Hey everyone!

I've got a bit of a request. I'm studying German and English languages at my university and last semester I took an introductory course on translation. Having now been asked to write a paper to complete the course, I decided (maybe a bit prematurely) that my Japanese was probably good enough by now (3 months of study in) that I might be able to write a paper about one facet of translating Japanese.

After sloshing through all the secondary literature I could find (of which there is remarkably little and the quality of which is often doubtful) I decided to focus on the different ways of indicating one's status and, more specifically, on the different ways of saying "I" (俺、僕、私、あたし、我、吾輩,　手前, わし - Google Translate shows me there's also 小生, and 拙者, but I haven't ever seen these, so I'm not sure whether or not to include them at all) If I run out of material with this, which I doubt, there's the different ways of saying "you" (貴方、あなた (I think writing it in Hiragana and Kanji respectively gives it a slightly different connotation, right?)、あんた、君、お前 - and so on)

These throw an interesting wrench into translating because there's no equivalent, yet they do hold non-trivial information that somehow has to be included when translating. If anybody has any good sources on translation, I'd be much obliged if you could give me a link (the best I've found is "The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation" - and by best I mean "least rubbish", and it's definitely a practical "course", as it says in the title, and doesn't include too much theory, more often simply listing the different problems)

I'm also keeping an eye open for interesting translation examples I could use, so if some anime fansub or book translation or anything of the like caught your eye in this regard, I'd love to take a look at that as well - turning "吾輩は猫である" into "I Am a Cat" always seemed less than ideal to me and I'd love it if I could manage to figure out a few translator's tricks by which they can cheat themselves out of this problem elegantly.

Edit: Just remembered わし, which google for some reason didn't show me.

Zlarp Wrote:turning "吾輩は猫である" into "I Am a Cat" always seemed less than ideal to me and I'd love it if I could manage to figure out a few translator's tricks by which they can cheat themselves out of this problem elegantly.

Not all that on topic, but I remember someone (Jay Rubin maybe?) saying that they would have translated that with the royal we--'We Are a Cat'--to give the same sense of arrogance as 吾輩.

Tzadeck Wrote:

Zlarp Wrote:turning "吾輩は猫である" into "I Am a Cat" always seemed less than ideal to me and I'd love it if I could manage to figure out a few translator's tricks by which they can cheat themselves out of this problem elegantly.

Not all that on topic, but I remember someone (Jay Rubin maybe?) saying that they would have translated that with the royal we--'We Are a Cat'--to give the same sense of arrogance as 吾輩.

Very much on topic, actually. Makes me think of other possibilities. "We Are Cat", "WE Are a Cat", "I Am Cat", "I Am The Cat", "I Am the Cat", "I, the Cat", "We, the Cat", or even "I, Cat" (though I guess it's too close to Asimov's "I, Robot" not to evoke the analogy by accident)

I'm not sure if it's practical for you to get a copy any time soon, although I recommend it if you intend to pursue Japanese translation to any extent, but The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation is full of these kind of things.

One of the more interesting examples is a section from Alice in Wonderland where Alice meets the Caterpillar, who asks 'Who are you?' The citation claims there are more than 100 Japanese translations. Various translators attempted to convey the Caterpillar's age, condescending manor, and "spacey-ness" (he's smoking a shisha bong) in different ways. These are the examples printed.

おまえはだれだね
だれだい、あんたは？
あなたはどなたです
あんた、何者？
あんた、だれ？
あーた、だーれ？

Another interesting issue raised was the folly of missing cultural references. For example, the translator of Saving Private Ryan unwittingly translated the American national anthem as if it was a regular song, and the author's original meaning was lost in translation.

Thanks for the suggestion. I know about "The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation" - I actually have it open in a PDF right now (ebook copy became available just a week or so ago, I think, otherwise I'd have ordered a physical copy, since no library had it at that point that was accessible to me). Good to know that there's a lot of stuff I can use in there.

I'm still slogging through Mona Baker's "In Other Words", which was cited as a source in The Routledge Course and I decided to give my attention to that one first. It has quite a few Japanese examples, though apparently the author couldn't figure out a way to get Kanji into their book (mind you, it's from 1992, I don't blame them, especially since Japanese isn't the focus of the book). There's also some errors (it gives "貰う" as an example for one of the many synonyms Japanese has for "give", even though it actually means "recieve" - though admittedly it is often used in situations where English would use "give")

I guess I should highlight the fact that that I know about this book a bit more in the original topic.