IceCream Wrote:is wondering whether a cat is acting "normal" normal?
You can't look at it from the perspective of what hasn't yet been introduced in the book, and magic hasn't yet here.

Jarvik7 Wrote:In any case, a reversal of the commonly held belief (3,4) is still a disparity between translations and non-translations.

nyquil Wrote:But what is the damage then? Reading Harry Potter puts one at risk of not being exposed enough to feminine talk, or not as much as non-translation works? And the other point is "use of abstract nouns as grammatical subjects of transitive verbs". Are the consequences desastrous if one is less exposed to this, especially considering it was supposed to be a "non-native-like" construction?

More seriously, what is missing here is a bit more information on the possible deviations from the norm. How do the numbers vary compared to the mean for the translation group and the non-translation group?
Overall I find this study unsatisfactory, because of the small sample size (I understand the practical problems raised by the author) and because it would have been interesting to have a "control group" of some sort: choose another set of non-translated excerpts and see what you get. Actually if I have some time I'll see if I can run some analysis on the text file for the first Harry Potter.

Jarvik7 Wrote:The feminine speech one is a big one imo but is more a "gaijinese" than translationese. Listen to any western movie or TV show that has been dubbed into Japanese. They do not speak like normal Japanese people either in pronunciation or in choice of words, despite the fact that it is a native Japanese person saying the dubs. Japanese people generally want foreign stuff to seem foreign.

Quote:Feminine speech is a problem in my experience, especially in tv/movies. The problem is that English is pretty neutral so the translator must create the tone of speech out of nothing to make it natural. More than men being feminine (as in the quotes examples), I find that female characters are TOO feminine.

Quote:It's off-topic but I think having some Japanese basics before tackling RTK is a good idea.

IceCream Wrote:@mattimus. omg. how is it even possible to sososo completely and entirely miss the point of what's being said?!

nest0r Wrote:I don't know what this thread's about now, but the translation of that first paragraph does seem accurate to me.

IceCream Wrote:hehe yeah, wccrawford, you've been saying that since the 2nd page... ahhh unnecessary disagreement. i♥itreally

@nest0r: ok, i give up. what IS your first language?? I've been trying to guess it for ages, but your polyglot dream thread totally throws me off! rrrrr, and you have absorbed too many influences. can't work it out at all!!

CharleyGarrett Wrote:All this is S-O-o-o interesting, but my point is that I'm reading kanji into Japanese words. Having it be a familiar story that I'm reading just helps me somewhat in doing the reading. I can guess the word in some cases (not that I rely on that guess work). It is not that I'm mining this for developing "normal" sounding Japanese production. In fact, I'd only quote HP as a joke if I was pretty sure that my companion would get the reference to the book/story. Divide and conquer, right? L+1, right? I'm not going to go directly from just barely knowing the kanji to struggling thru something completely and totally unfamiliar. But that's just me.

Tobberoth Wrote:What you need to be afraid of, that you will automatically pick things up from this HP translation and a year down the line, a Japanese person will ask you why you always say something in such an odd way... and you have no idea, it's not like you will remember at that time that it was a very translationese way to say something and was used all the time in harry potter.

Grinkers Wrote:This seems like the best place to ask... but how are the books in Japanese? I don't want to start a fight or anything, but I'm curious. Why read it in Japanese instead of English?

I'm sure there's Japanese books at about the same level for Japanese kids, although I don't know any off hand (post a list if you've got one!)

PS: I'm a "go for the original" type. Just curious about the other side of things is all.

wccrawford Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:What you need to be afraid of, that you will automatically pick things up from this HP translation and a year down the line, a Japanese person will ask you why you always say something in such an odd way... and you have no idea, it's not like you will remember at that time that it was a very translationese way to say something and was used all the time in harry potter.

You say 'afraid', I said 'wary'. If he talks like a character from a book, he's going to get a few odd looks... But it's not going to ruin his life.

Thora Wrote:Thanks for the linked article J7. Interesting.

Jarvik7 Wrote:The feminine speech one is a big one imo but is more a "gaijinese" than translationese. Listen to any western movie or TV show that has been dubbed into Japanese. They do not speak like normal Japanese people either in pronunciation or in choice of words, despite the fact that it is a native Japanese person saying the dubs. Japanese people generally want foreign stuff to seem foreign.

Quote:Feminine speech is a problem in my experience, especially in tv/movies. The problem is that English is pretty neutral so the translator must create the tone of speech out of nothing to make it natural. More than men being feminine (as in the quotes examples), I find that female characters are TOO feminine.

The parts I bolded didn't make sense to me. Are they aiming for more natural or more foreign? How would making it an exaggerated version of natural Japanese make it seem more foreign when the foreign style is seen to be more gender neutral?

CharleyGarrett Wrote:You're still not getting my point. I'm reading japanese WORDS, to become familiar with reading kanji. I don't suppose that we gain the use of words from any one reading of any one book. I'm not afraid that I'll talk like HP after reading these 7 novels. "Subconsciously" was used as an example. No, I don't remember where I picked up that word, but I think that is the point. I didn't get it from any one and only place. By reading a lot of stuff (after learning to read), I think it'll naturally fall out what is the natural and what is stilted. But anyway, I'm not really worried about producing Japanese at this point in my journey. I learn my abc's, then I learn to read words, and later I might mine native sentences to get an idea of the meaning and usage of the words.

IceCream Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:@nest0r: ok, i give up. what IS your first language?? I've been trying to guess it for ages, but your polyglot dream thread totally throws me off! rrrrr, and you have absorbed too many influences. can't work it out at all!!

If you don't know I'm certainly not going to tell you.

if i guess it right, will you tell me? pleeease

ok, here's my guess:
even though you say things as if you are in america sometimes, i think that's to throw people off. I think you either live in Britain, or live somewhere where British english is the form of english used, and have absorbed a lot of british culture.
You say that english isn't your 1st language. But, i've never seen you make any grammatical mistakes. So, i think the structure of your native language must be close to english. Since you say you still speak slowly, i guess you didn't learn it to native fluency as a child, but through reading as a teenager and adult. That's another reason to think the structure of your native language is close to english.
So, there are no obvious giveaways in your grammar as to where you come from, but your style of writing is fairly continental. However, you don't have many aspects of romance languages in your writing, in fact, you much more remind me of a translation of dostoyevsky or some other old Russian author, with a lot more modern and postmodern touches.
Therefore, i would gesture vaguely at somewhere in the eastern past of europe, perhaps german, czech, polish, or russian. But, your writing style isn't so harsh, either, so it's hard to tell.
So, i thought maybe you are from slightly north of there, maybe finnish, norweigian, or somewhere around that area or something.
Actually, if you didn't say that english isn't your first language, i would definitely guess that you are actually British, and have read, and absorbed the style of, many translated works, in many areas, from fiction through science, and philosophy, and that therefore you write like that. I have another friend who writes and speaks like that too...

am i close?

Tobberoth Wrote:You're probably right, incorrect usage is automatically fixed from enough exposure. However, reading 7 Harry Potter books is a LOT of books and takes a lot of time, and it might be the only thing someone is reading because they are scared of "real" Japanese. Therefor, say they spend 6 months reading just the HP books. In 6 months they get quite good at Japanese and start using it. How about then? Pretty much ALL their exposure so far has been from translationese. Sure another year or two down the line, their exposure might have "fixed" it, but that's still a lot of time speaking bad Japanese (possibly).

nyquil Wrote:I'm back to square one. Could anyone give me an example of the "bad" Japanese present in a translation (even better if the example is taken from Harry Potter)?