The Del Rey translation of Sugar Sugar Rune is not very good.

[snarp]

As I've complained before.

So I am naturally astonished to see that, in addition to not knowing English, it doesn't know French:



You know, you guys, you can just google "French dictionary" and one'll pop up. It doesn't cost anything. You could even just type those two words directly into the search engine, and end up here.

Also, this thing:



I don't think that "love-love" is really a word that needed to be retained for purposes of cultural authenticity. I feel, strongly, that there are English-language equivalents to this idea. That do not make people cringe.

(It's an actual Japanese term, yes, and one that's in common use. One of my students once, upon realizing how badly it offended my aesthetic sensibilities, started repeating it to me aggressively, fascinated by the contortions of my face.)

Comments

[kaigou]

Would the love-love thing be roughly analogous (in terms of use) to the American colloquial of like-like -- as in, "you don't like her, you like-like her". Or is the love-love thing just a repetition to emphasize that it's extra-amount-of-love instead of plain-love, or something? Just curious, seeing how the "like-like" thing is now several generations old. (How long does it have to be around before it's no longer colloquial and is simply common?)

[snarp]

No, it's not anything that nuanced; it's just the English word doubled ("raburabu"). That kind of doubling is pretty common in Japanese. I... don't honestly understand the rules for it (I don't think anyone does), but it doesn't work that way.

I'm going to say that "lovey-dovey" would be the easiest translation for "love-love", since I feel like it's used more to describe a mood or sensation than, uh, a state of being, if that makes any sense. I guess there are some further connotations - kind of an idea of youth or frivolity. But there's absolutely nothing there that couldn't be conveyed in English.

[eisen]

I've occasionally seen it translated as "SO ROMANTIC!!", which I feel also captures the connotations pretty well.

[snarp]

Yeah, that also works!

[kaigou]

Ahh. The doubling fascinates me, because it's such an interesting quirk, but used so differently than the way we use it in English -- it seems like, when you find doubling in English, it's meant to imply that the second use is somehow a reverse of the first. As in, the first is goes by a common definition but the repetition either negates that definition or flips it. (Sort of like the famous bit with a speaker declaring that while you can find a double negative being used to indicate a positive, in no language do you have a double-positive used to mean negative, at which point someone in the back spoke up and said, "yeah, yeah.")

But there's absolutely nothing there that couldn't be conveyed in English.

CP (the SO) has a focus in his dissertation on essentialism, and it seems to me that a lot of the "you can't translate this" (both as an argument by a culture, and as something bought into by translating/outside cultures) is part of a cultural designation of being, well, intentionally incomprehensible. In some ways, sometimes, it seems to me that professional manga translations appear to play this up -- no idea whether this is unconscious, or just poor translation skills, or one exacerbating the other. Some truly pathetic manga translations (and Del Rey looks bad, but it has plenty of compatriots in its suckitude) would definitely give the impression that Japanese is simply untranslatable, that it's incomprehensible -- dare I say, inscrutable -- to anyone not born-and-bred-and-of the culture.

I have serious kickback at the idea of justifying poor translations because of this inclination to believe or play up the mystique, but I don't think some of the younger starry-eyed USian otaku are necessarily ignorant of the pathetic quality of the translations. From what I've seen in smaller fandoms where only a few scanlate and purely for the love of it (and having been there myself), sometimes it seems as though the badness of manga translations is somehow directly proportional to the assumed coolness of the original -- and, if not in so many words, sometimes used as justification for learning Japanese. IOW, if you "really" want to experience the greatness, you have to do it in the original, because otherwise you're missing that je-ne-sais-quoi.

Which, as dual-language fans are in high demand for summaries, scanlations, and various linguistic expertise ("let's ask so-and-so what they're really saying!"), I can see that some stand to gain from the original language getting all the cache. Would that cache really be half so much if we had top-notch translations on every manga, enough to demonstrate that English is just as flexible and nuanced as Japanese for telling a story?

[jinian]

So it seems like English doesn't have a word for cachet.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

[kaigou]

I always get cache -- the computer term -- confused with cachet. Somewhere in there I got it in my head that cache has cachet, and now I can't pronounce cache.

For that matter, I'll probably die being unable to spell mischevious.

[jinian]

You cache your cash in a cache, but you sashay to display your cachet? I dunno about this mnemonic I'm trying to invent...

Mischievous is one of those words that always looks wrong, and if you don't know it comes from mischief you embarrass yourself when trying to pronounce it too. I learned to talk from reading, so I have many of these minor disasters in my past.

[kaigou]

My SO constantly makes fun of some of my pronunciations, since a lot of them are grounded in hearing (backwoods) relatives speak... and every single-syllable word is at least three syllables in their mouths and let's not even talk about what those relatives do to fifty-cent SAT words. Hence, even as I have no problem spell 'mischief', I still hear the extra -eeee- sound there in the middle when the -ous gets stuck on the end. To my ears/memory, a lot of -ous words have an extra -eee- sound in there, actually.

Actually, cache in cash and sashay in sachet, err, cachet, might actually work. I'll have to remember that.

[snarp]

Some truly pathetic manga translations (and Del Rey looks bad, but it has plenty of compatriots in its suckitude) would definitely give the impression that Japanese is simply untranslatable, that it's incomprehensible -- dare I say, inscrutable -- to anyone not born-and-bred-and-of the culture.

I would say that the cause of a lot of inappropriate refusals-to-translate incidents is an impulse to exoticize and other Japanese culture, yeah. And the funny thing is, SSR's sensibilities are unusually unamenable to that: the women are mostly assertive and dismissive of male authority, and the heroine is fairly cynical about romance. Hey! Japanese girls aren't supposed to be like that! That is not how the narrative goes!