Oh, I'm completely aware that it's a literary device, but even so, that's still a device that's used to identify a word that is not a loan-word, to let you know that if you don't "get" it, it's possibly because it's not even English. The issue here is that the entire book is ostensibly within the same, unchanging default language (whatever that may be), thus italicizing non-English words acts as an obtrusive reminder that suddenly we're in non-default mode.
Academic texts, of course, are a completely different issue. I'm used to philosophical and theological texts (and as I understand it, this also applies to a number of other disciplines) where a technical term originates in another language and therefore the term is both its meaning and its original word. I mean, I would never say 'world-onlooking' in a philosophical treatise; I would say 'Weltanschauung' (including the capitalization, per the German) because that word is the technical term. That, no problem; eventually you learn that the word is 'Dasein' and you don't even translate it, anymore than I'd translate the latin names for plants or the latin words for illnesses.
One of the more intriguing applications of italics+terminology in academic-styled works was the translation of Azuma's work, Database Animals. In that, the translators chose to italicize the first appearance of any new term (as a way of highlighting it), but did not italicize it after that. I suspected at points this may have been because the text was so loaded with Japanese-language technical terms that the italicization quota would've been maxed out for the whole decade -- but there's philosophical works for you. I can recall writing analyses of various German theologians and feeling like I was halfway through the first year of German just from the number of italicized German words in the paper. Cripes!
As for the issue in fiction, it still seems to me that it's a cop-out to claim there's no way to translate something; there always is. It just sometimes requires some creativity on the part of the author. But even at that, if it's a title and referring to a specific person, then capitalize it per English title-grammar; otherwise, leave it in lower-case and treat it as a brand-new loanword. Readers can get with that, and that way, it doesn't strip the author of the option of using italics as actual emphasis -- it went by rather fast in the post, it seems, but the total lack of any other italics in the text made for some very flat-reading arguments, and I got tired of being told someone was shouting, when there was nothing in the actual dialogue to give me that clue, a case where italics are especially useful and potentially powerful as a visual aid to create sound.
no subject
Date: 27 Aug 2010 06:43 pm (UTC)Academic texts, of course, are a completely different issue. I'm used to philosophical and theological texts (and as I understand it, this also applies to a number of other disciplines) where a technical term originates in another language and therefore the term is both its meaning and its original word. I mean, I would never say 'world-onlooking' in a philosophical treatise; I would say 'Weltanschauung' (including the capitalization, per the German) because that word is the technical term. That, no problem; eventually you learn that the word is 'Dasein' and you don't even translate it, anymore than I'd translate the latin names for plants or the latin words for illnesses.
One of the more intriguing applications of italics+terminology in academic-styled works was the translation of Azuma's work, Database Animals. In that, the translators chose to italicize the first appearance of any new term (as a way of highlighting it), but did not italicize it after that. I suspected at points this may have been because the text was so loaded with Japanese-language technical terms that the italicization quota would've been maxed out for the whole decade -- but there's philosophical works for you. I can recall writing analyses of various German theologians and feeling like I was halfway through the first year of German just from the number of italicized German words in the paper. Cripes!
As for the issue in fiction, it still seems to me that it's a cop-out to claim there's no way to translate something; there always is. It just sometimes requires some creativity on the part of the author. But even at that, if it's a title and referring to a specific person, then capitalize it per English title-grammar; otherwise, leave it in lower-case and treat it as a brand-new loanword. Readers can get with that, and that way, it doesn't strip the author of the option of using italics as actual emphasis -- it went by rather fast in the post, it seems, but the total lack of any other italics in the text made for some very flat-reading arguments, and I got tired of being told someone was shouting, when there was nothing in the actual dialogue to give me that clue, a case where italics are especially useful and potentially powerful as a visual aid to create sound.