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.
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 05:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 05:25 am (UTC)I'd be really interested to hear Rowland justify her decision to have Sano refer to himself as '-sama', because really, just no, unless the character in question is both conceited and bragging (often humorously; I can think of a couple instances of manga characters doing this immediately). I'm less bothered, I admit, by the persistence of yoriki and other untranslated words, because part of the reason people are reading the books is for the setting, and you have to give the people what they want, and sometimes an exact translation can be infelicitous in other ways--when I leave things untranslated in my manga scripts it's usually because providing explanatory notes at the end is much less awkward than an exact translation in the body of the text. And terms like "detective" have a lot of connotations in English-language literature, not all of which Rowland may want to evoke. ETA: Though the italics, and the inconsistency, I would probably also find annoying, and ultimately questionable.
(no subject)
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 05:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 08:31 am (UTC)I've seen an edition of 'Cancer Ward' where this sort of issue was dealt with using footnotes, but that adds another layer to the text that the author didn't intend also.
(no subject)
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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.
(no subject)
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 04:08 pm (UTC)The 28-year-old is at work and probably shouldn't take the time to read the whole thing.