Though not entirely not--Danny's point about "forte" (that it doesn't have to be pronounced "for-tay") is a little random but does emphasize the fact that Danny is more erudite than he often behaves.
Gus and Shawn of Psych often make comments about word choices. One of my favorites is when they comment on "stanchions"--as in "Oh, that is what they are called!"
In Season 2 of The Andy Griffith Show, "Guest of Honor," Barney expresses concern for a group of criminals he read about in a police magazine:
Kleptaminaracks.
They sound so much more interesting than the regular kleptomaniacs!
The scene is not the first time The Andy Griffith Show has played with language.
Grammar & Language: Jokes Based on Definitions
I came across it initially in a light novel series. I figured it was translator’s choice, especially since the initial translator was obviously a Japanese speaker/writer translating Japanese to English. I assumed the translator went to the thesaurus and picked the wrong word: “If he isn’t done with just this restraint [show of disapproval], how will I protect Wataru in the future?”
But then I started to come across it in other translations in more grammatically correct contexts.
It is being used in a way that an English writer wouldn't do. If an English speaker wrote, “He is showing restraint,” the word would mean self-control, an absence of action.
But in the light novel and manga, “He makes this restraint” means almost an active action, a deliberate strategy, something like “sit back and watch you crash and burn while forcing you to live up to an expectation and, by the way, I’m withholding approval until I decide whether you succeeded…”
In other words, “The more restraint he gives us, the stronger we will become in reaction.”
Is the word
“restraint” the English definition of a Japanese word that has no direct
English substitute? When the translator goes to the thesaurus, how does the translator choose?
For example, Fuyumi Ono uses "nod" a lot. There's
a lot of nodding in Japanese culture, to the extent that people joke
about bowing while talking on the telephone with a superior. A reader once
pointed out I was overusing "wry smile," though I was simply
translating the same word the same way each time.
A linguist somewhere surely has written a dissertation on the subject.
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| Fumi Yoshinaga's Ooku is one of the |
| few manga series I've encountered that |
| uses "courtly" language. |
Eugene: Japanese historical dramas have long used the equivalent of Hollywood Shakespearean dialogue. The more recognizable rhetorical flourishes (like honorifics) are preserved, while updating enough of the grammar and vocabulary to make it comprehensible to modern audiences without becoming anachronistic.
Like Shakespeare and especially Chaucer and earlier, hardly anybody today could understand the material if it actually remained faithful to the period. Nevertheless, the people back then sounded to each other more or less like what we sound to each other today.
The same way Anglo-Saxon verbs and Latin verbs can mean the same thing while still not being the same, a Chinese cognate has a different "flavor" than a native Japanese word or a loan word from a European language. Kanji orthography has also evolved over time, resulting in multiple "spellings" for the same kanji.
Sort of like aluminium and aluminum or theatre and theater or spanner and wrench. How a kanji is written can also tie the text to a particular time or place. In the Twelve Kingdoms, Fuyumi Ono prefers more "classical" kanji, and often uses Chinese words, rather like dropping a French, German, or Latin word into an English text.
For example, Ono uses a kanji in a passing reference to a kind of youma that wasn't in any online Japanese dictionaries, so I thought she made it up (which she also does, this being a fantasy world), until I found the reference (originally in Chinese). Google Translate is very useful when translating the Twelve Kingdoms!
Is Shakespeare a big deal in Japan? Are the references as common—and often unacknowledged—as in the West?
Eugene: Akira Kurosawa adapted MacBeth in Throne of Blood and King Lear in Ran. Especially in Showa period dramas, it can seem that every girl's school in Japan has to put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet. In Hanako and Anne, an entire story arc is devoted to Hanako translating Romeo and Juliet for her BFF Renko to star in.
Kate: Youka complains that names “really are confusing.” I can relate! There’s Keikei and Keiki. There’s an Emperor Kyou but that Emperor is in En. And a Kei Province but that province is also in En. And then there’s the Russian multi-name thing, so the author refers to Enki by Enki and by Rokuta. And don't get me started on the number of bureaucrats!
Does the kanji make a difference? That is, are the names less confusing in Japanese?
Eugene: Yes, kanji make a big difference when it
comes to proper nouns in Japanese. Not only do kanji allow the reader to
differentiate between homophones, but they add semantic information that makes
them each unique and memorable. A kanji has its own built-in set of mnemonics, which
are often referred to when making introductions.
Kate: A few times I have run into double negatives as a kind of emphasis. Are double negatives common in Japanese texts? ("I can't get no satisfaction" sort of thing.)
Eugene: Double negatives are ubiquitous in Japanese, especially tag questions. The difference in Japanese is that "Yes, we have no bananas" is acceptable grammar. So you end up with a translation that is "Yes" in Japanese and "No" in English. Very much the bane of the Japanese language student.
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| Birds don't necessarily fly (through the sky). |
| Not all birds fly. |
"Looks just like a patchwork quilt, doesn't it?"
Poirot, who dislikes small airplanes and small ships and anything, really, that goes up and down, refuses to look out the window. Eyes squeezed shut, he pronounces, "Non!"
"Well," Hastings says, "it does to me. It does to anyone else."
"Not to Poirot!"
"I suppose you don't think that [the clouds] look like a mass of cotton wool."
"Non!"
"It does to anyone else" is how humans manage to communicate. We decide that "X" is called a certain thing, making it possible for us to overcome the gap between Person A's understanding of X and Person B's understanding of X.
The criticized yet beloved Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Darmok" takes this too far. But it underscores a valid point. Picard and the Tamarian captain learn to communicate by moving in the opposite direction to Hastings. The communication, "There's a monster" is only made possible after the men have shared individual stories about monsters.
It is difficult to imagine any language continuing this way ("There's a monster" is so much easier and results in a lot less death) but the underlying point is valid: a common currency must exist. X needs to be recognizable to at least a majority of "everybody elses."
Picard luckily knows his mythology.
Ah, a good reason to teach mythology! Be ready for when the aliens arrive!
In "Andy's Rich Girlfriend," Andy Griffith Show, Season 3, Barney attempts to warn Andy about the perils of dating a rich girl. He paints a picture of the wealthy lifestyle that includes "a couple of nurses and a nanny."
Andy knows very well what Barney is saying but replies, "Two nurses and a goat?"
"No, no," Barney says. "This kind of nanny takes 'em to the park and speaks French...They go off to refinishing school--"
"Finishing school," Andy says quickly since he doesn't want Barney to stop describing his version of a wealthy lifestyle, which involves bicycles with lots of reflectors.
Nanny = goat
Nanny = woman who takes her charge to the park and speaks French.
The mix-up is funny; Barney's belabored definition--mostly, it appears, culled from Hollywood films--is equally funny.
My favorite example of a vocabulary mix-up occurs in Home Improvement, Season 4, "It's My Party." Randy decides to have a boy-girl birthday party, mostly to get closer to a girl he likes. Unfortunately, his "nerdy" (Brad's word) parents keep embarrassing him. Tim (literally) over-waxes the dance floor.
His mother digs up her "old 45s."
Straight-faced, Randy queries, "You're going to let us have guns at the party?"
Brad clearly thinks this is a great idea!
45 = record
45 = gun
The hilarious point here is that today, what with police procedurals and CSI, most people likely know the latter definition more than the former.
Of course, Home Improvement is always playing on language as Tim mangles Wilson's advice. Our brains know that language is weird and confusing and multi-layered, perfect opportunities for humor.
Joan looks at one image. Her friend makes a face and says, "That's a whole family of dead dolls."
"Ghastly," Joan agrees.
Or does she?
I've always assumed that Joan says, "Gas leak." That is, she responds by declaring a deduction about what she sees on the screen. She follows the line by saying, "No foul play" as she types.
Hodgins then "translates" the poetry using computer software. The "romantic" poetry translates into lines that include "under the heavens fruit floats" and "love hurts as skin yells with new shoes" and "you are my carburetor."
Of course, Arastoo's poetry is better than that!
But it comes down to choosing the right possibility out of myriad possibilities for a single word or phrase--one that we read or one that we heard--and the choice comes down to context. My choice for Joan works as does "ghastly." The context allows for both.
Last year, I attempted a "Hodgins" approach when I mistakenly ordered the German version of a manga. I went ahead and created a penciled-in translation using Google Translate.
Luckily, I'd read the manga already in English (borrowed through the library). I doubt very much that I would have gotten even slightly close if I hadn't. I would have written the following in the manga's margins:
and
"Machines sing about curry and toast."
and
"See the cats type the snowflakes."
Surreal. Maybe even poetic. Not all that comprehensible.
In the first season Psych episode "9 Lives," Shawn becomes temporary owner of a cat. He claims he will use the cat to solve the crime. Gus protests the pure silliness.
Shawn proclaims, "[This cat] has more integrity in his furry little hand--"
"Paw," Gus interjects, deadpan.
"--paw than most people have in their whole appendages--"
At this point, much like the writers in the back room, Shawn pauses and considers:
"--appendages--all of--"
He then reworks the final phrase:
"--than most people have in all of their appendages...combined."
Psych also has one of my favorite "perfect word" issues in which Gus and Shawn discuss whether to call a briefcase an attache. Briefcase and attache do have different connotations!
In the Season 7 Last Man Standing Episode "Arrest Her Development" Mandy (new Mandy) tackles adjectives and adverbs on several occasions."[The apartment search] is going bad. Badly? Terrible. Terribly?"What is even more hilarious to me is that she solves each difficulty, including the one above, by doing what I did as a student: coming up with a completely new phrase:
"It ain't good."And more:
"I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm 6-feet tall...You think of us as these helpless, pathetic beautiful children. [So] stop treating us like one. Like two? Like both? We ain't children!"And:
"More than okay. Better than okay? We cool."In case anyone is wondering, the answers are:
My favorite moment, however, comes right before Booth pushes over the first wall of hay. Exasperated at running into yet another dead end, he says to the pediatrician/ coroner, "Tell your assistant [who is with the mummy] to throw his flashlight into the air."
Castle has a lot of great grammar moments--which makes sense since Castle is a writer.Castle: Casillas. Good name. Hard to possessive pluralize though. The Casillas-es-es car has broken down. They will be late for the symphony.I must admit. Through my life, as a writer, I simply alter sentences to avoid this issue:
Kate: The car belonging to the Casillas family has broken down.But give the Castle writers credit, Lanie uses the possessive later in the script:
Lanie: Emilio Casillas' autopsy file makes for some very interesting reading.More last name fun:
Provenza: Wait. Wait. When you refer to them as a couple, shouldn't it be "the Dickerhooves"?Despite Flynn's response (a furrowed brow), the answer is, "No." Last names are like brands. But the mild joke does prove that our brains are wired to instinctively apply grammar rules.
Kate: The book has multiple loose ends, which did not escape your notice. As a writer yourself, how do you handle a book that you enjoy but has noticeable gaps. Is translation your primary concern? Are the plot holes ever an issue?Eugene: English has SVO word order and Japanese is SOV (like German). But the real difference is that it is grammatical in Japanese to drop the subject and even the object when it is understood in context (no need for anaphora). As a result, much of Japanese is OV or just V. Add to this the sociolinguistics of indirectness, and the result is that Japanese favors what translates into English as the passive voice.
The translator has to backfill the missing elements to form grammatical English. Tracking down antecedents can be one of the hardest things about translating Japanese. Once you end up with grammatical English, the direct translation is often in the passive voice and really should be rewritten. But because the translator already knows the “meaning,” the surface-level grammar can “disappear.”
That’s why a translation needs a rigorous line edit before it gets a copy edit, even if the translation is 100 percent accurate.
Eugene: The translator’s job is to best communicate what the author wrote or the best estimation of what the author wanted to say based on the text. While it may be helpful to add parentheticals to clarify what is in the text, it’s not the translator’s job to add information to the narrative that wasn’t there to begin with. If there’s a plot hole, the translator’s job is to translate the plot hole.
Especially at this point, having read only two of the novels in the middle of the Boy Detectives Club series, I don’t want to make any assumptions about authorial intent or get ahead of myself.
Of course, when it comes to adaptations and overseas localization, the “integrity” of the original work is up for grabs. The NHK anime of the Twelve Kingdoms squashed two storylines together and invented a male character out of whole cloth. The English dub of Detective Conan renamed the entire cast. But as long as the copyright holder agrees, well, let marketing lead the way. Though I disapprove of such modifications.
Granted, I prefer Blade Runner with the “original” voiceover that Ridley Scott loathed and removed in his director’s cut. Then again, I’ve yet to see a director’s cut that improved on the theatrical release. I guess sometimes the “suits” and the marketers know what they’re talking about.
Kate: Referring back to tone, the translation of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ōoku: The Inner Chambers uses (at least in the early volumes) old-fashioned “thee” and “thou” verbiage. I have to
admit, it kind of puts me off (I prefer her contemporary works). Is this a common
translation approach—does Japanese have an equivalent to King James’ English? Do
translators try to match it? Should they? Eugene: The Ōoku was the rarefied women’s quarters of Edo Castle so this might be an attempt to reflect the hierarchal language of the court. To be sure, the language of the time was as distinct as Elizabethan English is from modern English, so this could also be an attempt to reflect that historical distance and the peculiarities of that social class.Kate: In the past I’ve asked you what you would like to see translated. In general, what do you think DOES get translated? Do the choices reflect translators’ preferences? Their readers’ demands? The ease of translation? Length of text? What is popular in the moment? What seems most likely to transfer between cultures? How does a publisher decide?!
My sociolinguistic stance is that historical characters should sound like they sounded to their contemporaries. NHK historical dramas split the difference, using certain terms and conjugations that are associated with “historical” Japanese, but not so much that the dialogue is rendered incomprehensible. A similar middle ground is what BBC and Hollywood historical dramas use: “Shakespeare with the hard stuff removed.”
Though as in the case cited above, simply getting the terms of address right—finding the right analogues for the honorifics—should often suffice. The dialogue can only withstand so much complexity.
Eugene: Educated guesses here.Kate: Thanks so much for the interview! It will be exciting to discover with The Bronze Devil what Kogoro Akechi and Yoshio Kobayashi do next!!
What gets translated is whatever publishers think will sell and whatever they can afford to license. Or what they love. I’m referring to popular fiction as opposed to literary fiction, which exists in a different realm. In the latter case, the reputations of the author and translator will figure into the calculations, as do their professional and academic relationships, such as that between Van C. Gessel and Endo Shusaku.
Clouds Above the Hill, Ryotaro Shiba’s massive retelling of the Russo-Japanese War (think of it as Japan’s War and Peace) was translated into English at the expense of his publisher, who hired three translators to tackle the sixteen-hundred pages. This was a labor of love for the publisher, as I doubt the English translation will ever break even (though Shiba is a bestselling author in Japan).
Right now, the light novel is ascendant, in no small part because of the manga and anime tie-ins. Publishers are going to lean toward titles and authors and genres that are getting good press and good ratings. When GKids or Crunchyroll announce a bunch of licenses, publishers will be looking at all the marketing possibilities for those titles. I’m sure a lot of product packaging goes on too.
Makoto Shinkai does the novelizations for his own films. GKids has already acquired the North American rights for Weathering with You (the film). Yen Press published Your Name (the novel) so odds are they will get Weathering with You as well. I assume that publishers like Yen Press have stables of translators they work with, and that a translator who has worked with an author will keep working with that author.
Frankly, I have no real idea. I mean, Yen Press is co-owned by Kadokawa Corporation and Hachette Book Group, so they’ve got all kinds of access and very deep pockets. I’d love to get the low-down on how they leverage that access. But I don’t know, except that, at the end of the day, they still have to turn a profit.
"Ah, yes, indeed. For as we all know, it is the capricious person whose capriciosity is never truly caprified."
It's a great quote because it illustrates a point that Stephen Pinker makes as well as Charlie in Numb3rs. The human brain is wired to not only learn language but to develop and play with it. Children, for example, start with imitation. They then go through a period of time where they experiment with the rules.
So a child will start by saying, "I swam yesterday." THEN, as the child ages, the sentence becomes "I swimmed yesterday" before the child learns (as opposed to imitates) to use "I swam."
In the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Semi-Professional," good-old boy Judge Blakemore is questioned by Detectives Eames and Goren. Blakemore becomes more and more flustered at Eames' barrage of remorseless questions, which reveal that the judge is a philanderer--and not a particularly chivalrous one."I find the tone of your questions completely gratuitous."This is bad grammar--or actually, to be more exact, a bad vocabulary choice. A tone cannot be gratuitous. It can be wry or confident or sarcastic or dry.
 |
| Not the primary villain, but the episode |
| has Law & Order alum, Bruce |
| MacVittie. Adorable actor! |
 |
| Just to make things confusing, this is a totally |
| different definition than the one being discussed. |
"Interrogating criminals is my forte."Danny maintains that the word is pronounced "fort" as in
"I like to lock up criminals in a fort."In other words, one can say
"Interrogating criminals is my forte (fort)."According to dictionary.com, Danny is right(ish)--although saying "for-tey" is also okay. I think saying, "fort" rather than "for-tey" sounds just wrong, so I am going to continue to say "for-tey."
It's a weird grammar moment but not, in fact, out of keeping with Danny's personality. He is a self-described grunt who does in fact have a high vocabulary reflective of his core personality--in other words, Danny is more adaptable to situations that he pretends; he can behave like an intellectual when he needs to. 
In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker tackles the idea of linguistic determinism, the idea that language determines how people think. If our culture uses the phrase, "Where no man has gone before," we have no choice but to be sexist! We are only saved from our sexist thoughts when some inventor suggests, "Where no one has gone before."Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; interior decorators have names for shades...printers have many different names for fonts. [Take] the earnest assertion "It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos...snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word..." Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious in the culture of printers...fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word..." Utterly boring, even if true.
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| C.S. Lewis's Boxen images |
 |
| Faraday |
 |
| A geometer |
In the episode with the dog (one of my favorites since, well, dogs; plus Cesar Millan shows up), There once was a term which could vex,
Bewilder, and really perplex;
This word, enervated,
Is close to deflated;
Once you get it it’s not so complex.
 |
| He's actually a very nice dog...He reminds me of you... |
| He's got warm and reassuring brown eyes, and he's capable of great violence. |
