the orientalism of names and words
26 Aug 2010 09:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouBooks recently read: English: A Novel by Wang Gang, and the Sano Ichiro mystery series by Laura Joh Rowland. There is nothing in common between these two books except for being set in Asia; the former has been translated from the Chinese and the latter is an American book for an American audience, not to mention the roughly three hundred years' difference, too -- from the early Tokugawa to the Cultural Revolution. It's reading them so close together that I noticed the names.
It was really Gang's novel that made me notice, since the translator chose the rather unusual tactic of translating first names. (Surnames are left as-is.) The protagonist is thus "Love Liu", and his classmate is "Sunrise Chen" and his teacher is "Second Prize Wang". At first it was a bit confusing -- in English, we don't translate names per se, but then again, we have names that aren't really word-uses in themselves. Most people don't even know what their names mean, and even if we do, we have words that are only for proper-names (Alexander, Emily, Ethan); if there's a meaning to the name, we use that meaning to describe a thing, not the proper-name (protector, rival, strong).
But Love Liu's name plays some significance, in that there's a long passage where his parents try to explain why they gave him the name "love". If his name had remained in Mandarin, a reader would have to associate non-english-word with "love", and the association would probably only last a page, at most. The name would become -- like our English names -- a name for which any meaning is secondary, even negligible. But with the name translated, you constantly read "Love" when someone addresses the protagonist, just as you can't get away from the fact that Second Prize Wang is, well, probably never going to be first place.
(The translation is awkward, at times; for whatever reason, the translator took a very stilted kind of quasi-early-YA-ish tone, so despite the complexity of the text's meanings, the style itself reads like a slightly advanced Dick and Jane book. What bugged me about that was actually the growing discomforted sense that readers for whom Gang's story is their first introduction to Chinese modern literature might therefore conclude that Chinese readers can't handle -- or don't like or don't appreciate -- works with complex sentences. The text may've been accurate on a literal level, in that Chinese grammar is simpler than English grammar, but still... just a sense I got. If you can get past the 3rd-grade level to realize the graduate-level story buried in there, just prepare yourself for a heartbreaking bittersweet work.)
Meanwhile, over in the Tokugawa period -- written, curiously enough, by an American of Chinese-Korean heritage -- we have Ichiro Sano. Or, in the book's version, Sano Ichiro, because the author insists (unlike Gang's translator) on the Asian order of names. Most of the characters have common-enough Japanese names (Reiko, Yoshihiro, etc), but some characters... don't. There's also Wisteria (a tayu), and Rat (an informant). It started to bother me, after the second or third book -- why do some characters rate a Japanese name, and others get a moniker that's English? It didn't even seem to be consistent; it wasn't like all prostitutes and eta had English-language names (as if this were a class thing).
For that matter, I italicized eta because there's one thing of huge notice in this series, but it's really only noticeable because the author's first three books in the series are with one publishing house, and the remainder are with another publishing house. The entire series uses honorifics in the text, and does its level best to manage an English-language equivalent of some Japanese addresses (ie "Honorable Husband" as a way to imply the different and somewhat formalized interactions between spouses). The books also use some Japanese titles (things like yoriki for what I gather is a type of mid-level police detective), but translate other titles -- like 'Chamberlain' for the Shogun's second-in-command, and in one book, "the Left Minister" and "the Right Minister" for the Emperor's court.
What the first book does not have is Japanese in the dialogue (other than honorifics). I didn't give this much thought, until I started on the fourth book (released by Publishing House #2) and hit a line by the protagonist's chief retainer: "sumimasen -- excuse me --" ...it's a pattern of speaking he uses through most of the next two or three books, until he (I suppose) gains in enough confidence or status that he needn't apologize for every single interruption. Or something.
It's not the apology-preface, nor am I paying much attention at this point to whether this could be considered appropriate cultural characterization or just plain characterization -- it's the fact that the first word in that oft-repeated phrase is in Japanese.
It suddenly occurred to me: why?
To the point: the story takes place in Japan, consists of entirely Japanese characters, and is (in context of the book) entirely in the language of that place. I may read the text as 'english' but within the world itself, they're not speaking 'english'; they're speaking 'japanese'. It's like the notion that when I read a science fiction novel set on the planet Looberegg and featuring the neon-grass basket-making culture of the Loobereggites that I just take for granted that Loobereggites probably speak Loobereggish, and not English. Which means the "sumimasen -- excuse me --" amounts to "excuse me, excuse me".
I mean: how often do you think something in your native tongue and simultaneously think that this is word that must be translated...into your native tongue? I can't think of a single instance, because hello, the entire thing I'm speaking is my native tongue. Duh.
The only time -- at least from where I stand, as a reader -- to use foreign terms in dialogue is when you're attempting to remind a reader that the language being spoken is not the same as the default language of the text.
Now, because I know a lot of you reading don't have English as a native language, let me make this perfectly clear: I don't mean "english" is necessarily the default. I only mean that whatever language forms your thoughts is therefore your default; if you are fluent in a non-native language and reading in that language, I know from experience that temporarily the story's language becomes your default. I know that the point where I realized my fluency in French was when it dawned on me that I was thinking in French, and not English, but I never thought of my thoughts as one or the other. Language was somehow the same, in that it was my personal default, even if the actual language had changed. I think this is one reason why science fiction commonly labels its language as "common" or "standard" (or in older stories, as the "vulgar") -- it's whatever is the basic default.
Anyway, so long as the default language is consistent within a story, then any intrusion of a (reader's) non-default word or phrase thus becomes an intrusion that's interpreted as non-default for the story. Use of a non-default word/phrase, therefore, is obtrusive -- which can work to a story's benefit when it's a situation where the purpose is to remind the reader that this text is occurring in a non-default language for the story: a default-language speaker now speaking Japanese, a non-default language speaker now speaking Spanish, etc.
That's a long-winded (hey, this is me, after all) contemplation that sums up why I eventually started finding the text in the Sano Ichiro series to be, well, supremely annoying. Why is yoriki not translated, but chamberlain is? Why do I have to see saosan-sama (Sano's title) repeatedly in italics? (And don't get me started on the bizarreness, as I understand it, of Sano introducing himself as the saosan or whatever it is, complete with the -sama at the end, which I've always been told is the height of rudeness to use self-referential honorifics, but whatever.)
It's two things going on here. One is that italics -- like in the paragraphs above -- are being used both for emphasis and for non-default words. Rowland's publishing house at least sidesteps that confusion, in that eventually I realized not a single word is italicized except for non-english words, but removing that tool from the author's toolbox rendered a lot of arguments kinda, well, flat. Unless the author were to go in for excessive use of exclamation marks (which she doesn't), how else am I to tell when someone is yelling, except by virtue of her narrative telling me that someone is yelling? There's nothing in dialogue itself to indicate, as italics are able to do.
The second is that every other publishing house out there does use italics as emphasis, which means that when non-english words are italicized, my eyeballs and brain read those words as "getting special emphasis". I don't think, "this is a foreign word," I think, "this is important! pay attention!" the way I would if it were italicized in dialogue and I were meant to read that as yelling.
This hadn't necessarily been an issue before -- or maybe I just hadn't been reading anything that made me stop and realize what I was reading -- except that prior to stumbling over Rowland's series, I'd just finished reading the entirety of the Brother Cadfael series from start to end. (I do that about once every three years; it's like comfort food if such could be literary and not calorie.) There are a number of archaic terms in that series that barely even make sense in context, sometimes: things like maenol and seisin and whatnot. Except that not a single one is italicized. They're all treated like they're just words, unusual and perhaps opaque to many modern readers, but "just words" all the same.
I realized, while reading Rowland, that if the editors had chosen to non-italicize the Japanese words, eventually I would've handled this the same as I handled the archaic Saxon and Welsh terminology in the Brother Cadfael series: titles and terms and words that I could deduce in context, that in context become additions to the "default" language.
(As an aside, I disagree strongly that the issue is that English doesn't have an equivalent for, say, the Japanese concept of "yoriki" as detective, or whatnot. There are between 650,000 and 750,000 English words in an unabridged dictionary, and if you add in scientific terms, there are nearly a million words in the English language. I point-blank refuse to accept that an author -- whose stock in trade is words, for crying out loud -- could not come up with an English equivalent of some kind that gets the idea across without resorting to completely non-default language.)
Here's another way to look at it, as a type of author-introduced loan-word. Let's say, for instance, that you were reading an article and the author made a reference to schadenfreude. Would you expect to see that italicized as a non-english word, or has the word become so prevalent now that it's become a loan-word, and therefore no longer italicized? Would you expect to see italicization for kimono, pagoda, siesta, minaret, smorgasbord, jambalaya, apparatchik, avatar, boondocks, tchotchke, or even hurricane?
So if the language in the text is (supposedly) the 'default' language and there's no introduction of non-default (as the characters all speak/think a common tongue), the use of non-reader-default being italicized is obtrusive. Countering that non-default -- as evidenced by the way Peters uses archaic Welsh and Catholic terminology in the Cadfael series -- works best when the word is treated as though it's just one more (if unfamiliar) word in the default language. In that frame, yoriki would not be italicized, anymore than shogun or emperor or the various demoninations of money.
That's how it'd work if I ran the world, or at least edited a number of the current literature -- in those stories with a single default language, that is. Until that happens, I suppose I'm doomed to keep tripping over italics of non-english terms in a default-only story, constantly backing up and wondering if that italic is there to remind me that this word is not part of my own world, or if maybe it's just that the only time anyone refers to yoriki (including in the narrative) that they're actually really pissed-off.
Though the latter does make for some twisted instinctive interpretations of the text, I'll say.
It was really Gang's novel that made me notice, since the translator chose the rather unusual tactic of translating first names. (Surnames are left as-is.) The protagonist is thus "Love Liu", and his classmate is "Sunrise Chen" and his teacher is "Second Prize Wang". At first it was a bit confusing -- in English, we don't translate names per se, but then again, we have names that aren't really word-uses in themselves. Most people don't even know what their names mean, and even if we do, we have words that are only for proper-names (Alexander, Emily, Ethan); if there's a meaning to the name, we use that meaning to describe a thing, not the proper-name (protector, rival, strong).
But Love Liu's name plays some significance, in that there's a long passage where his parents try to explain why they gave him the name "love". If his name had remained in Mandarin, a reader would have to associate non-english-word with "love", and the association would probably only last a page, at most. The name would become -- like our English names -- a name for which any meaning is secondary, even negligible. But with the name translated, you constantly read "Love" when someone addresses the protagonist, just as you can't get away from the fact that Second Prize Wang is, well, probably never going to be first place.
(The translation is awkward, at times; for whatever reason, the translator took a very stilted kind of quasi-early-YA-ish tone, so despite the complexity of the text's meanings, the style itself reads like a slightly advanced Dick and Jane book. What bugged me about that was actually the growing discomforted sense that readers for whom Gang's story is their first introduction to Chinese modern literature might therefore conclude that Chinese readers can't handle -- or don't like or don't appreciate -- works with complex sentences. The text may've been accurate on a literal level, in that Chinese grammar is simpler than English grammar, but still... just a sense I got. If you can get past the 3rd-grade level to realize the graduate-level story buried in there, just prepare yourself for a heartbreaking bittersweet work.)
Meanwhile, over in the Tokugawa period -- written, curiously enough, by an American of Chinese-Korean heritage -- we have Ichiro Sano. Or, in the book's version, Sano Ichiro, because the author insists (unlike Gang's translator) on the Asian order of names. Most of the characters have common-enough Japanese names (Reiko, Yoshihiro, etc), but some characters... don't. There's also Wisteria (a tayu), and Rat (an informant). It started to bother me, after the second or third book -- why do some characters rate a Japanese name, and others get a moniker that's English? It didn't even seem to be consistent; it wasn't like all prostitutes and eta had English-language names (as if this were a class thing).
For that matter, I italicized eta because there's one thing of huge notice in this series, but it's really only noticeable because the author's first three books in the series are with one publishing house, and the remainder are with another publishing house. The entire series uses honorifics in the text, and does its level best to manage an English-language equivalent of some Japanese addresses (ie "Honorable Husband" as a way to imply the different and somewhat formalized interactions between spouses). The books also use some Japanese titles (things like yoriki for what I gather is a type of mid-level police detective), but translate other titles -- like 'Chamberlain' for the Shogun's second-in-command, and in one book, "the Left Minister" and "the Right Minister" for the Emperor's court.
What the first book does not have is Japanese in the dialogue (other than honorifics). I didn't give this much thought, until I started on the fourth book (released by Publishing House #2) and hit a line by the protagonist's chief retainer: "sumimasen -- excuse me --" ...it's a pattern of speaking he uses through most of the next two or three books, until he (I suppose) gains in enough confidence or status that he needn't apologize for every single interruption. Or something.
It's not the apology-preface, nor am I paying much attention at this point to whether this could be considered appropriate cultural characterization or just plain characterization -- it's the fact that the first word in that oft-repeated phrase is in Japanese.
It suddenly occurred to me: why?
To the point: the story takes place in Japan, consists of entirely Japanese characters, and is (in context of the book) entirely in the language of that place. I may read the text as 'english' but within the world itself, they're not speaking 'english'; they're speaking 'japanese'. It's like the notion that when I read a science fiction novel set on the planet Looberegg and featuring the neon-grass basket-making culture of the Loobereggites that I just take for granted that Loobereggites probably speak Loobereggish, and not English. Which means the "sumimasen -- excuse me --" amounts to "excuse me, excuse me".
I mean: how often do you think something in your native tongue and simultaneously think that this is word that must be translated...into your native tongue? I can't think of a single instance, because hello, the entire thing I'm speaking is my native tongue. Duh.
The only time -- at least from where I stand, as a reader -- to use foreign terms in dialogue is when you're attempting to remind a reader that the language being spoken is not the same as the default language of the text.
Now, because I know a lot of you reading don't have English as a native language, let me make this perfectly clear: I don't mean "english" is necessarily the default. I only mean that whatever language forms your thoughts is therefore your default; if you are fluent in a non-native language and reading in that language, I know from experience that temporarily the story's language becomes your default. I know that the point where I realized my fluency in French was when it dawned on me that I was thinking in French, and not English, but I never thought of my thoughts as one or the other. Language was somehow the same, in that it was my personal default, even if the actual language had changed. I think this is one reason why science fiction commonly labels its language as "common" or "standard" (or in older stories, as the "vulgar") -- it's whatever is the basic default.
Anyway, so long as the default language is consistent within a story, then any intrusion of a (reader's) non-default word or phrase thus becomes an intrusion that's interpreted as non-default for the story. Use of a non-default word/phrase, therefore, is obtrusive -- which can work to a story's benefit when it's a situation where the purpose is to remind the reader that this text is occurring in a non-default language for the story: a default-language speaker now speaking Japanese, a non-default language speaker now speaking Spanish, etc.
That's a long-winded (hey, this is me, after all) contemplation that sums up why I eventually started finding the text in the Sano Ichiro series to be, well, supremely annoying. Why is yoriki not translated, but chamberlain is? Why do I have to see saosan-sama (Sano's title) repeatedly in italics? (And don't get me started on the bizarreness, as I understand it, of Sano introducing himself as the saosan or whatever it is, complete with the -sama at the end, which I've always been told is the height of rudeness to use self-referential honorifics, but whatever.)
It's two things going on here. One is that italics -- like in the paragraphs above -- are being used both for emphasis and for non-default words. Rowland's publishing house at least sidesteps that confusion, in that eventually I realized not a single word is italicized except for non-english words, but removing that tool from the author's toolbox rendered a lot of arguments kinda, well, flat. Unless the author were to go in for excessive use of exclamation marks (which she doesn't), how else am I to tell when someone is yelling, except by virtue of her narrative telling me that someone is yelling? There's nothing in dialogue itself to indicate, as italics are able to do.
The second is that every other publishing house out there does use italics as emphasis, which means that when non-english words are italicized, my eyeballs and brain read those words as "getting special emphasis". I don't think, "this is a foreign word," I think, "this is important! pay attention!" the way I would if it were italicized in dialogue and I were meant to read that as yelling.
This hadn't necessarily been an issue before -- or maybe I just hadn't been reading anything that made me stop and realize what I was reading -- except that prior to stumbling over Rowland's series, I'd just finished reading the entirety of the Brother Cadfael series from start to end. (I do that about once every three years; it's like comfort food if such could be literary and not calorie.) There are a number of archaic terms in that series that barely even make sense in context, sometimes: things like maenol and seisin and whatnot. Except that not a single one is italicized. They're all treated like they're just words, unusual and perhaps opaque to many modern readers, but "just words" all the same.
I realized, while reading Rowland, that if the editors had chosen to non-italicize the Japanese words, eventually I would've handled this the same as I handled the archaic Saxon and Welsh terminology in the Brother Cadfael series: titles and terms and words that I could deduce in context, that in context become additions to the "default" language.
(As an aside, I disagree strongly that the issue is that English doesn't have an equivalent for, say, the Japanese concept of "yoriki" as detective, or whatnot. There are between 650,000 and 750,000 English words in an unabridged dictionary, and if you add in scientific terms, there are nearly a million words in the English language. I point-blank refuse to accept that an author -- whose stock in trade is words, for crying out loud -- could not come up with an English equivalent of some kind that gets the idea across without resorting to completely non-default language.)
Here's another way to look at it, as a type of author-introduced loan-word. Let's say, for instance, that you were reading an article and the author made a reference to schadenfreude. Would you expect to see that italicized as a non-english word, or has the word become so prevalent now that it's become a loan-word, and therefore no longer italicized? Would you expect to see italicization for kimono, pagoda, siesta, minaret, smorgasbord, jambalaya, apparatchik, avatar, boondocks, tchotchke, or even hurricane?
So if the language in the text is (supposedly) the 'default' language and there's no introduction of non-default (as the characters all speak/think a common tongue), the use of non-reader-default being italicized is obtrusive. Countering that non-default -- as evidenced by the way Peters uses archaic Welsh and Catholic terminology in the Cadfael series -- works best when the word is treated as though it's just one more (if unfamiliar) word in the default language. In that frame, yoriki would not be italicized, anymore than shogun or emperor or the various demoninations of money.
That's how it'd work if I ran the world, or at least edited a number of the current literature -- in those stories with a single default language, that is. Until that happens, I suppose I'm doomed to keep tripping over italics of non-english terms in a default-only story, constantly backing up and wondering if that italic is there to remind me that this word is not part of my own world, or if maybe it's just that the only time anyone refers to yoriki (including in the narrative) that they're actually really pissed-off.
Though the latter does make for some twisted instinctive interpretations of the text, I'll say.
no subject
Date: 27 Aug 2010 05:51 am (UTC)Thing is, while I understand Japanese to rely on honorifics, the language that I'd think would be much much harder to convey without a huge reliance on author-introduced loan-words would be Korean. Now there is a language where you can't even bloody well say hello without knowing the other person's age, gender, marital relationship and possibly shoe size, and all of it contrasted to your own. (I've always wondered how the hell one would communicate in Korean if one had amnesia and didn't know one's social standing. My god! You couldn't communicate at all! There are no verb tenses for "I have no freaking clue"!)
I think 'reader expectation' carries a huge amount of the burden, here.
no subject
Date: 27 Aug 2010 06:03 am (UTC)Are you talking about putonghua, or Qing-era classical Chinese?
In any case, I think the fact that there's no contemporary usage of honorifics to project back onto a unified past in China has something to do with reader expectations, but undoubtedly reader expectations get the lion's share of the blame here.
no subject
Date: 27 Aug 2010 03:50 pm (UTC)Um...no. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but generally, gender doesn't matter. Age, yes, all the time, and in a hierarchical setting, like a company, one's rank. Marital relationship doesn't really matter either, except in the more general sense that unmarried people tend to be younger than married people. Age trumps all, but it's really not that complicated since you do normally ask someone their age upon introduction if you're going to interact with them in the long term (or if it isn't obvious already).
I've always wondered how the hell one would communicate in Korean if one had amnesia and didn't know one's social standing. My god! You couldn't communicate at all! There are no verb tenses for "I have no freaking clue"!
You would use a polite speech level, just as in English you speak politely to any stranger about whom you know nothing. There are seven speech levels, but only four are still in common conversational use. Two are polite, two are impolite/casual/intimate. For most conversations among adults, you use the polite informal speech level, which is in fact the speech level that is first taught in most Korean language classes. In fact, despite what I said above about age mattering a lot, you would probably go around speaking polite informal to most adults regardless of whether they were older or younger than you, unless you were close enough to drop into casual. As soon as I entered my late teens, most adults who were obviously older than me started speaking to me in polite informal unless they were close friends of my parents who knew me well enough to use casual speech levels.
The only complication is that you do add special honorific inflection or use special honorific verbs (in any speech level) when you're talking to/about people that you want to show special respect, and usually it's in quite an obvious context: the person in question is either considerably older than you (an elder) or obviously higher in rank (your work superior, the president of a company, etc.). If there are no obvious signifiers of status, you would not use these honorifics until given further information.
Forgive the long digression but you've touched on one of my pet peeves: Western expats in Korea often complain about the honorific system and the hierarchical nature of Korean society. Personally, as a Korean-American, I've always found English to be maddeningly confusing because conveying politeness/rudeness is much more nuanced, and it's easy to make a mistake in tone. I've always found social interactions to be much more straightforward in Korean because you know where you stand and you always know what to say.
In practice, from what I've seen, speech levels and honorifics in Korean are not really translated into English (unless it's one of the other three archaic speech levels that are no longer in common use, in which case, translators typically fall back onto archaic-sounding English). Also, since Korean culture is less well-known in the U.S., most books I've seen use far fewer untranslated words since there is not the assumption that the reader will have any idea what they mean.
To get back to the point of your post, I think there's an argument to be made for leaving terms untranslated as a form of resistance (there's a great post I read about this topic here: Only Poems Can Translate Poems: On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation), but that is completely undermined if the translation is provided afterwards in the dialogue. (The "sumimasen--excuse me" example you mention is also my pet peeve.) I also do italicize Japanese words in my animanga fanfiction because I'm always aware that my audience's default language is English while the default language of the source is Japanese, but I've lately come around to the position that I should stop the habit (unless I'm writing in third person omniscient POV).
no subject
Date: 27 Aug 2010 07:23 pm (UTC)I suppose people might complain about Korean complexity, but I actually rather like it: it's very straight-forward. Okay, easy to screw up if you don't have things memorized, but as long as you know who you are, and have a sense of who you're talking to, then there's not a lot of guesswork, from how it's been explained to me. None of this "is he richer/higher-class than me, is she a single mother, does he have a first-born son whose male?" (The last being a major consideration in Arabic.) Once I got the basic ending-sounds down (and ignoring that I'm sure my pronunciation is badly-accented with American), it was reasonably easy to keep track of the properly polite way to say good morning, good afternoon, when I was out shopping at my favorite Korean deli. Not all the women spoke English very well, so I got into the habit of at least saying "please" and "thank you" as best I could -- and there wasn't any real "oh, was that too-polite" or "not enough" kind of question: either you give the proper ending-sound or you don't.
(And if I didn't, I have found that Koreans are much politer about correcting you; they don't refuse point-blank but they don't give up on you either, or maybe that's just mother-aged newly-American Koreans who decide that if you say you want to say hello properly then by gawd you are GOING TO SAY IT RIGHT and they are going to make SURE you do. That's a far cry from Japanese immigrants I've met who ignore outright any attempts at their language by Anglos, or Chinese who'll smile politely but then seem to think that you tried, you get points for that, and now you can stop, thank you. (Heh.) Noooo, the Korean women I've met take a definite pride in their language, from what I can tell, and even if it feels like sometimes I was being quizzed (if not outright tested: "now, say hello to her, too!") by women who could make me feel like a six-year-old with That Look. Or maybe it's just that Korean culture rewards the talking monkey more than its neighboring cultures. I'm not sure. I was raised that you be polite and say thank you, and if someone doesn't speak your language, that doesn't get you out of saying thank you, but requires that you put in a bit more effort to make sure the person understands that you're appreciative. If that means learning how to say it with the variety of sound-endings in a language not your own, then so be it, but you don't get to be rude and not say thank you just because the person doesn't speak English. My own grandmother would rise up and smack me if I did.)
(Also, sometimes I think Americans complain about certain languages and in fact what they're really complaining about is the tonal quality -- but being raised in an atonal language makes us, well, kinda tone-deaf, so many Americans know there's something they "can't get" about the language. Problem is that being tone-deaf means they (like me) can't even hear the tones they're not hearing, so instead they complain about what seems like the biggest variation between the other language and English, which is the levels of explicit formality. Or maybe it's just that once I realized I could never truly mimic the tonal quality of Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese, I could relax and at least make sure I had the right polite-endings where appropriate, and discovered it's not nearly as hard as one might think, coming from an implicit-language.)
The drawback of course is that I'm not very good at faces, so each time I said "good afternoon" as best I could, modulated for either the elderly lady behind the counter or the younger lady who made the sandwiches or the middle-aged lady who owned the place, I had to pause a moment to look at the person's face and try to recall roughly how old + ending-sound. Then the woman who owned the place dyed her hair to cover the gray and I spent the next week repeatedly screwing up and giving her the hello you'd give a woman in her twenties. I was seeing no-gray and thinking, "young!" *headdesk*
Anyway, no, I should've edited down the late-night facetiousness of not paying attention. My apologies.
I think there's an argument to be made for leaving terms untranslated as a form of resistance
I think that has value, which is part of what makes Rowland's stories an unusual case study: it's a series of stories written in English, for an English-speaking audience, by someone who is not Japanese. I can see resistance as an issue if it's a translated work or the author is of that culture (even if writing in English), but I'm not sure quite what to make of things in this instance. Something to ponder, certainly.
no subject
Date: 27 Aug 2010 08:30 pm (UTC)Noooo, the Korean women I've met take a definite pride in their language, from what I can tell, and even if it feels like sometimes I was being quizzed (if not outright tested: "now, say hello to her, too!") by women who could make me feel like a six-year-old with That Look.
I've found this to be generally true of the immigrant community I grew up in as well. My mother gets excited whenever anyone asks her how to say something in Korean and will provide long explanations with extensive cultural commentary, and whenever a non-Korean guest says something in Korean to the people at my church, they instantly win over the audience. From what I can tell, I think the difference from, say, Chinese and Japanese immigrants probably has to do with the fact that there's much less general awareness of Korean language and culture in the U.S. mainstream, so it's always nice to get someone who is actually interested in learning your language. Also, one can't discount the legacy of Japanese colonialism--depending on the person's generation, the mere act of teaching Korean to anyone probably feels like a minor victory.
Just another minor correction: modern standard Korean actually isn't tonal. There are certain regions in the southwest province that have tonal dialects (and it's quite possible that the women at your local deli happen to be from those regions), but the Korean one generally hears on the news or Seoul isn't tonal at all. (My father is also tone-deaf and agrees with you on the hopelessness of ever hearing the difference between tones in Mandarin.)
Then the woman who owned the place dyed her hair to cover the gray and I spent the next week repeatedly screwing up and giving her the hello you'd give a woman in her twenties. I was seeing no-gray and thinking, "young!"
Hee, well, if you ever make that mistake again, you can smoothly turn it into an excuse to flatter her about how young she looks! ^^ (Best way to butter up elders!)
I can see resistance as an issue if it's a translated work or the author is of that culture (even if writing in English), but I'm not sure quite what to make of things in this instance.
Nod, I agree that it tends to hinge on whether the writer is an insider or outsider to the culture in question and probably doesn't apply to Rowland's case.
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 08:44 pm (UTC)Oh, yes! That was my favorite part, actually. Including stories from the women about being a young bride and meeting relatives, or being a small child and making the mistakes all children make, along with specifics about "what to do when your son marries and how his new wife should act" and "what you say to your sister when she still hasn't gotten married" and "what women call their husbands" (versus "what women call their husbands when their husbands aren't around" which is always hysterical in any culture, honestly, I think that's just part of humanity).
Hee, well, if you ever make that mistake again, you can smoothly turn it into an excuse to flatter her about how young she looks!
Believe me, they thought it was hysterical. There was a lot of good-natured ribbing going on (even when you can't understand the language, you can understand the tone and expressions!), but it was clear she was flattered to be mistaken (repeatedly!) for the young woman who worked there.
Big difference from the Vietnamese women I've known who will step back in shock if you use the wrong sound-ending for saying hello to them. I vaguely recall the rule was that in Vietnamese, there's value placed on gender, relationship (if you're related or not, that is, and whether it's work-relationship, I think), and age... of both speakers. So there's one hello to a woman younger than me, hello to a man younger than me, hello to a woman my age, my mother's age, my grandmother's age, but with some kind of change based on whether I'm a woman or man (though not, as I recall, a huge change, more like an inflection, so I guess verb-ending, there, too). Oh, that was tough. I greeted a friend once and she practically recoiled in horror, saying, "do I look like a grandmother!?" *dies of embarrassment* Or the woman at a local favorite restaurant who lectured me at least once a month for getting the ending wrong and implying she was ten years younger than me. No, definitely not flattered, more like amused yet despairing of the American who can't seem to remember There Is A Proper Way To Do This. *sigh*
ust another minor correction: modern standard Korean actually isn't tonal. There are certain regions in the southwest province that have tonal dialects...
I have begun to believe it's something about "the south" regardless of where you live. A Vietnamese coworker used to make fun of his mother-in-law's accent, and it sounded extremely sing-songy... and yep, her family is from coastal southern Vietnam. Or my step-mother, ridiculing the sing-songy accent of southern Sweden, or even the French I learned... in the south of France, which has a distinct twang-lilt to it, compared to the relative flatness of northern France. I have no scientific basis, but it just seems like "south" in any culture is going to have a stronger singing-style of accent. Maybe it has something to do with people who live where it's hotter than where everyone else (in the culture) lives. I have no idea.
As for tonal, I had no idea it wasn't tonal -- maybe I've only interacted significantly with immigrants coming from the south, because I've been lectured repeatedly on mimicking their delivery (a very lilting delivery) as closely as possible. I'm not a very good mimic, though, so it doesn't exactly help, compounded by the fact that I'm language-tone-deaf to some degree already. (Well, not entirely -- I can hear when someone else has tones, but I can't tell when I'm doing it.)
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 10:21 pm (UTC)