It is not specific to Harry Potter. All translations into Japanese are written using a sort of translationese. That is the desired writing style for translated works in Japan. In English speaking countries we prefer naturalization over accuracy.

They are two different styles of translation, neither of which is better than the other. It is something to be careful of when you're studying a book as a source of language instead of reading it as application of your knowledge though.

See http://repository.library.ualberta.ca/ds...l+2009.pdf for a paper about it by my former translation professor.
Also:
http://members.shaw.ca/yukarim/03Meldrum
http://members.shaw.ca/yukarim/02Meldrum

If you absolutely must study from translated works for some reason, at least have the sense to mine vocabulary and grammar in isolation from their context. If you see something you don't know, try to find it in some native text and add THAT to your SRS. Don't just add the sentence patterns into your SRS as-is. Yes, if you read lots of other native material you will probably eventually offset the "damage" done by Harry Potter etc, but why spend time learning unnatural Japanese to begin with?

By all means read HP in Japanese for enjoyment, but don't sentence mine it.

wccrawford Wrote:I don't expect it to come back word for word, but the ideas of 'normal' and 'honest' are VERY different. Also, saying something humbly and bragging are quite different as well. Combined, they change the entire meaning of the sentence.

まとも means "normal" or "sensible," not "honest" (at least not in the most common sense of the word), regardless of what the dictionary says. Please don't fall prey to dictionaryitis, especially if you're going to use it as the basis for claiming that a professional translation is inaccurate. Yeesh.

@Jimmyseal: It does mean honest/proper...
ex: Earn an honest living. Get a proper education. etc

I never mentioned the word "proper" anywhere and I'm not sure why you brought it up.

You seemed to miss my parenthetical qualification. The most common meaning of "honest" is "not telling lies," and I'd bet dollars to donuts this is the way wccrawford read it and why wccrawford took issue with the Japanese version.

I said proper because that is the other main meaning of the word. Normal and sensible are not definitions of the word except by extending honest/proper (living etc) to be the normal condition in which humans live.

Jarvik7 Wrote:See http://repository.library.ualberta.ca/ds...l+2009.pdf for a paper about it by my former translation professor.
Also:
http://members.shaw.ca/yukarim/03Meldrum
http://members.shaw.ca/yukarim/02Meldrum

Thank you very much, this is the kind of thing I was looking for. I just looked at it quickly. It is interesting that they note that both styles of translation compete:
"In the 1970s, the distinction between translation for researchers and translation for common readers became apparent, and the norm of translation for common readers, at least, began moving toward domesticated translation (Furuno, 2002)."

Also, of the different supposed characteristics of "translationese" they find mainly two: overuse of personal pronouns (kanojo and karera) and longer paragraphs. The first point is important, as the lower usage of pronouns is one of the differences between Japanese and languages like French or English. I'm still unconvinced that reading this material creates lasting "damage", but it does invite caution. (I also find the excerpts used in the thesis/article to illustrate this phenomenon a bit unconvincing, as the non-translation one describes a single person while the translation one describes an interaction between two characters, where it will be more often necessary to specify the subject.) I will not comment on the perils of reading books with long paragraphs...

wccrawford Wrote:I would be very much interested in that.

I'll put it up when it's finished. It's not very polished. However, it is made in isolation from Harry Potter, i.e. it covers the vocabulary in HP with sentences from the Apple Dic, which is consistent with Jarvik7's advice not to mine HP directly.

Ch 4.2 mentions ~5 different common characteristics. She only discusses two of them in the main part of the thesis for the sake of focus.

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.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Ch 4.2 mentions ~5 different common characteristics. She only discusses two of them in the main part of the thesis for the sake of focus.

Not from my reading. There is a list of 5 characteristics of translationese:
"1) use of overt personal pronouns (Yanase, 2000; Miyawaki, 2000;
Nakamura, 2001);
2) more frequent use of loanwords (Yanabu 1982, 1998;
Yoshioka, 1973);
3) use of female specific language (Ohmori, 2006; Kono 1999);
4) use of abstract nouns as grammatical subjects of transitive verbs (Morioka, 1988, 1997, 1999; Yoshioka, 1973); and
5) longer paragraphs (Miyawaki, 2000). "

These are then studied on a corpus of translated and non-translated works. As I have said, they find evidence for 1) and 5).
For 2) they say: "Overall, occurrences of loanwords do not differ greatly between translation and non-translation." Of course they do find a greater number of katakana words in translated works (proper nouns or plant and animal names), but a finer analysis brings them to the conclusion above.
For 3) they say: "Another mixed result is obtained from the analysis of the use of female expressions. (...) but overall, one can say that
non-translations exhibit more occurrences of female specific sentence-final
particles. This finding is contrary to the common perception of translation's overuse of female language. "
For 4) they say: "The results of counting show that abstract nouns used as grammatical agents for transitive verbs actually occur more frequently in non-translations than in translations."

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

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.

Cool stuff (the section about traditional Japanese handling of Chinese texts and how this influenced the approach to western texts was particularly interesting.)

It would be interesting to examine this corpus for possible differences in use of passives (frequency, inanimate-subject, etc), since that came up in another thread as a 'translationese' marker (sadly probably not too easy to do mechanically).

I don't think female language is a problem of translation, it's a problem of Japanese role language (役割語). If you read some of the books by 金水敏 you can see how in Japanese media, you change how people talk to show stereotypes. There's not just female language, there's male language, professor language and country-bumpkin language. For example, check the professor in Astro Boy. He uses わし, ておる and じゃ, even though he's from Tokyo. This just shows that he's an old smart guy, it has no real connection to the real world. Therefor, mining for natural Japanese is a problem in all media which uses role language... most shounen manga for example.

Tobberoth: My point is that I can instantly tell if I'm listening to a dubbed movie or a native movie without looking at the screen. Women in native Japanese fiction don't speak super-femininely unless that is a character trait, but dubbed movies almost universally have all of the women using かしら、〜だわ, etc and the men speaking in polite です・ます form where they wouldn't in a native film. The same happens in books.

Your point about no fictional language being natural is true though, which is why I'm not a proponent of sentence mining novels/manga/anime at all*.

*(Actually I'm not a proponent of any form of sentence mining, because I think it's a waste of time, both in card creation and in actual reviewing, for the minimal benefit over simple word:definition cards, but thats for a different thread)

Jarvik7 Wrote:I said proper because that is the other main meaning of the word.

What is a "main" meaning of a word in this situation?

Quote:Normal and sensible are not definitions of the word except by extending honest/proper (living etc) to be the normal condition in which humans live.

What?

I have no idea what you are trying to say, but it sounds a bit bonkers.

Tobberoth Wrote:I think if you search for Harry Potter on this forum, you find about one million topics about people reading it in Japanese. Search for Lord of the Rings and you find nothing, etc. I've already whined about it in other topics, but why? It's not even good books in English and it's not good to read translated works so... why?

I'm going to have to go out, find easy Japanese novels and write links to people so they stop relying on translations of books.

For now, I recommend Homeless Chuugakusei.

I can barely slog through Lord of the Rings in English, I can't even imagine what it would be like in Japanese.

Jarvik7 Wrote:*(Actually I'm not a proponent of any form of sentence mining, because I think it's a waste of time, both in card creation and in actual reviewing, for the minimal benefit over simple word:definition cards, but thats for a different thread)

Derailing briefly -- could you go into this directly, even if briefly, in another thread? No antagonism here at all, I find quite a bit of your take on things to be insightful and would be curious to see your opinion on that subject in more depth.

Ok, return to translated works discussion! I don't intend to derail the derail even further.

JimmySeal Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:I said proper because that is the other main meaning of the word.

What is a "main" meaning of a word in this situation?

Quote:Normal and sensible are not definitions of the word except by extending honest/proper (living etc) to be the normal condition in which humans live.

What?

I have no idea what you are trying to say, but it sounds a bit bonkers.

He's saying that まとも means honest or proper, not normal or sensible. It only means "normal" if you assume that an "honest life" is a "normal life".

Tobberoth Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:I said proper because that is the other main meaning of the word.

What is a "main" meaning of a word in this situation?

Quote:Normal and sensible are not definitions of the word except by extending honest/proper (living etc) to be the normal condition in which humans live.

What?

I have no idea what you are trying to say, but it sounds a bit bonkers.

He's saying that まとも means honest or proper, not normal or sensible. It only means "normal" if you assume that an "honest life" is a "normal life".

Or in this case, if you assume that a 'proper life' is a 'normal life'.

'Honest' was the translation I was using that was so wrong. 'Proper' fits much, much better.

@wccrawford: you were complaining about the quality of the Japanese translation and now you think that "proper people" fits much, much better?

Well, your choice, but I am not sure what you gain by this, so I stick to my second post:
"@wccrawford: don't be mislead by まともな人間. It simply means here "normal people", so no need to feel unhappy with the translation. ..."

Matthias Wrote:@wccrawford: you were complaining about the quality of the Japanese translation and now you think that "proper people" fits much, much better?

Well, your choice, but I am not sure what you gain by this, so I stick to my second post:
"@wccrawford: don't be mislead by まともな人間. It simply means here "normal people", so no need to feel unhappy with the translation. ..."

From my point of view, まともな人間 means "normal people" just as much as ちゃんとする means "Do it normally". Which it doesn't. まともな人間 means more like "upstanding citizen".

As usual, a Japanese definition is always preferable:
"道理にかなっていて、他人から非難される点のないこと。きちんとしていて、いかがわしい点のないこと。また、そのさま。"

Doesn't sound like something one would translate with "normal" to me.

"upstanding citizen", now that fits so nicely into this opening sentence.

Is that a third style of translation, the ちゃんと translation style? I love it!

Matthias Wrote:"upstanding citizen", now that fits so nicely into this opening sentence.

Is that a third style of translation, the ちゃんと translation style? I love it!

It's not important how it fits into the opening sentence, you can translate anything into anything as long as it gets the point across which is why we have a discussion of transparancy vs fidelity. The point is that you said there's nothing odd about the translation because まともな人間 means "normal people" which it doesn't. The English definition of normal doesn't fit the Japanese definition of まとも, so it doesn't mean that. This doesn't necessarily make it a bad or odd translation though, since it's perfectly normal to slightly change a sentence in translation to make it fit better.

Sure there are sentences where "upstanding citizen" can be a valid translation, and to be fair it still sounds better than a "regular upstanding citizen type of proper/normal/honest person".

Tobberoth Wrote:It's not important how it fits into the opening sentence, you can translate anything into anything as long as it gets the point across which is why we have a discussion of transparancy vs fidelity.

The point is that "upstanding citizen" does not fit into this sentence, does not get the point across and does not qualify here neither under transparancy nor fidelity.

I do not use rikaichan so I do not miss "upstandingness" in the range it gives for まとも (the front; honesty; uprightness; directness; decency; normality). I can also accept that "normality" is in this range only because rikaichan does not fit the high standards of what you call a decent dictionary. But if you ask an average Japanese person about the meaning of まともな in this sentence he/she most likely will say へんじゃない or ふつう and not "道理にかなっていて、他人から非難される点のないこと。きちんとしていて、いかがわしい点のないこと。また、そのさま。"

Well, you stick with "upstanding citizen" and I say that "normal people" is a valid translation in this sentence - as long as it is not translated/understood as "honest family" anymore it is a progress.

Correct, they are interested in being perceived as perfectly normal people ("but they also had a secret"). And that is exactly what the translator conveyed with まともな人間. No sense in translating it back, but まともな was taken as honest (which is here simply wrong) and with this the quality of the Japanese translation was questioned. Therefore I (and later also JimmySeal) suggested to take it simply as "normal" - that was eagerly dismissed as wrong.

But in order not to "fall prey to dictionaryitis", here are for the AJATT followers among the friends of まともな two more sentences from the first chapter of the Japanese HP1:

まともな猫がこんな態度をとるのだろうか、と彼は首をかしげた。
Original: Was this normal cat behavior? Mr. Dursley wondered.

奥さんは、すばらしくまともな一日を過ごしていた。
Original: Mrs. Dursley had had a nice, normal day.

Pick upstanding, honest or proper as you like but the translator again just wants to convey "normal". Amen.

Well, isn't that the point being made? The translation is being questioned because the translator picked まともな to convey "normal" even though まともな doesn't mean "normal".

IceCream Wrote:no, the translator doesn't just want to covey normal.

Again, the meaning that the english word "normal" coveys is connected to what is going on around it. The translator is using the same kind of humour that JKRowling was using when she repeatedly used this word "normal'. Since it's informed by the very first line of the book, the repetition of the word increases your understanding that these people are extremely concerned about the world around them, and whether it is right and proper. It lets you know that the Dursley's idea of normal, isn't in fact normal.
If the translator simply wanted to covey "normal" he would have used something like "普通" and not the まとも, which has a different range of meanings.

And again, don't "pick" any meaning. that's ridiculous. Consider the range of meaning and the connotations that meaning has.

Actually, I disagree. It wasn't that they weren't 'normal', it was that their view of 'normal' included not being magical. That was abnormal to them. It had nothing to do with being proper or honest or any of that. Just plain normal.