I'm pretty sure I agree with you re: italicised loanwords, but I think probably one of the main reasons people do it has little to do with thinking about it as a literary device and everything to do with convention. Foreign-words-in-italics has a long tradition in literature - at least 50, 60 years; there's some in my Agatha Christie books, which, you know. Not a definitive statement, but indicative of a trend - and it's also required in academic circles. You have to put things in italics if you're not translating a word, no matter how often you use it. It's incredibly annoying - full disclosure: I'm one of the strange people who find romaji at least three times as difficult to read as kanji, even when it takes me five or ten minutes to look up an obscure term - but I think anyone who's good enough to become a professional translator has probably been exposed to that kind of thing enough for it to seem natural? I'm assuming translators have gone through university channels, of course, but...
I guess if 'yoriki' is incredibly clunky when translated it would make sense to keep it as-is? You'd have to know the entire structure of the system to judge that, though, so. Hard to say.
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 01:02 pm (UTC)I guess if 'yoriki' is incredibly clunky when translated it would make sense to keep it as-is? You'd have to know the entire structure of the system to judge that, though, so. Hard to say.