- then I need to learn traditional. It's not just what 90% of the licensed-in-Chinese manga and Chinese-original manga are; it's also, from what I can tell, the preference of 90% of the Chinese scanlation groups, too.
The bottom line is that I'm tired of seeing hanzi and thinking, I should be able to read that...
Anyway, by the time I'd reached page five in my laborious reintroduction scheme, I happened to read the latest English-release of another series (after trying and failing earlier on a Chinese version of the same). I asked myself: why did the other release look like that and this one looks like this? How did they make the images look so nice? Since I had the first bit translated anyway, and with a general levity equivalent to my usual self-amusement at learning new tricks regardless of actual real-world value, I figured, hey, here's a tutorial, so let's try it. What does that bandaid thingie do, anyway?
A bit of context: in my non-project get-paid-for-it life, when my designs become Real Live Things it means almost all of my time until the end will be spent ramming people's heads against the wall when they want to get fancified on crap like fonts, sizes, layout, and design. No, no, I'm always saying: two fonts, one for the header, one for the body, two sizes each at most, don't change the cancel button's location from page to page, follow the goddamned wireframe and STFU already... but on a comic-book page? Did you ever count how many fonts there are on a single page, when it comes to sound effects? Wow, I gotta get me some of that secret so-not-good-for-me joy of using LOTS of fonts. Glee.
So I produced what I suppose you could call a student scanlation: I wiped the chinese text in the pictures, puzzled over my translation as to how to convey the meaning but with an ear towards English flow, and put it together. My real intention? I was planning on page-by-page comparisons -- the original Japanese raw, my translation from the Chinese, and the english version done by scanlators with a clue (and with better source material). Outside my own goal of getting back to fluent read/write skills, I'm also intensely curious about what cultures embed in language, and what this says about us, and I guess you could say this is just one more way that manifests itself for me. What was said in the Japanese that sounds 'right' to a Japanese reader, and what did it have to become to sound 'right' to a Chinese reader, and woah, so that's what they were really saying there, the mystery solved!
I would say that such purely academic discoveries are my idea of joy, but it's also a form of research. I prefer to write multicultural characters, and our language carries a huge amount of information about how we, as a culture, perceive ourselves, our place in society, and the world around us. The Japanese reluctance to use pronouns (to the extent that saying "that person" is considered more polite than simply "him" or "her"), the Chinese telegraphic tendency to drop anything that's implied (as in, if I'm talking about the house, I don't have to include subject in the subject-verb-object construction because you and I already know subject=house), and the English... well, if you're reading this, you're probably already aware on some level that if English has any hallmark, it's a rabid love of loanwords -- from other languages, industry jargon, net-speak, science fiction, anywhere we find a word and it catches our fancy.
[Yes, last week I heard a director say, "Ef-why-eye," spelling out the acronym instead of saying "for your information." He then followed it up with "grok." Both in a professional meeting. This language loves itself some word salad, I swear, and it permeates everything. When was the last time you heard of an English-language group insisting we "only use English words" a la the French with their anti-Xerox campaign of the 80s or the Japanese and their bafflement over the popularity of using English words when perfectly good Japanese words already exist? How about you do a search on wabi-sabi and see how many times it's used, without explication, in english-language books and media?]
My point is (and I do have one) that to effectively capture the dialogue of a character from a non-American background, you really do need to grasp -- at least I believe so -- the language that's part and parcel of the character's personal culture. You can't ever really walk into another culture and be entirely at home, and writers have enough trouble just trying to 'capture' our native cultures. We need shorthand for *cough* grokking cultures not innate to us: comprehending the language, I think, is the key.
For instance, the construction of Japanese and Chinese sentences are radically different. (In some ways, English has much more in common with Chinese than with Japanese, in terms of sentence structure.) At least in English, we have ways of duplicating a foreign language's terminology or style, a kind of pseudo-pattern that implies it originated in something other than English. Yeah, so there's the whole fan-speak of bad pigeon-Japanese, but at the same time, how else do you capture the nuance? (Here again I point to the English tendency tosteal words embrace loanwords like crazy.)
A fine example of the English take-all-prisoners behavior: the Japanese honorific. For a guy who's your peer, or younger, you're probably going to use -kun, as in, Michael-kun. It's kinda like saying Mikey... but not really, because if you had a closer/more-informal relationship, you might say Mike-kun. Compare that to English, where we'd never call a coworker Mikey, for instance, unless Mikey had indicated that this was the name he preferred to use. More likely, he'd be Mikey at home, Mike with his friends, and Michael at work: again with the cultural nuances. And, perhaps, this Michael has a younger peer of lower social standing -- another concept that we don't contain in the English language, which is as radically equalizing as Chinese -- in which case, it'd be Michael-sama... but how do you translate Mike-sama? I mean, it's sort of like calling Prince William "Prince Will" to his face. In English, we'd just drop the title to indicate closeness.
So how do you do it? Seems to me that the majority of translators (professional and amateur) have decided that the best answer is... you don't. Just leave the honorific in there, and let it be a loanword to indicate a nuance we don't have in English.
Chinese, though, is like English in the way it has equality as a backbone of its linguistic styles. Sure, there are 'formal' ways to say things, much like in English we'd say "shut up already!" to a kid but "please, keep it down," to coworkers. (Or not, but that's also just as much an indicator of dynamics in relationships.) I recall back when I was much quicker at the reading comprehension *cough* and reading a Chinese translation of a Japanese work. In the unofficial English translation from the Japanese, there's easily five or six different (non-military) ranks used, with honorifics, blah blah blah. In the chinese?
大 人
da ren
Literally, "big person."
Yep. That's lord, boss, owner, master, local chief, informal head guy at the local watering hole. While there are other titles (usually referring to one's family or work position), 大人 was pretty much treated as a one-size-fits-all for most of the titles in the Japanese, which the English scanlation group must've struggled for hours to parse (baron, chief, lord, head warrior, etc). Then again, China hasn't had a titled aristocracy for a thousand years. It does have its elite -- which traditionally have been the educated bureaucrats (and that's historically independent of one's financial/social origins) -- but it doesn't have lords, ladies, there's no baron, marquis, duke, earl... and the language reflects this.
As you may have gathered by now, this was killing a lot of birds with one big freaking rock, as far as I'm concerned. Learn traditional! Parse Chinese (err, Hong Kong, really) cultural assumptions! And see what this also, by contrast, tells me about Japanese!
No, really. I love this kind of thing.
Like one specific passage, which prompted some great discussions between this dog and the household Leo. I hit a line in the story where Joe, with no apparent third parties participating, is talking to Tom. Here's a literal translation (with variant definitions) of what he says.
I | with or to follow | Tom | to say | he | to retreat or but or to decline | how | not | believe to be true | question-indicator
Yes, that's right, no punctuation. Hmmmm. Is this:
I (Joe) follow you (Tom) speak [to] him to decline. How not believe?
Smoothing into an English pattern, I think maybe it's: "I'll support you/go with you when you tell him you're turning him down. How could he disbelieve, then?"
Or maybe it's:
I (Joe) follow you (Tom) to speak to him. (You're) declining how, not believe true?
My brain promptly fills in the blanks, right or wrong, with something like this: I'll support you / go with you to talk to him. How can you decline? Don't believe me?
Or maybe... that 'he' is the Chinese translator's mistake of using the wrong pronoun to replace the Japanese non-pronoun? Since the person missed that 萤, ying, was the character's name, maybe the second mention of 萤/ying became third-person pronoun to indicate that Ying is Some Other Dude Not Appearing Here. So if, by that logic, 萤/ying and 'he' are the same person...
I with you, speak, you retreat but not believe it's true.
Uh. Who's the subject again? I'm thinking it's Joe (I)... so maybe it's Joe who doesn't believe it's true -- what, that Tom (you) is running away, or does he (Joe? Tom? My dog?) not believe something else is true? But if it's Tom who's the actual subject, then Tom's retreating/declining is due to him/Tom being the one who doesn't believe.
Me? I believe my head just exploded.
OBLIGATORY PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!
The preceding paragraphs are why you should GET DOWN ON YOUR KNEES and thank the nearest professional translator, and SWEAR that you will never ever again SNARK about how "that's not really accurate to what was said" because you know what? THIS SHIT IS HARD, YO.
Ahem.
[Incidentally, the version I eventually chose was: Yet when we speak, you retreat. What, don't believe me? which the runner-up version was I tell you, you're retreating. How can you not accept the truth? which has quite a different tone and set o' connotations in there. Without any insight into the character's motivation for his words, I don't know whether they should be snarky, patient, teasing, or cruel. Oi, vey!]
Here's where the hour of awesome intellectual meandering came in: I hit the Leo with the question of, in Japanese would you ever use the third-person pronoun to refer to the person you're speaking to? Or would you just repeat the name in lieu of any pronoun? And lo, did much conversational happiness ensue.
...there's another cultural embedding, for those of you curious about things I've noticed. One is the Japanese obsession with anti-pronoun-ness, which -- for the most part -- doesn't affect the speech of Japanese-native-speaking-English patterns. Well, until you get to your name: on average, a Japanese person, I've noticed, tosses around your name in conversation easily five times as much as a non-Japanese (although the name used is almost always your first-name, perhaps as a concession to Western society's association of 'last names' with school, work, and annoyed parents).
Listen to how Western-culture people actually talk to friends and associates. We very rarely use a person's name, and when we do, it's often only because we need to designate either the subject or object (ie, Joe says to Tom during Sam's visit, "I was telling Sam the other day..."), or to differentiate between potential listeners ("hey, Sam!" as opposed to just "hey!"). It was round about the fifth or sixth dinner with a whole room of Japanese friends that I realized I was positively twitching because I kept hearing my name, over and over, when a person was speaking to me. Not as a pronoun replacement, but as a modifier within the sentence. Like so:
American: Could you get out the wine glasses?
Japanese: Name, could you get out the wine glasses?
Now, multiply that by ten, and repeat it for three-hour durations about six times, and yeah, I guess twitching might be a reasonable reaction if you're from a culture that leaves listener-identification to be assumed. Hearing my name used as preface or tag on a sentence or question for about the hundredth time made me want to scream: please, you really are wearing out my name! Stop already!
[Incidentally, I've noticed Indian coworkers do the same. It's always, "Name, got a minute" when they stop by your office, while American, Korean, Malaysian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and even Pakistani coworkers would just say "got a minute?" I seem to recall the Brits & Aussies I've worked with have used name+phrase and phrase-only to equal amounts. Hmmm.]
Anyway, that's all just one instance of what I mean when I say comprehending a language is sometimes the best, or at least perhaps the most graspable, means to getting some basic sense of another culture.
Round about the Tom-Joe-Ying madness, I went looking for the Japanese originals. Someone has to have scanned them, quality isn't the issue as long as the text's readable. Not that I can read it, ho, not even, but I do have the ability to shanghai the Leo away from his own manga reading (in the original Japanese, I might add), to demand he Solve The Goddamn Mystery.
The only responses were in the negative: no raws available. Plus, no volume's been announced or released, so no idea how long it'll be. Hunh, but the Chinese groups have the raws... where did they get them? (And do I suck for not being able to figure out emule, and who named it that, anyway?) Okay, no Japanese-source material available, and nothing looking likely on the horizon for at least three months. Maybe more.
Meanwhile, the fifth chapter was been published, as a single -- at some point enough in the past that it's already, again, only available in Chinese. If you assume that "five chapters" usually equals "one volume" (sometimes, but not always, true), then volume two should be coming, well, if not soon-soon, at least by the end of this year. To use the US as a comparison: it's usually a 3-6 month lag between the last single and the compiled volume. (Partly because they want the singles to sell out before introducing the set as competition.)
Let's assume the next volume is released around September, and the scanlation group gets a scanned copy -- with the presumption they have an in-Japan scanning-person so there's no shipping-overseas-delay -- and then has to clean up the scans, translate it, edit the text, actually insert the text so it fits nicely and legibly onto the page, and then they'll release it. I'm thinking... five months (from now) at the absolute minimum. Six months, maybe seven, before we see a high-quality, properly-translated, scanalation chapter... if we pretend the translators, editors, scanners, and layout folks really like pulling all-nighters for several days in a row. And even that estimate ignores the quiet, but huge, threat of sudden announcement that the series has been licensed.*
*In which case, with some of these distribution companies, that doesn't just mean a year's work from a professional translator. It could mean "coming soon" is a curse of indefinite length. Which company is it that's holding the rights to distribute several big mangaka in English, but haven't released the rights -- or any titles -- in over a year?
Do you REALIZE what this means?
Sure, it means that by the time any 'real' (from the Japanese, professional or amateur) version comes out, no one will remember my measly learn-traditional-and-go-crazy adventure. Long, long forgotten, links dead, download expired, etc.
But the biggest ramification of such a long wait?
IT'S GOING TO BE SEPTEMBER BEFORE I FIND OUT WHAT THE FUCK JOE WAS REALLY SAYING TO TOM THE GODDAMNED FIREFLY.
*headdesk, repeat*
One major lesson learned, though:
Crazy-ass fonts are cruel and unusual punishment to non-native speakers.
I spent almost an hour with a page exploded to like 300%, trying to figure out a character. Count strokes, look through three different dictionaries, count strokes again and think, hrm, maybe that's 14 strokes, not 13? Try again... Eventually I figured it out only by managing to spend another twenty minutes parsing the second character, and then by context (and use of a nifty feature called "end of dictionary entry" in the online searchable dictionaries), figured out what it meant. And you know what it was? A SOUND EFFECT. A freaking SOUND EFFECT ate almost TWO HOURS of my LIFE because the formatter/layout person thought the font looked COOL. Well, damn you and your coolness! I can't read it!
On the other hand, it gives me additional ammunition when bonking the heads of those crazy-ass programmers who don't see a problem with eighteen fonts on a single page in 8-pt. But still. A sound effect. All that time, and it was nothing more than a Chinese-filtered-Japanese version of KAPOW.
Well, hey, that's entertainment, I suppose.
Why manga, and why this one? Well, the first volume's been scanlated, so I have context in terms of character names, places, conflicts. Second, manga tends to have simpler language compared to say, a novel, plus it comes with handy pictures to show you who's talking and their expressions as they do so -- more context -- and manga authors tend to use the same sentence construction and vocabulary selection repeatedly. Third, children's books have simplistic construction but are geared towards learning new words, and I want to refresh myself, not confuse myself further. Fourth, I like this author's work, so I'm motivated to finish what I started because I genuinely want to find out what happens next.
Which kinda begs the question: why learn simplified and now have to re-learn the traditional forms of the characters? (People tell me it's "easy to switch" but I think that really only applies if you're already a native reader, much like a native English speaker doesn't balk at quick/qwik, right/rite, you/u, etc.) But the only region using/writing in simplified is PRC; the rest of the world, for political, cultural, and whatever else reasons, haven't picked up the use. (Before anyone asks, my university's professors were all from the University of Beijing, so traditional wasn't even a curriculum option.) Unless I want to restrict myself to reading only novels considered suitable by PRC -- a notion I find as exciting as being stuck in the local Christian Scientist reading room -- then I need to learn traditional. It's not just what 90% of the licensed-in-Chinese manga and Chinese-original manga are; it's also, from what I can tell, the preference of 90% of the Chinese scanlation groups, too.
The bottom line is that I'm tired of seeing hanzi and thinking, I should be able to read that...
Anyway, by the time I'd reached page five in my laborious reintroduction scheme, I happened to read the latest English-release of another series (after trying and failing earlier on a Chinese version of the same). I asked myself: why did the other release look like that and this one looks like this? How did they make the images look so nice? Since I had the first bit translated anyway, and with a general levity equivalent to my usual self-amusement at learning new tricks regardless of actual real-world value, I figured, hey, here's a tutorial, so let's try it. What does that bandaid thingie do, anyway?
A bit of context: in my non-project get-paid-for-it life, when my designs become Real Live Things it means almost all of my time until the end will be spent ramming people's heads against the wall when they want to get fancified on crap like fonts, sizes, layout, and design. No, no, I'm always saying: two fonts, one for the header, one for the body, two sizes each at most, don't change the cancel button's location from page to page, follow the goddamned wireframe and STFU already... but on a comic-book page? Did you ever count how many fonts there are on a single page, when it comes to sound effects? Wow, I gotta get me some of that secret so-not-good-for-me joy of using LOTS of fonts. Glee.
So I produced what I suppose you could call a student scanlation: I wiped the chinese text in the pictures, puzzled over my translation as to how to convey the meaning but with an ear towards English flow, and put it together. My real intention? I was planning on page-by-page comparisons -- the original Japanese raw, my translation from the Chinese, and the english version done by scanlators with a clue (and with better source material). Outside my own goal of getting back to fluent read/write skills, I'm also intensely curious about what cultures embed in language, and what this says about us, and I guess you could say this is just one more way that manifests itself for me. What was said in the Japanese that sounds 'right' to a Japanese reader, and what did it have to become to sound 'right' to a Chinese reader, and woah, so that's what they were really saying there, the mystery solved!
I would say that such purely academic discoveries are my idea of joy, but it's also a form of research. I prefer to write multicultural characters, and our language carries a huge amount of information about how we, as a culture, perceive ourselves, our place in society, and the world around us. The Japanese reluctance to use pronouns (to the extent that saying "that person" is considered more polite than simply "him" or "her"), the Chinese telegraphic tendency to drop anything that's implied (as in, if I'm talking about the house, I don't have to include subject in the subject-verb-object construction because you and I already know subject=house), and the English... well, if you're reading this, you're probably already aware on some level that if English has any hallmark, it's a rabid love of loanwords -- from other languages, industry jargon, net-speak, science fiction, anywhere we find a word and it catches our fancy.
[Yes, last week I heard a director say, "Ef-why-eye," spelling out the acronym instead of saying "for your information." He then followed it up with "grok." Both in a professional meeting. This language loves itself some word salad, I swear, and it permeates everything. When was the last time you heard of an English-language group insisting we "only use English words" a la the French with their anti-Xerox campaign of the 80s or the Japanese and their bafflement over the popularity of using English words when perfectly good Japanese words already exist? How about you do a search on wabi-sabi and see how many times it's used, without explication, in english-language books and media?]
My point is (and I do have one) that to effectively capture the dialogue of a character from a non-American background, you really do need to grasp -- at least I believe so -- the language that's part and parcel of the character's personal culture. You can't ever really walk into another culture and be entirely at home, and writers have enough trouble just trying to 'capture' our native cultures. We need shorthand for *cough* grokking cultures not innate to us: comprehending the language, I think, is the key.
For instance, the construction of Japanese and Chinese sentences are radically different. (In some ways, English has much more in common with Chinese than with Japanese, in terms of sentence structure.) At least in English, we have ways of duplicating a foreign language's terminology or style, a kind of pseudo-pattern that implies it originated in something other than English. Yeah, so there's the whole fan-speak of bad pigeon-Japanese, but at the same time, how else do you capture the nuance? (Here again I point to the English tendency to
A fine example of the English take-all-prisoners behavior: the Japanese honorific. For a guy who's your peer, or younger, you're probably going to use -kun, as in, Michael-kun. It's kinda like saying Mikey... but not really, because if you had a closer/more-informal relationship, you might say Mike-kun. Compare that to English, where we'd never call a coworker Mikey, for instance, unless Mikey had indicated that this was the name he preferred to use. More likely, he'd be Mikey at home, Mike with his friends, and Michael at work: again with the cultural nuances. And, perhaps, this Michael has a younger peer of lower social standing -- another concept that we don't contain in the English language, which is as radically equalizing as Chinese -- in which case, it'd be Michael-sama... but how do you translate Mike-sama? I mean, it's sort of like calling Prince William "Prince Will" to his face. In English, we'd just drop the title to indicate closeness.
So how do you do it? Seems to me that the majority of translators (professional and amateur) have decided that the best answer is... you don't. Just leave the honorific in there, and let it be a loanword to indicate a nuance we don't have in English.
Chinese, though, is like English in the way it has equality as a backbone of its linguistic styles. Sure, there are 'formal' ways to say things, much like in English we'd say "shut up already!" to a kid but "please, keep it down," to coworkers. (Or not, but that's also just as much an indicator of dynamics in relationships.) I recall back when I was much quicker at the reading comprehension *cough* and reading a Chinese translation of a Japanese work. In the unofficial English translation from the Japanese, there's easily five or six different (non-military) ranks used, with honorifics, blah blah blah. In the chinese?
大 人
da ren
Literally, "big person."
Yep. That's lord, boss, owner, master, local chief, informal head guy at the local watering hole. While there are other titles (usually referring to one's family or work position), 大人 was pretty much treated as a one-size-fits-all for most of the titles in the Japanese, which the English scanlation group must've struggled for hours to parse (baron, chief, lord, head warrior, etc). Then again, China hasn't had a titled aristocracy for a thousand years. It does have its elite -- which traditionally have been the educated bureaucrats (and that's historically independent of one's financial/social origins) -- but it doesn't have lords, ladies, there's no baron, marquis, duke, earl... and the language reflects this.
As you may have gathered by now, this was killing a lot of birds with one big freaking rock, as far as I'm concerned. Learn traditional! Parse Chinese (err, Hong Kong, really) cultural assumptions! And see what this also, by contrast, tells me about Japanese!
No, really. I love this kind of thing.
Like one specific passage, which prompted some great discussions between this dog and the household Leo. I hit a line in the story where Joe, with no apparent third parties participating, is talking to Tom. Here's a literal translation (with variant definitions) of what he says.
I | with or to follow | Tom | to say | he | to retreat or but or to decline | how | not | believe to be true | question-indicator
Yes, that's right, no punctuation. Hmmmm. Is this:
I (Joe) follow you (Tom) speak [to] him to decline. How not believe?
Smoothing into an English pattern, I think maybe it's: "I'll support you/go with you when you tell him you're turning him down. How could he disbelieve, then?"
Or maybe it's:
I (Joe) follow you (Tom) to speak to him. (You're) declining how, not believe true?
My brain promptly fills in the blanks, right or wrong, with something like this: I'll support you / go with you to talk to him. How can you decline? Don't believe me?
Or maybe... that 'he' is the Chinese translator's mistake of using the wrong pronoun to replace the Japanese non-pronoun? Since the person missed that 萤, ying, was the character's name, maybe the second mention of 萤/ying became third-person pronoun to indicate that Ying is Some Other Dude Not Appearing Here. So if, by that logic, 萤/ying and 'he' are the same person...
I with you, speak, you retreat but not believe it's true.
Uh. Who's the subject again? I'm thinking it's Joe (I)... so maybe it's Joe who doesn't believe it's true -- what, that Tom (you) is running away, or does he (Joe? Tom? My dog?) not believe something else is true? But if it's Tom who's the actual subject, then Tom's retreating/declining is due to him/Tom being the one who doesn't believe.
Me? I believe my head just exploded.
OBLIGATORY PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!
The preceding paragraphs are why you should GET DOWN ON YOUR KNEES and thank the nearest professional translator, and SWEAR that you will never ever again SNARK about how "that's not really accurate to what was said" because you know what? THIS SHIT IS HARD, YO.
Ahem.
[Incidentally, the version I eventually chose was: Yet when we speak, you retreat. What, don't believe me? which the runner-up version was I tell you, you're retreating. How can you not accept the truth? which has quite a different tone and set o' connotations in there. Without any insight into the character's motivation for his words, I don't know whether they should be snarky, patient, teasing, or cruel. Oi, vey!]
Here's where the hour of awesome intellectual meandering came in: I hit the Leo with the question of, in Japanese would you ever use the third-person pronoun to refer to the person you're speaking to? Or would you just repeat the name in lieu of any pronoun? And lo, did much conversational happiness ensue.
...there's another cultural embedding, for those of you curious about things I've noticed. One is the Japanese obsession with anti-pronoun-ness, which -- for the most part -- doesn't affect the speech of Japanese-native-speaking-English patterns. Well, until you get to your name: on average, a Japanese person, I've noticed, tosses around your name in conversation easily five times as much as a non-Japanese (although the name used is almost always your first-name, perhaps as a concession to Western society's association of 'last names' with school, work, and annoyed parents).
Listen to how Western-culture people actually talk to friends and associates. We very rarely use a person's name, and when we do, it's often only because we need to designate either the subject or object (ie, Joe says to Tom during Sam's visit, "I was telling Sam the other day..."), or to differentiate between potential listeners ("hey, Sam!" as opposed to just "hey!"). It was round about the fifth or sixth dinner with a whole room of Japanese friends that I realized I was positively twitching because I kept hearing my name, over and over, when a person was speaking to me. Not as a pronoun replacement, but as a modifier within the sentence. Like so:
American: Could you get out the wine glasses?
Japanese: Name, could you get out the wine glasses?
Now, multiply that by ten, and repeat it for three-hour durations about six times, and yeah, I guess twitching might be a reasonable reaction if you're from a culture that leaves listener-identification to be assumed. Hearing my name used as preface or tag on a sentence or question for about the hundredth time made me want to scream: please, you really are wearing out my name! Stop already!
[Incidentally, I've noticed Indian coworkers do the same. It's always, "Name, got a minute" when they stop by your office, while American, Korean, Malaysian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and even Pakistani coworkers would just say "got a minute?" I seem to recall the Brits & Aussies I've worked with have used name+phrase and phrase-only to equal amounts. Hmmm.]
Anyway, that's all just one instance of what I mean when I say comprehending a language is sometimes the best, or at least perhaps the most graspable, means to getting some basic sense of another culture.
Round about the Tom-Joe-Ying madness, I went looking for the Japanese originals. Someone has to have scanned them, quality isn't the issue as long as the text's readable. Not that I can read it, ho, not even, but I do have the ability to shanghai the Leo away from his own manga reading (in the original Japanese, I might add), to demand he Solve The Goddamn Mystery.
The only responses were in the negative: no raws available. Plus, no volume's been announced or released, so no idea how long it'll be. Hunh, but the Chinese groups have the raws... where did they get them? (And do I suck for not being able to figure out emule, and who named it that, anyway?) Okay, no Japanese-source material available, and nothing looking likely on the horizon for at least three months. Maybe more.
Meanwhile, the fifth chapter was been published, as a single -- at some point enough in the past that it's already, again, only available in Chinese. If you assume that "five chapters" usually equals "one volume" (sometimes, but not always, true), then volume two should be coming, well, if not soon-soon, at least by the end of this year. To use the US as a comparison: it's usually a 3-6 month lag between the last single and the compiled volume. (Partly because they want the singles to sell out before introducing the set as competition.)
Let's assume the next volume is released around September, and the scanlation group gets a scanned copy -- with the presumption they have an in-Japan scanning-person so there's no shipping-overseas-delay -- and then has to clean up the scans, translate it, edit the text, actually insert the text so it fits nicely and legibly onto the page, and then they'll release it. I'm thinking... five months (from now) at the absolute minimum. Six months, maybe seven, before we see a high-quality, properly-translated, scanalation chapter... if we pretend the translators, editors, scanners, and layout folks really like pulling all-nighters for several days in a row. And even that estimate ignores the quiet, but huge, threat of sudden announcement that the series has been licensed.*
*In which case, with some of these distribution companies, that doesn't just mean a year's work from a professional translator. It could mean "coming soon" is a curse of indefinite length. Which company is it that's holding the rights to distribute several big mangaka in English, but haven't released the rights -- or any titles -- in over a year?
Do you REALIZE what this means?
Sure, it means that by the time any 'real' (from the Japanese, professional or amateur) version comes out, no one will remember my measly learn-traditional-and-go-crazy adventure. Long, long forgotten, links dead, download expired, etc.
But the biggest ramification of such a long wait?
IT'S GOING TO BE SEPTEMBER BEFORE I FIND OUT WHAT THE FUCK JOE WAS REALLY SAYING TO TOM THE GODDAMNED FIREFLY.
*headdesk, repeat*
One major lesson learned, though:
Crazy-ass fonts are cruel and unusual punishment to non-native speakers.
I spent almost an hour with a page exploded to like 300%, trying to figure out a character. Count strokes, look through three different dictionaries, count strokes again and think, hrm, maybe that's 14 strokes, not 13? Try again... Eventually I figured it out only by managing to spend another twenty minutes parsing the second character, and then by context (and use of a nifty feature called "end of dictionary entry" in the online searchable dictionaries), figured out what it meant. And you know what it was? A SOUND EFFECT. A freaking SOUND EFFECT ate almost TWO HOURS of my LIFE because the formatter/layout person thought the font looked COOL. Well, damn you and your coolness! I can't read it!
On the other hand, it gives me additional ammunition when bonking the heads of those crazy-ass programmers who don't see a problem with eighteen fonts on a single page in 8-pt. But still. A sound effect. All that time, and it was nothing more than a Chinese-filtered-Japanese version of KAPOW.
Well, hey, that's entertainment, I suppose.
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Date: 8 Jun 2008 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 9 Jun 2008 04:17 pm (UTC)I remember once in class -- and this was a third semester of five-day-a-week classes, too -- the professor asked me a question. I replied. He winced, then seemed to realize he had, and caught himself... and then tried to make me feel better by adding, "well, you certainly have the most beautiful handwriting."
It sort of became a class joke, especially since the kid with the best accent was a Japanese girl... who had the most atrocious handwriting. Heh.
no subject
Date: 9 Jun 2008 04:21 pm (UTC)My handwriting is about average, but my character recall/recognition... EPIC FAIL.
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Date: 9 Jun 2008 12:48 am (UTC)I'm hoping I can at least remember the basic getting-around phrases, and I'll have my trusty (battered and worn) small dictionary with me, so should be ok getting around.
(some travel blogs suggest my biggest problem will be to stop people speaking English to me -
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Date: 9 Jun 2008 03:38 am (UTC)It depends entirely on where you are and whether or not they can understand your Chinese. Most places I went people were eager to drop the English conversation and switch over (even the people I was supposed to be teaching, with one or two exceptions), but I've talked to people who visited Shanghai who said they weren't allowed to get a Chinese word in edgewise.
no subject
Date: 9 Jun 2008 02:41 pm (UTC)