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.

Yes, cats act oddly to begin with, so it's normal to wonder if a cat is acting normal, or if by cat-definition, it's even weirder than normal.

And yes, you can. You know why? Because the author is introducing that concept to you. You're supposed to wonder why they chose to say they were 'normal', since that in itself is an odd thing to say. After you're given time to wonder why they said it, she explains that it's because they think magic is abnormal.

You're the one assuming the author meant other things by her words, not us.

@wccrawford: どうも

But I give in: normal people, normal cat and normal day is all wrongly translated with something meaning upstanding, honest and proper but definitely not meaning "normal".

Please tell the translator. She is Japanese, but it was her first translation so that should explain her repeated wrong use of まともな. I will reeducate my wife that her understanding of まともな is wrong.

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

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.

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.

I've always said that if I end up talking like an anime character, that's perfectly fine by me. At least I'll be able to speak it.

And there's always time for correction later.

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?

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

Worth repeating I think.

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

I think Matthius and JimmySeal are saying that まともな　conveys the same connotations that 'normal' does in the English version. So they aren't really saying anything different than you are. You can find this sense of 'normal' in the dictionary entries and examples on the internet. まともな人なら... :-)

edit: I was curious about differences bw まとも,　普通, and 正常. My guess was that まとも　also conveys decency, not strange/bad, and not suspicious - which work here. I also wondered if まとも's sense of having no trickery (being all above board) would relate to their secret magic? I wonder what sense native speakers get from these words? I googled the words together out of curiosity and noticed that one Japanese blogger prefers 正常　to まとも for this HP sentence. hmm, I think I over thunk it - or else Icecream needs to have a word with Blogger. :-)

There's always going to be small details that are different in translated works. It's just impossible for there to be a 1:1 word between languages for something as large as a whole book, so I don't think that would be too big of an issue.

I'd be much more worried about unnatural or foreign-ish sounding sentences. Because of the potential unnatural sentences, I don't think translated works would be a very good sources to mine sentences from, especially if the miner is just starting out with Japanese. It seems silly to have first exposure to a foreign language as translated items.

I wasn't originally going to read Harry Potter in Japanese, but I saw the first book at BookOff for 105 yen so I bought it on impulse. I'm not familiar with the original works, so the small details aren't that big of a deal for me. I'm not sure when I'll get around to reading it, or if I ever will, so I can't really comment on contents.

I'd be interesting to see what a Japanese native thinks of translated books. As far as the translated books I've read in English, I can't recall anything specifically "weird". However I wasn't really looking for weirdness either...

I don't know what this thread's about now, but the translation of that first paragraph does seem accurate to me. Captures all the nuances of the English, from the awareness of societal scrutiny (the nail that sticks out gets hammered down)/keeping up appearances, their prideful declaration of humility, etc. Even though none of the English-language versions feature a direct quote in the initial paragraph, it works for the Japanese translation because there's a definite spoken-idiomatic (prim) feel to the 'thank you very much' that might've not been conveyed with a simple おかげさまで.

I think the まともな might be used here because its usage in Japanese carries that aforementioned context? That is to say, if you use まともな to describe something, isn't that usage usually contrasting it with something strange/negative within a sentence, or implying that in the relative scheme of things, it's not-strange/negative? Rather than the 'diligent-honest/earnest' or 'not-special/usual' connotations of other words. Shrug, I dunno.

@IceCream - This is my simplified-for-the-forum writing style. I do speak the way I write (albeit more slowly because I am unused to speech), but with my 'normal' writing voice which I try to avoid with this alias. ;p

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

The real issue with the translation was that the HP copy I found online (when I wanted to compare my Japanese book) isn't the same as the real English book. I suspect what I found online was an early leak that eventually went through a good editor and changed a lot. Comparing a real book with my Japanese book shows that the translation was indeed a good one after all and my worries were for naught.

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.

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!!

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

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.

You're not going to quote things anyway, that's not how learning by immersion and exposure works. It works by your brain automatically picking stuff up, subconsciously. I doubt you know where you learned the word "subconciously", I sure don't, but I used it in this sentence, and you could use it in a sentence of your own. You're not quoting someplace else, you picked it up somewhere, probably years ago.

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.

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.

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.

I read all 7 books in Japanese and enjoyed them thoroughly. I've also read kids' books in Japanese, grown-up books in J, cookbooks, academic books, newspapers, and about half of The Two Towers (from the Lord of the Rings). Right now, I'm on the second volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events, which looks to be quite good in Japanese.

I think you'll enjoy reading in Japanese more if you don't look up any words except for the ones that come up a lot or really impede your understanding of the text as a whole. Context is essential for understanding the meaning of words. If you're not at the point where you can understand most of the text without a dictionary, you will probably be happier reading something different. I think the translation is brilliant, as far as I can tell, and a Japanese friend speaks well of it, too. Harry Potter was enormously popular in Japan, which says something for the quality of the translation. The nice thing is that it's not "Japanese for children" -- it's written mostly at an adult level but glossed with furigana. That kind of thing is a bit hard to find and makes these a useful learning text.

After HP, I wanted to read something authentic, so I tried Shonen H. It has furigana and large print, and it is meant to be both historical and accessible to kids. It is very dark and a bit didactic. It was getting so depressing that I quit. I wanted to find something at that level that was originally written in Japanese, using normal adult language but glossed in furigana, but now I think sometimes a translation can be better. I'm mostly looking for something to read in restaurants or trains.

I don't need furigana as much these days, but the Lord of the Rings was very slow going. I finally got the English so I could hurry up and find out what happened to the poor characters who were trudging through the landscape in slow motion.

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.

I think it's more like:
"Dude, what the hell are you doing?"
"Prithee, young knave, what is it thou art doing?"

Of course this is only a related example, since translated works are much different from old English, but it is nonetheless very likely that you will sound equally as strange.

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?

Translationese is generally caused by sticking to the source sentence structure too rigidly. Even if you do that, you still have a choice of words to use in the translation, ex かな vs かしら. The translator has to act as a second author to fill in the blanks, so to speak, for stuff that isn't spelled out in English but has to be present in Japanese. The translator has to choose what tone of language to use since Japanese isn't nearly as neutral as English in terms of gender or social position. You can write neutral Japanese, but that still gives it a translationesy nuance because it's neutral, which isn't normal Japanese either. My experience with E-J translations is that the translator thinks "these are foreigners, I'll translate it to sound like how stereotypical foreigners talk" (in terms of tone, not broken Japanese).

Reminds me of using foreign accented English speakers to play foreigner roles. I wonder if they could use Japanese voice actors with English accents...

But I still don't get it. You're saying the translators actually aren't trying to make it sound natural. They are intentionally giving it a foreign flavour - translating it to how foreigners talk. That seems sensible for a dub. So how does the overly feminine speech fit in? Is that part of the foreign flavour? (Doesn't seem to fit the stereotype of foreign women in Japan.)

Feminine (male) speech is one stereotype of foreigners, since traditionally everyone learns です・ます first and may never move onto plain form. Men using polite speech where a normal man would use plainer speech = feminine. It's not just about key words like かしら or 〜わ. I don't do E-J translations, but I'm guessing the translators make the women even more feminine so they still appear more feminine than the men.

Dubs and books are more or less the same in terms of translation. Dubs are just more obvious because they are also pronounced in ridiculous gaijin accents.

I don't think it's a big issue as long as you're keeping translated materials to a minimum. I'd imagine that's not a problem for most people learning Japanese. I mean we aren't learning Japanese just to read translated materials.

I'm not sure what to think about the AJATT about translated items. For example historical, religious, etc materials would probably be better to just read it in English, then go back to Japanese material. These kind of books might lose a lot of the content through translation, and aren't very good to mine for sentences.

Harry Potter is obviously not in those categories, and was written/translated very recently, but it's still something to think about.

When it comes to feminine speech, while かしら and わ are the most visible and known ones, there's a lot more common ones. Generally, feminine characters refrain from using だ and skip it completely using よ, わ or ね instead. This is because a feminine character shouldn't put emphasis on her own opinions or conclusions.

Male: そうだ, そうだよ, そうだね
Female: そうよ, そうのよ, そうよね, そうわね

I'm pretty much all of you who have read manga etc recognizes this even if you maybe never thought about it.

In older works, feminine speech was even more pronounced using odd forms of Japanese. For example, they ended sentences in てよ without it being a request. And like Jarvik7 said, feminine characters generally speak more polite than males. In earlier works, they often used the Japanese passive in its honorific sense a lot.

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.

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.

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).

I wouldn't risk it, since there's no point. Just don't read translated works until you're good enough to spot the translationese yourself and you've saved yourself a lot of trouble.

I'm a poor guy to comment given that I stopped Harry Potter book one only half way through (it did get boring after the hat scene). However, I have to agree that trying to process an entire book is like trying to process an entire 13 episode series. That's a lot of effort being concentrated into one specific aspect of Japanese culture.

Imagine instead processing a chapter out of 13 different books or an episode from 13 different shows. You broaden exposure, tone, accents, patterns of speech, culture references, etc. Yeah, it'll be harder as you have to learn more new words per chapter or episode but the trade off there should be worth it.

By the way, what I mean by process is looking up each unknown part to fully comprehend the whole. So this is reading for studying instead of reading for pleasure.

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?

Wow. If you put so much effort into it, I might begin to feel guilty. Well, you're right that I never said English isn't my first language--also, it's possible that my reference to being unused to speech was a general reference to a continued asymmetrical development of literacy over orality--most of my focus on speech is in the form of 'reduced listening'. It might also be possible that I am making a general reference to word choice, syntax, stylization, when stating that my forum alias has a different, more simplified (although often here, simple means messy) writing style.

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).

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)? It should be feasible if one can so strongly claim that reading Harry Potter will make you speak bad Japanese.
I'm asking because the study given by Jarvik7 basically left only "overuse of third person pronouns" as a worrying feature of translations. I've run the count on the second volume of Harry Potter and if I haven't made mistakes (and if the file is accurate compared to the published book) this is not an issue. The number of occurrences per 10000 character of 彼 is 5.5 in non-translations in the study and 2.33 in HP2 (yes, that's less). For 彼女 it's 0.3 for non-translations and 0.48 for HP2. For 彼ら it's 0.4 for non-translations and 0.04 for HP2.

I'm aware that the study only looks at a few points, for instance measuring the use of feminine language mostly through sentence-final particles while Jarvik7 notes that it's not just about such "markers". Still, I'm curious and would be happy to read an excerpt from a translation and an explanation of what makes it non-natural Japanese.

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)?

I think it would be very difficult to identify an isolated example of unnatural Japanese in a Harry Potter book. Yuka Matsumoto is a professional, after all, and her translations have sold millions of copies, so the Japanese must be enjoying them. Nonetheless, given the vast difference in grammar and ways of expressing things, there's no denying that translators have to make sacrifices in fidelity and naturalness translating in either direction.
The slight differences in usage can compound themselves over time and give you a false sense of how natural Japanese sentences and paragraphs are structured.

One point that I think presents a fair amount of difficulty to translators is relative clauses. Japanese tends to use short, simple relative clauses in places where English would typically use adjectives (that's not to say that there's always an equivalent English adjective mind you). In many of these cases, using an equivalent English relative clause would sound bizarre.

On the other hand, English writers tend to use long, complex relative clauses (and sentences in general) than Japanese writers do, mainly because the basic word order (SVO, and the use of relative pronouns) often makes complex sentences easier to parse in English. This again presents translators with a challenge and they must make sacrifices in usage.

I'm a strong advocate of reading translations of English YA novels in foreign languages. The stories are familiar, and I think that Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket are some of the best YA literature available in any language (of course, I'm not really an authority on the latter part). Still I think it is important to "cut the umbilical cord" as soon as you are able, and that's probably quite a bit sooner than you think