oh I have no idea
30 Jan 2012 12:05 amCurrently having a slight mental breakdown over the tanks that just arrived. Not from a Taiwanese publisher like I'd thought, but from a Hong Kong publisher. Which for a moment made me happy, until I realized, it's traditional. Why is a HK publisher using traditional? As if it's not bad enough that the publisher's using characters that I haven't seen at all (from reading Taiwanese scans), they can't even be arsed to simply keep the original kanji for Japanese place-names. No, they're spelling out names phonetically, like instead of 名古屋 it's 那古野 (na-gu-ye?) so I spent several long minutes utterly baffled. At least most of the personal names (so far) have kept to the original Japanese, and thank the heavens for Wiki including the kanji for non-English names.
But still: why is a Hong Kong publisher, of a work that (according to the inner page) should only be distributed in Hong Kong (ahem), using traditional? Is this some kind of a political statement, or is there something else going on?
Because it just seems to me that if it's a manga that's supposed to be for readers 15-22, wouldn't most of those readers, post-98, have been educated in simplified per the switch back to PRC-rule? Wouldn't traditional be making the text just that much more complicated, comparatively?
Sheesh. It's like I can't win, sometimes. Taiwanese is traditional, and that's hard enough, but at least I've finally got the hang of the more common Taiwanese slang/colloquial... and now, looks like I have to do it all over again with HK.
sob, sob.
But still: why is a Hong Kong publisher, of a work that (according to the inner page) should only be distributed in Hong Kong (ahem), using traditional? Is this some kind of a political statement, or is there something else going on?
Because it just seems to me that if it's a manga that's supposed to be for readers 15-22, wouldn't most of those readers, post-98, have been educated in simplified per the switch back to PRC-rule? Wouldn't traditional be making the text just that much more complicated, comparatively?
Sheesh. It's like I can't win, sometimes. Taiwanese is traditional, and that's hard enough, but at least I've finally got the hang of the more common Taiwanese slang/colloquial... and now, looks like I have to do it all over again with HK.
sob, sob.