The Zen of Foreign Language Acquisition

[akujunkan]

On translating:
I'm well on my way to translating (or at least outline translating) the complete works of Banana Yoshimoto while at work. Putting in eight hours a day of intensive Japanese translation is doing wonders for my ability to read.

The interesting thing about Japanese is that it doesn't rely on pronouns, or even subjects, to the same extent that English does. This is fine for native speakers who are used to such conventions, but native English speakers rely on pronouns and subjects, demand pronouns and subjects, and will mentally supply them when the text does not.

This creates some interesting situations, such as realising, five pages into a novel, that it is not being told in the first person. Over halfway through, I'm still reading the text as though it's being narrated in first, and being gently jarred whenever I'm reminded that it's in third.

I've also realised, ten pages into another novel, that the narrator is a woman, and not, as had previously been supposed, a man. (And was my brain ever going through convoluted loops trying to justify all the increasingly feminine speak patterns evident through that story...)



On web browsing:
I despise it when machines are programmed to try and anticipate my desires. Microsoft is, of course, the greatest offender in this regard - just ask anyone who's attempted to type an outline as they wanted it to appear in Word.

But now I've found that this extends not only to Word, but to IE as well. I have an American edition of IE on my computer, and I cannot for the life of me convince it to access the American web editions of Hotmail, LiveJournal, and Google. Something, buried deep within the coding of IE, continues to bump me to the Japanese URLs of the aforementioned web pages, even when I specifically request the American versions.

This is fine in Hotmail, or when I'm using the basic lj functions, but just try to decipher a FAQ on creating filters, subfilters, and friends grouping in lj, in a foreign language, when the terms being used by the FAQ are so specific and so new that they do not appear in any of my eight Japanese dictionaries.



Fun With Second Language Source Material (or, Assuming Makes Ass Out of, Well...You):
As anyone who knows anything about me is aware, I write a lot of Saiyuki fic. I like to think that my ability to read Japanese fluently gives me a leg up over the other authors in the fandom who are working from the shitty HK subs, or even worse, working from the fiction written by 14 year olds working from the shitty HK subs.

I recently received a series of very nice, thoughtful, and enthusiastic comments about my fiction from someone who obviously enjoyed reading it.

This person unfortunately went on to tell me that she was annoyed by the way I was transliterating a specific character's name into English. (Basically, the point in question was whether the hiragana for ん　should be transliterated as 'm'.)

Her take - "There IS no ending consonant sound in Japanese apart from "n". I go nuts when people spell it "sempai", although I understand the pronunciation is hard to make out."

And she's ever so incorrect. First of all, depending on which of the four to eight romanization systems one uses, ん can be, and often is, transliterated into 'm' before the consonants m, b, and p. And this does indeed reflect a change in pronunciation, although the exact sound is impossible to transcribe accurately into Roman letters.

Which just goes to show that it's dangerous to assume your audience has no knowledge (or less knowledge than you) of the language in which their source material is written.



It Wouldn't Be As Moving In English:
The thing that gets me about Banana Yoshimoto's books is that you can be sailing along, everything's dandy, and then you turn the page and someone is dead.

Bam!

This comes as a shock not only because the pacing and narration are so different from those in books written in English, but also because I have to concentrate slightly harder to understand what's going on in the first place. (I can read a 200 page book in Japanese in about seven hours. I can do it in under two if it's written in English.)

It's because I'm concentrating so hard, I think, that I become so emotionally attached to the characters. I'm working through this with them, slowly, and by necessity paying attention to every word and nuance because they aren't second nature to me the way English is. This means that I might actually be reading the text more closely than I would an English text, which means I'm thinking about the characters more, and thus identifying with them more.

And the feeling of "My gods, I actually understand what's going on here!" also intertwines with and deepens whatever emotion is being expressed in the text.


This has been your daily dose of philosophising, courtesy of yours truly.

That will be all.

Comments

[tuanda13.livejournal.com]

Hey you!!! I know you are busy over there in crazy Japan with your translating and teaching and philosophising, but I really need to know about one-handed tin whistle playing, is it possible?
Continue having a fantastic time!

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

Hey you! I answered this for you in an earlier post - unfortunately, you do need both hands for the pennywhistle. But your friend should check out the tabor pipe, which only needs one hand to play.

Holy Cwap!

[tuanda13.livejournal.com]

How did I miss your answer? I'm an eejit! Thank you so much though!
*back away slowly with much apologizing and groveling*

!!

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

Don't worry about it! (And I don't deserve groveling; at leat not until I rule the world.) I'm glad you found the earlier post - I didn't have time to figure out which one it was. I hope the tabor pipe works for your friend. If she can't buy one, there's a way to make one by taping down the top three holes on a regular pennywhistle. It really is a cool instrument - worth learning to play, I think.

microsoft word is evil!

[bloody-american.livejournal.com]

Microsoft is, of course, the greatest offender in this regard - just ask anyone who's attempted to type an outline as they wanted it to appear in Word.
Haha, so true.