intro
people tend to believe more and more that grammar is not as necessary as vocabulary. who cares if a participant of an international conference, prominent scientist and dedicated researcher, whose mother tongue is not English, uses Past Simple instead of Past Perfect if everything is understandable?
in that case, I feel a little remorse, but I have to admit that this is not the case to get angry. 'tis not that all people feel the same respect towards languages they learn. and they do not aspire to become translators, as well, seeing a foreign language only as a means of international communication
'freelancing'
there are cases, however, when people have to become translators - if not they, who will? students, young people studying Japanese have already embedded it into their duty - to translate manga, to make subtitles, to translate song lyrics, so that the others, who are not as fortunate as them to be able to learn Japanese, could enjoy the product of Japan's modern entertainment industry
are they high professionals? nope. do they get reward for this? nope. in other words, since they do it out of their free will, we cannot blame them or demand something from them. or so I believe
it only bothers me a little that they have no pride and no ambitions to exceed the level of beginning amateurs. it strikes me very often how many of them see only one word out of three, and dream the rest up, and leave the grammar absolutely unnoticed
lyrics
just the other day I saw lyrics of Psycho le Cemu's 'Rin ~ai suru mono no tame ni~' where the line
叶わぬ思いだけは音もなく迫る炎に遮られて was translated as 'The feeling of an answer, this silence is drawing near and the flame is blocked'. a nice text it may seem, if we are to close our eyes to the fact that there is no word like 'answer' in the Japanese line, 'kanawanu' is a negative form of 'kanau' which is not rendered in the translation, 'oto mo naku' is not a noun but an adverb, 'semaru' is not a predicate but a participle because it stands before the word 'honoo', and the particles 'wa' after 'omoi' and 'ni' after 'honoo' are just overlooked, which made the flame 'be blocked' instead of making the 'feeling' be 'blocked by flame'
Tegamibachi
even I know that a verb ending in -i, the so-called second stem or -masu form, with the particle 'na' makes imperative mood, and a verb in dictionary form ending in -u with 'na' makes negative imperative mood. even I know that one must read all the possible variants of translation in the dictionary to understand the meaning fuller, and even I know that 'forge' may mean 'temper', but can also mean 'falsify'. even I know that words should not be ignored if they are used in the text, and I can read in jisho.org that 出なおす means 'to come again', 'to make a fresh start'
therefore, even I would be able to translate this properly - 'come back after you have tempered your 'heart' enough!'
and still, they write
probably this is not important. probably it does not affect reading the manga. probably I am too scrupulous. but I do believe that ignoring overtones and nuances even once leads to ignoring them more often, and also to ignoring more important parts as well. and I do believe that ignoring whatever - a short line or a long monologue - distorts the image of the character. Zazzie is not a misanthrope who gives up Mackey completely because of his cheating. vice versa, he encourages him to try again, but warns that a strong heart is needed. this is a big change in Zazzie's personality. am I wrong?
No comments:
Post a Comment