Marco Giancotti - "Is There Anything Untranslatable?"

https://aethermug.com/posts/is-there-anything-untranslatable

 

 

 

fitting native word simply doesn't exist that works as well as the foreign one in that situation. I often have conversations like this:

Marco: I'm looking for a date spot, have you been to that restaurant before?

Friend: yes, it's great.

M: nice and cozy?

F: yeah, especially very... shibui.

M: perfect, she'll love it then.

Shibui (渋い) means, in this context, quietly refined in an austere way, without pretenses, almost stoic. Saying shibui like that, in a mere second, conveys what would otherwise make a clunky and unnecessarily long digression.

 

 

 

 

Perhaps the most famous story about translation in Japan is an urban legend featuring Natsume Souseki, considered by many to be the greatest Japanese novelist of the early 20th century.

When he wasn't writing future classics, he worked as an English teacher. One day—the story goes—his students were trying to translate the English phrase "I love you" to Japanese. They knew the translation for each of those three words, so naturally they constructed a grammatically valid sentence with them. How hard can it be?

When they asked Souseki to check their translation, however, he told them they'd gotten it all wrong.

"Japanese lovers don't say things straight to each other's face like that," he said. "You'll do better to translate it as, isn't the moon beautiful tonight?"

The story itself may be apocryphal, but the message rings true. There is a side of translation that has less to do with the meaning of individual words than with the intention of the speaker. You forgo a literal translation in favor of one that uses different words, but achieves the intended meaning more closely. This approach—usually called "free translation"—exists for all languages, but it's especially important when the two languages in question are very different. Japanese (to/from) translators are forced to do this kind of work all the time.

 

 

 

 

When a surgeon turns to her assistant and says “Scalpel,” this one-word linguistic act—we might call it a command or a request—is, first and foremost, an instruction for mutual coordination. The key to understanding this is that when you use language, you are never just saying something. You are doing something. With words, you act on those around you, to help them, influence them, build affiliations with them.

— Language vs Reality, Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists, Nick Enfield

 

 

 Translation is achieving the goals of the original text in a different language.

 

Marco Giancotti - "The Beautiful Dissociation of the Japanese Language"

https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-the-japanese-language 

 

 

  

It uses kanji characters for writing (more on this later), and it uses a whole lot of them. Depending on who you ask, there are four, five or more thousand characters in use, and you can't read a newspaper if you don't know at least 2,000 of the more common ones.

There are also two syllabic scripts (syllable-based alphabets) in use, called hiragana and katakana

 

 

 

The Japanese scholars-aristocrats began repurposing the Chinese characters, which they called kanji (for, well, "Chinese characters"). Sometimes, instead of using them for their meaning, they used them for (gasp!) their pronunciation. By ignoring the original content of a kanji, they could string them together to form almost any sound.

 

 

 

Over the centuries those "sound-only" kanji, called man'yougana, evolved into something else entirely. They became simpler, more streamlined, and more standardized. Where the symbols were originally composed of many short strokes, they gradually lost detail and complexity. Where the scribes could choose between a slew of different kanji for any given sound (for instance, the sound pa could be represented by any of 20 characters), later the number of options dwindled and eventually settled to two.

That's how the two syllable-based alphabets in use today, hiragana and katakana, came about (collectively kana).

 

 

furigana. These are tiny kana characters showing you how to pronounce a difficult kanji. 

 

 

 

My favorite are all the versions of the word "cousins" meant in a reciprocal sense, as in "she and I are cousins (of each other)". In spoken language, you just say itoko in all cases, and that's it. In written language, you use the appropriate combinations of the kanji 兄 (ani, older brother), 弟 (otouto, younger brother), 姉 (ane, older sister), and 妹 (imouto, younger sister), preceded by the kanji 従 (shitagau, accompany), to specify the exact genders in the relationship. (These are also jukujikun, come to think of it.) 

 

 

Gikun is the replacement of a kanji's or word's normal pronunciation with something else through furigana. Novelists and manga-ka use it to inject an almost subliminal layer of meaning beyond what is afforded by the words and kanji. It achieves an effect similar to a textual voice over, at the same time as the actual text you're reading.

You see it a lot in manga: the actual kanji say something, but the furigana, instead of giving you the true pronunciation of the word, give you something else entirely. Sometimes it's a synonym of the word with a more pungent nuance

 

 

 

The author of the excellent gikun explanaton on japanesewithanime.com clarifies the context:

Todoroki Shouto 轟焦凍 has both cold and heat abilities, which come from the sides of his body: from the right comes cold, from the left comes heat.

Here Shouto, the protagonist, is telling the flame-y man "during combat, I won't use my heat power for any reason at all." Being a kids' comic, all kanji have furigana. But the kanji for "heat" (highlighted in red) comes with an unexpected reading. Instead of the official netsu, the furigana reads hidari, which means "left".

So the reader gets two messages at the same time: the character says "I won't use the left", but the text is saying "I won't use heat".