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sinnesspiel) wrote2014-02-01 01:10 am
sinnesspiel) wrote2014-02-01 01:10 am
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Novel translations and tense; showing and telling moods in Shiki and Gyakuten Saiban
As most of what I've translated to this point has been dialogue, I had a bit of a conundrum when translating a work with a non-character narrator. Fidelity to the given verb tense changes the tone to either an unintelligent error-ridden one at worst or a conversational one at best, when this isn't necessarily the tone of the original text. However, this change must mean something and if it isn't noted, something is lost in translation.
Grammatical moods are not related to emotional moods, they indicate what the verb or sentence is doing, such as whether the sentence is stating a fact (indicative mood), stating a likelihood or potential (potential mood), asking a question (interrogative mood) or serving a number of other purposes. Modality is a cloudy subject best defined before any work discussing it for context due to the many meanings of mood and the many moods languages have or don't. For the purpose of this discussion we're going to go hyper-simple. The only moods relevant are those favorite terms of creative writing teachers: showing or telling. The reason those titled modalities are relevant should be apparent based on the researchers and works considered beforehand.
Paul J. Hopper showed that in English, tense shift is important in developing background and foreground details, such that in the foreground are the sequence of events, and in the background are amplifications or comments upon the occurrences. That foreground must be sequential, it's the showing of actions in a set order, whereas the amplification is telling us something relevant to it, a thought on it. While studies I've read have focused on colloquial speech adjusting tense shift either intentionally creating a vivid tension or because the speaker is caught up as if reliving it, this is not a view without contention, nor is it applicable to something written and edited. I've deemed it more prudent, when considering translation of an omniscient uncharacteristic narrator, to dismiss that mode from consideration.
Kindaichi Haruhiko is the Japanese linguist I was referred to by Japanese, in looking into the tense change matter in Japanese narratives. In his works, he refers to the moods as presenting and narrating, which I've renamed show and tell for because our discussion, unlike Kindachi's considerably more broad fields of linguistic research, is about literature with a narrator who is always narrating. Though they use different terminology and are discussing different works and language, much like Hopper, Kindaichi suggests that different verb tenses denote whether we're being shown something in sequence or told a detail irrelevant to the sequence of events being shown in that foreground.
Neither necessarily says that one verb tense serves one purpose or the other; rather, a non-I character shown taking action of even just established as existing can be identified by a sentence with a certain tense (usually past), and it may be the case that sentences in that tense are then meant to be fulfilling the showing role. This would make a different (present in our case) tense the tense of telling, a separate narrative on a different time plane from the sequence of events. It would be as if the narrator is not in the past, but is adding information relevant from their alternate placement in time, over the shown past sequence.
If you look at the Ace Attorney/Gyakuten Saiban witness statements which are narratives of events the speakers were involved in, this theory generally bears out. The only swaps to present tense are when recounting their current cognition over the past-tense narrated event (I still haven't forgotten; I think, I am, there is). There are exceptions in Yahari's statements. One is one which any reader could unequivocally declare to be a present tense used strictly for emphasis, the same way a news paper headline would read a past tense event as if it were happening now, such as "Dewey defeats Truman!" The other one, "what I do is obvious" (in answer to what he did at a past event) happens to be the only one of the lot to seem to meet a narrative criteria of adding (telling) cognition to the events otherwise sequential (shown) literary narrative.
An interesting note about each of the statements is that they are in fact technically present tense, with more explicit present-tense telling modality than is used even by the omniscient narrator's voice in novels. The novel excerpt has very few asterisks denoting explicit telling modality. The overwhelming majority of past-tense sequential statements in Gyakuten Saiban happen to end with a present-tense copula, which could be translated as "it is the case that this past tense event happened." (Thus, technically present tense with a past tense clause--but translating it that way when it's dialogue would add nothing but bulk.) It is not just declaring something happened, but signifies that the element is being told rather than shown. This is because, short of being a narrator in a story, some things you can only tell.
For those who have studied Japanese, you may have come across the -garu form of adjectives/verbs. The form is necessary because you cannot speak definitively about somebody else's feelings, you were probably told. You cannot show that someone wants something or is afraid; you have to conjugate it with -garu or darou or -sou to show that they are seeming to. You can show or narrate that someone had shown signs of it, but you can only show wanting or fearing from your own perspective. This is likewise why the many statements in the literary narrative would seem inappropriate in spoken Japanese--or at least, would be distinctly taken as a "literary narrative" voice. While I try to keep these notes and discussions to the point where no Japanese knowledge like this is necessary (even if I describe it, I don't think the unnatural or literary feel can be taught), the copula/narrative voice aspects are not necessarily to understand the point made, though they will be illustrative to those who do.
For reference, telling modal markers outlined by Kindaichi are:
da, no da, (no) mono da, (no) koto da, (na, no) wake da, (after otherwise past tense conjugated verbs).
Not outlined by Kindaichi, but brought up by others, and clearly adding cognition and thus making them telling are:
dakara, kara (da), sei (da), ka.
These clearly add cognition because they assign a because, or shoulds. Likewise, there are -you and darous, which are conjectural of volitional.
Nobody's said anything yet but I'm sure some readers have raised a brow at the narrator going probably or might. These I translate out as conjectures, along with the becauses or shoulds; these are not so much lost in translation, but it helps to be aware of them in determining the purposes of modes and tense switches.
Kinsui Satoshi is my favorite Japanese linguist, the leading researcher on Japanese fictional character voices and sociolinguistic stereotypes. He's done extensive documentation on traits of speech that signify a type of character such as their gender, their age, their employment or education level, etc. in fiction. Many of these types of speech are not used by real people unless they're speaking as a character (play acting) the same way one could presumably speak as a narrator. Whether used or not by real people, they are viewed and thus used with a consciousness of character. While no studies I've come across have counted these elements, I would certainly say they qualify as telling as they posit the speaker's awareness of themselves as a speaker. These are modality markers which objective narrators have no form of. While Akane and Yahari in samples below use different forms of the copula (desu and ('n) da respectively) and are characterized through that, both have some sentences whose moods are only suggested by ze or zo or yo (for Yahari) or "no" without the copula that follows (for Akane). Since these aren't mood markers noted by any published linguists I've come across and are my own, and I am not a published linguist, I've noted these separate from the universally available mood markers, as separate from the formally recognized ones.
Japanese linguist Murakami Fuminobu has likewise suggested the view that the change in tense is a change in mood, and that this unique literary narrative voice which can show us a character's feelings or wants in a way other speakers must tell is because the line between author and character blurs. Often times, there is no subject on these sentences, so, Murakami posits, it could be translated with the subject being I, as if the character is monologuing and showing their own states. Sentences with no stated subject doing the action are in grey for your consideration of his theory; for these, you could posit the actor to be anybody, really, though I think context makes my choices fairly inarguable--the question is whether that person should be first person (I) or third person (he).
In standard Japanese language, a person can say what happened, their own perceptions, and their own cognition. In literary narrative Japanese language, the narrator can say what happened, their own perceptions, their own cognition, their characters perceptions, and their characters cognition. The narrator can even perceive the character's perceptions and cognition and add their own on top of it. In short, just as the characters in the Gyakuten Saiban examples can show and tell, the narrator is not the only one who can show and tell in a literary narrative. Tense alone is not enough to determine who is showing or telling for a sure translation, and I posit that this ambiguity is not because of the lack of stated subject in the original Japanese text. I also suggest that because of the characterized linguistic traits noted by Kinsui that the most accurate form of translation from Japanese to English available is, while flawed, the standard, consistent past tense narrative.
If the mood argument were a view that bore out consistently in either spoken or literary narrative, I would absolutely chuck aside grammatical propriety and say that readers of a work translated from Japanese must learn to accept it in literary narrative and that they would 'learn' it as less colloquial than it would feel in English (as the author of Shiki distinctly lacks a characterized feel). If Murakami's analysis were one that applied to the works I've taken on, I would absolutely consider translating such sentences as thoughts of the character. But look at the samples below and see that sentences in past and non-past do not cleanly set out into sequential events and reflection.
I've used a bold font on verbs in present tensein the original text.
Grey text notes sentences where in the Japanese text there is no subject explicitly stated.
Red stars denote that there is a present copula (da, desu, no da, no desu, etc.) on a past tense verb signifying a grammatical mood/modality.
Pink denotes end-sentence characterization/emotion particles.
The underlined bold portion is future/conjectural mood and will be addressed separately as a part of the break down of the problems with the above hypothesis.
Shiki, Book 2, Chapter 5, sub chapter
Grammatical moods are not related to emotional moods, they indicate what the verb or sentence is doing, such as whether the sentence is stating a fact (indicative mood), stating a likelihood or potential (potential mood), asking a question (interrogative mood) or serving a number of other purposes. Modality is a cloudy subject best defined before any work discussing it for context due to the many meanings of mood and the many moods languages have or don't. For the purpose of this discussion we're going to go hyper-simple. The only moods relevant are those favorite terms of creative writing teachers: showing or telling. The reason those titled modalities are relevant should be apparent based on the researchers and works considered beforehand.
Paul J. Hopper showed that in English, tense shift is important in developing background and foreground details, such that in the foreground are the sequence of events, and in the background are amplifications or comments upon the occurrences. That foreground must be sequential, it's the showing of actions in a set order, whereas the amplification is telling us something relevant to it, a thought on it. While studies I've read have focused on colloquial speech adjusting tense shift either intentionally creating a vivid tension or because the speaker is caught up as if reliving it, this is not a view without contention, nor is it applicable to something written and edited. I've deemed it more prudent, when considering translation of an omniscient uncharacteristic narrator, to dismiss that mode from consideration.
Kindaichi Haruhiko is the Japanese linguist I was referred to by Japanese, in looking into the tense change matter in Japanese narratives. In his works, he refers to the moods as presenting and narrating, which I've renamed show and tell for because our discussion, unlike Kindachi's considerably more broad fields of linguistic research, is about literature with a narrator who is always narrating. Though they use different terminology and are discussing different works and language, much like Hopper, Kindaichi suggests that different verb tenses denote whether we're being shown something in sequence or told a detail irrelevant to the sequence of events being shown in that foreground.
Neither necessarily says that one verb tense serves one purpose or the other; rather, a non-I character shown taking action of even just established as existing can be identified by a sentence with a certain tense (usually past), and it may be the case that sentences in that tense are then meant to be fulfilling the showing role. This would make a different (present in our case) tense the tense of telling, a separate narrative on a different time plane from the sequence of events. It would be as if the narrator is not in the past, but is adding information relevant from their alternate placement in time, over the shown past sequence.
If you look at the Ace Attorney/Gyakuten Saiban witness statements which are narratives of events the speakers were involved in, this theory generally bears out. The only swaps to present tense are when recounting their current cognition over the past-tense narrated event (I still haven't forgotten; I think, I am, there is). There are exceptions in Yahari's statements. One is one which any reader could unequivocally declare to be a present tense used strictly for emphasis, the same way a news paper headline would read a past tense event as if it were happening now, such as "Dewey defeats Truman!" The other one, "what I do is obvious" (in answer to what he did at a past event) happens to be the only one of the lot to seem to meet a narrative criteria of adding (telling) cognition to the events otherwise sequential (shown) literary narrative.
An interesting note about each of the statements is that they are in fact technically present tense, with more explicit present-tense telling modality than is used even by the omniscient narrator's voice in novels. The novel excerpt has very few asterisks denoting explicit telling modality. The overwhelming majority of past-tense sequential statements in Gyakuten Saiban happen to end with a present-tense copula, which could be translated as "it is the case that this past tense event happened." (Thus, technically present tense with a past tense clause--but translating it that way when it's dialogue would add nothing but bulk.) It is not just declaring something happened, but signifies that the element is being told rather than shown. This is because, short of being a narrator in a story, some things you can only tell.
For those who have studied Japanese, you may have come across the -garu form of adjectives/verbs. The form is necessary because you cannot speak definitively about somebody else's feelings, you were probably told. You cannot show that someone wants something or is afraid; you have to conjugate it with -garu or darou or -sou to show that they are seeming to. You can show or narrate that someone had shown signs of it, but you can only show wanting or fearing from your own perspective. This is likewise why the many statements in the literary narrative would seem inappropriate in spoken Japanese--or at least, would be distinctly taken as a "literary narrative" voice. While I try to keep these notes and discussions to the point where no Japanese knowledge like this is necessary (even if I describe it, I don't think the unnatural or literary feel can be taught), the copula/narrative voice aspects are not necessarily to understand the point made, though they will be illustrative to those who do.
For reference, telling modal markers outlined by Kindaichi are:
da, no da, (no) mono da, (no) koto da, (na, no) wake da, (after otherwise past tense conjugated verbs).
Not outlined by Kindaichi, but brought up by others, and clearly adding cognition and thus making them telling are:
dakara, kara (da), sei (da), ka.
These clearly add cognition because they assign a because, or shoulds. Likewise, there are -you and darous, which are conjectural of volitional.
Nobody's said anything yet but I'm sure some readers have raised a brow at the narrator going probably or might. These I translate out as conjectures, along with the becauses or shoulds; these are not so much lost in translation, but it helps to be aware of them in determining the purposes of modes and tense switches.
Kinsui Satoshi is my favorite Japanese linguist, the leading researcher on Japanese fictional character voices and sociolinguistic stereotypes. He's done extensive documentation on traits of speech that signify a type of character such as their gender, their age, their employment or education level, etc. in fiction. Many of these types of speech are not used by real people unless they're speaking as a character (play acting) the same way one could presumably speak as a narrator. Whether used or not by real people, they are viewed and thus used with a consciousness of character. While no studies I've come across have counted these elements, I would certainly say they qualify as telling as they posit the speaker's awareness of themselves as a speaker. These are modality markers which objective narrators have no form of. While Akane and Yahari in samples below use different forms of the copula (desu and ('n) da respectively) and are characterized through that, both have some sentences whose moods are only suggested by ze or zo or yo (for Yahari) or "no" without the copula that follows (for Akane). Since these aren't mood markers noted by any published linguists I've come across and are my own, and I am not a published linguist, I've noted these separate from the universally available mood markers, as separate from the formally recognized ones.
Japanese linguist Murakami Fuminobu has likewise suggested the view that the change in tense is a change in mood, and that this unique literary narrative voice which can show us a character's feelings or wants in a way other speakers must tell is because the line between author and character blurs. Often times, there is no subject on these sentences, so, Murakami posits, it could be translated with the subject being I, as if the character is monologuing and showing their own states. Sentences with no stated subject doing the action are in grey for your consideration of his theory; for these, you could posit the actor to be anybody, really, though I think context makes my choices fairly inarguable--the question is whether that person should be first person (I) or third person (he).
In standard Japanese language, a person can say what happened, their own perceptions, and their own cognition. In literary narrative Japanese language, the narrator can say what happened, their own perceptions, their own cognition, their characters perceptions, and their characters cognition. The narrator can even perceive the character's perceptions and cognition and add their own on top of it. In short, just as the characters in the Gyakuten Saiban examples can show and tell, the narrator is not the only one who can show and tell in a literary narrative. Tense alone is not enough to determine who is showing or telling for a sure translation, and I posit that this ambiguity is not because of the lack of stated subject in the original Japanese text. I also suggest that because of the characterized linguistic traits noted by Kinsui that the most accurate form of translation from Japanese to English available is, while flawed, the standard, consistent past tense narrative.
If the mood argument were a view that bore out consistently in either spoken or literary narrative, I would absolutely chuck aside grammatical propriety and say that readers of a work translated from Japanese must learn to accept it in literary narrative and that they would 'learn' it as less colloquial than it would feel in English (as the author of Shiki distinctly lacks a characterized feel). If Murakami's analysis were one that applied to the works I've taken on, I would absolutely consider translating such sentences as thoughts of the character. But look at the samples below and see that sentences in past and non-past do not cleanly set out into sequential events and reflection.
I've used a bold font on verbs in present tensein the original text.
Grey text notes sentences where in the Japanese text there is no subject explicitly stated.
Red stars denote that there is a present copula (da, desu, no da, no desu, etc.) on a past tense verb signifying a grammatical mood/modality.
Pink denotes end-sentence characterization/emotion particles.
The underlined bold portion is future/conjectural mood and will be addressed separately as a part of the break down of the problems with the above hypothesis.
Shiki, Book 2, Chapter 5, sub chapter
Toshio received notice of Mizuguchi's Ohkawa Shigeru's death at the usual time, early in the morning. September 19th, Monday. By the time he had hurried to the telephone, Shigeru had already died. Ohkawa Shigeru had been 33, one grade higher than Toshio, with 34 close at hand when he'd suddenly died.
Shigeru had been bedridden since three days prior, his breathing fizzling to a stop without anyone to care for him in the grey hours of the morning. When his family had come in the morning to try to wake him they finally noticed Shigeru was dead.
"To think that this could happen!" Shigeru's mother throws herself over the corpse sobbing. Toshio looked over that in irritation. Why, if he was ill, was he not made to go to the hospital, not brought into the hospital?
---Of course, he knows. Because it was over a weekend. It isn't that Shigeru's parents weren't worried about their son. Nor are they indifferent to his health. Shigeru became far worse than his parents feared. At first, they couldn't think it was something to call the doctor out for on his day off. All the same, because they were worried for their son, they planned to bring him in first thing at the beginning of the week. And that wasn't soon enough. The illness did not give Shigeru until Monday.
Toshio knows it'd be better to open the hospital even on days off. Those in the village are intimately familiar with Toshio. But that's why all the more they can't exploit him on his days off. There's no excuse for that, they think, most considerably. They mean well--it's absolutely nothing but the best of intentions but for those patients braving this disease, the two days of the weekend, just those two days of procrastination would become fatal.
It isn't just his patients. This is a problem for Toshio, too. Every time he's called out for an examination it's of a corpse---and unable to even do an autopsy, he can't observe its progress or observe it, leaving him unable to determine the source of the disease. Anyway, saying that he needed to fill out a death certificate, he asks about Shigeru's medical history, both parents' medical history, his habits past and present, pushing with all his might for who he'd seen recently, where he went, if there was anything there that could have infected him but nobody but the man himself could know all that. If he could at least ask Shigeru himself. While he was still lucid.
Lately the death reports had stopped. It is an incredibly short break. And then in came Shigeru's death notification. It was possible this is a beginning. After a small break ended the peak was coming.* The coming wave would probably be greater than the last one.*
It would be good to open the hospital on the weekend too.* He knows that. All the same, if he did decide to open the hospital, he would need staff. It wasn't as if he could tell his already busy staff to work any harder, and they weren't exactly surrounded left and right by places to try and recruit new staff from.
Toshio looked down at the Ohkawa husband and wife crumpled and crying, in a dark, somber mood.
Seishin received notice of Ohkawa Shigeru's death also at the usual time right after the morning services. Returning to the office for a short break Seishin and the others heard the phone ring and looked to each other. That a phone call in the morning was not a good thing was something all of them had come to feel in their bones this summer.
The one to take the call was Mitsuo, the one to say "again" in a small mumble was Tsurumi. Nobody else said a word beyond that.
When he went to the Ohkawa household in Mizuguchi for the bedside sutras, there unfolded the usual pathetic scene.
"If I'd known that it would come to this, I would have drug him to the hospital on Saturday!" His mother Norie breaks down sobbing. "It was because he said himself that he was okay!"
What happened with Fuki---when Gotouda Shuuji died, was repeating itself here. His father Choutarou and Norie both look to have rounded and become smaller too. Shigeru wasn't yet married. Seishin doesn't know whether he should say that the two having no daughter-in-law or grandchildren was fortunate or unfortunate.
For Ohkawa Choutarou and Norie, their son Shigeru's death was a disaster on par with their own deaths. It was a death so sudden they couldn't even imagine it in their dreams. The shock and significance was likely immeasurable to them, and yet to Seishin this was nothing more than another stereotypical scene he'd seen repeat so many times he felt nauseous this summer.
And so he found himself failing to ask indirectly about Ohkawa Shigeru's latest movements, too. Either way it there wasn't going to be any visible point of connection, he's feeling from the beginning in his heart. ---And, practically speaking, he couldn't find any point of contact between Shigeru and the dead to now.
Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney
Statements given by Akane (Ema) in case 1-5 (Yomigaeru Gyakuten):
"On that day... I was waiting for Onee-chan in the office at the police station.
The criminal came in there when running away... I was taken hostage.*
Prosecutor Zaimon Naoto-san had saved me but...*
I still haven't forgotten the sight I saw in that moment!
The criminal's knife overhead, above the prosecutor's chest...!
Even though I drew a picture from that time. It looks like it had gone missing....*"
"This 'picture'... is the one that I drew two years ago. *
The lightening was so bright that I could only see dark outlines, but...
After that, I... fainted, it looks like.*
....There is no mistake, the scene is drawn just as it was seen it at that time."
"Seeing the person who was the criminal with the knife above his head.... I,
without thinking, I rushed forward!* ...Towards the two shadows.
And then I knocked away the person holding the knife... I think.
At that moment in the flashing of light in the window,
I... saw Taiho-kun!*
Even though he wasn't in the room....
It was definitely Taiho-kun!*"
Statements by Yahari (Larry) in case 3-5 (Kareinaru Gyakuten):
"I was looking at the stars that night. At that lodge deep in the mountains.
That's, I walked around that bridge on food a few times but...
I didn't see nothing like a s, snowmobile!*
That night I didn't see no one at all around the bridge!*"
"Since I went to the mountain hut around 9... It was probably half past ten, I guess?*
I was lying down in my futon when... there was a bright white flash of light right before my eyes!*
And then, outside the window, that run down bridge's bursting into flames burning up!
The lightening was sounding but I went to see it right away. That's what I did.
There, I did meet Naruhodo. ...That's what I did."
"I'm a Tenryuusai (TN: Last name)! An artiste. It should be obvious what I do! (TN: in response to a question of what he did, past tense)
I drew it!* In front of the bridge! I was in a daze, throwing myself into drawing it out!*
The blow to my psyche... it's all taken down in the notebook just how I saw it!*
...When I realized the fire was out, that guy came staggering up.*"
"When I went to the run down bridge, she wasn't there anymore but...
I... I was worried about her, so I searched all over around the area!*
And then, I found a pretty crystal half buried in the snow!*
I'm sure Ayame-chan... was wearing a spare hood.*
There's no one else who could have lost a crystal that night is there? So yeah."
In the Gyakuten Saiban samples there's no doubt any present-tense background information is the speaking characters' cognition or perception. In the Shiki samples the background information is less discernible.
In both the Toshio and Seishin halves the immediate actions of Shigeru's parents over his corpse are put into present tense-as if happening on a different level than the narrative of what Toshio or Seishin are doing. It's practically filler fluff information. Coinciding with that, neither of the characters at the center of the sequential narrative interact with present-tense active Norie and Choutarou in their grieving, beyond witnessing it in a way that seems, to me, passive. This would make the present tense actions of the parents "background" or "told" details. In Toshio's portion the aspects formerly central to such scenes of his, namely the medical assessments or possible infection routes, are now based on how futile those are. When he does pursue those avenues as is his professional duty, it's in present tense and quickly dismissed for more narrative focus on we might assume are the topics more actively on his mind at the time. In Seishin's portion of the narrative, it's even explicitly outlined that the entire affair taken on a repetitive, removed nuance for him, to the extent that he even opts for inaction due to the ineffectiveness of it all. I think that we are shown what they think and told what's happening around them as they do. The sequential narrative is at first background.
Yet much of the non-sequential narrative, such as the 4th paragraph, is also present tense.
Is it cognition told over the past-tense events which are then shown in the rest of the 4th paragraph? If so, is it the narrator or Toshio doing the telling? What about the past tense events after; should that be taken as the perspective of the narrator showing us objectively it happened, or is it Toshio showing what happened? Who is our lens? Is it the narrator telling us what on Toshio's mind, or perhaps showing us Toshio's thoughts? If so the framing device of 'he thought' would likely be in place, or it could be put in parenthesis, both choices the author has made multiple times to show thoughts. With no framing device, is it simply the narrator narrating or is it as Murakami suggests, a reflection of the character that could even substitute the subject 'he' with 'I' for the following?
"To think that this could happen!" Shigeru's mother threw herself over the corpse sobbing. Toshio looked over that in irritation. Why, if he was ill, was he not made to go to the hospital, not brought into the hospital?
---Of course, I know. Because it was over a weekend. It's not that Shigeru's parents don't worry about their son. Nor are they indifferent to his health. Shigeru became far worse than his parents feared. At first, they couldn't think it was something to call the doctor out for on his day off. All the same, because they were worried for their son, they planned to bring him in first thing at the beginning of the week. And that wasn't soon enough. The illness did not give Shigeru until Monday.
If the present tense is meant to set off Toshio's own show and tell as suggested by Murakami, with italics suggesting his thoughts, it would also be possible to mark the question at the end of the first paragraph above as his; Toshio is taking action in the past tense, compared to Shigeru's mother in present tense, and the thought would better align with his narrative.Toshio is named as the one taking action in the next paragraph in present tense, and with him named as a third person, the distance between narrator and narrated is firmly restored. We come upon a similar problem if the focus is on Seishin's show and tell---Seishin is explicitly defined by name as a third person separate from the narrator, aside from the last paragraph, which is notably in telling mode. We have nothing to confirm that Toshio or Seishin were ever telling or showing. However that makes ascribing tense or mood to any tense come down to context, at which point it's not only very subjective as to whether it's more the character or the narrator, but increasingly moot to denote. Perhaps it's that I read it in Japanese and am aware of these details, but I think the same impression, that of Shigeru's parents being extraneous characters making some background noise while our main characters wallow in impersonal self-pity for dealing with so many dead. In that case risking attributing thoughts directly to the character that are only potentially theirs but lack all the specific hard markers thereof such as parenthesis or 'he thought' or 'he felt' doesn't improve understanding but does potentially put a thicker translator's lens over it.
The second problem, which readers familiar with Toshio likely noticed in the above sample, is that the narrative voice isn't in the character's voice, if it is supposed to be the character's. The non-character narrator is, aside from the right to use showing grammar in a unique way, to speak an utterly un-characterized standard. Kinsui noted that most main characters in fiction used less "role language" because they had to be easiest for the standard reader to identify with. I wonder if this relates to being easier for the narrator more easily merging the narrative with the character's thoughts at times?
A narrative opinion justifying the character's actions and adds too characterized a flavor to the narrator, one that opens them up to no longer being an observer/recorder but a potentially warped lens... which can be entertaining, but is not the impression given in the standard Japanese text of an omniscient narrator story.
Is there a significance in choosing this ambiguity without appending 'he thought' even when it seems strongly suggested that the narrative focus is on the type of thoughts the characters are experiencing while the action is happening?
It's possible that the narrator is choosing to present the character's thoughts, summarized, in more plain language, like a summary of a conversation. This would work with Kinsui's idea that audiences connect better with standard language than stereotyped character language. In that case, forcing it into a character show/tell in English would not be appropriate any more than rewriting it into their character voice would be.
Consider a Seishin portion in which the tense marking sequential action is present tense. That would make the single past tense one stand out as potentially showing us Seishin's thoughts while the rest is telling us what's going on.
"If I'd known that it would come to this, I would have drug him to the hospital on Saturday!" His mother Norie broke down sobbing. "It was because he said himself that he was okay!"
What happened with Fuki---when Gotouda Shuuji died, is repeating itself here. His father Choutarou and Norie both looked to have rounded and become smaller too. Shigeru wasn't yet married. Seishin didn't know whether he should say that the two having no daughter-in-law or grandchildren was fortunate or unfortunate.It's also possible that the present tense is indeed to orientate the reader more into the moment. That Shigeru's parents strong reactions or Seishin's thoughts on how to deal with them as it's his job to give comfort are background is my interpretation based on my understanding of the actual focal characters of the two scenes. There's nothing to say that because many of those elements discussed in present tense do get such a brush over that the more dynamic present tense isn't used to highlight them in their brevity.
This tension on the thoughts of the coming, larger wave in present tense discussed in the next paragraph may support that. I'm more confident in my read on it, but that's based on the surrounding text highlighting that theme, and my subjective observations tend towards assuming apathy or colder emotions. That text highlighting what I think is the theme will be there whether I translate other aspects according to it or not... and so, I default to not making an effort to emphasize or de-emphasize anything, and let the text speak for itself.
There are only three incidences of explicit telling markers in the given Shiki sample, all of them past tense. These involved "no da" and "hou ga ii" after paste tense verbs, making them arguably a present tense telling.
Putting aside that the tense may demark showing or telling or narrator or character as we've discussed that enough, the red marked sentences have telling mood markers.
On these it may be that just as in the Gyakuten Saiban samples we're being told the narrator's cognition. 'No da' is further removed than plain da, and this degree of narrative removal draws attention to the fact that these details are not at the forefront of his mind as he's thought past that. We're shown that 'he knows that' but when it goes into the less removed past form without the explicit telling marker, that's where his real current thoughts are. The narrator-tell thoughts are necessary for context, and it may suggest that they really deserve more weight than Toshio gives them, even if his own excuses for inaction win out.
However, another possibility, more visible in the first paragraph, is that the no da is another layer of removal highlighting a different timeline of Toshio's own thoughts. They're future/conjectural. It may be telling us his thoughts and using the narrative distance marker as Toshio's own; non-narrator can and do use these telling markers in regular daily conversation. Perhaps the narrative is showing a change in his thought from past to considerations for the future. Perhaps it's showing different levels of thinking of the character in terms of his relation to them; students of Japanese are likely very aware that Japanese is a language near pedantic about setting the psychological distance and direction of things.
Recall that Hopper distinguished the potential for there to be two timelines in any story--the narrator in the present overlaying things onto a past narrative which also had to happen in its own order. Just as we think and speak on these multiple planes, so too may fictional characters, and the idea of only two moods or two timelines is a simplification made for the ease of explaining subjective theories in a more definable reference. This doesn't mean anything is truly limited to them. There may be the narrative foreground and background and Toshio and Seishin's own in-scene foreground and background.
Conclusion:
The fact that linguists study this through example rather than simply asking modern writers what they're doing and why shows that the authors themselves may not be certain what their exact intention is, only that it bares out a certain feel and expresses what they want it to express. The rules of language and linguistics were not made before the language, and native speakers can tell the appropriate conjugations and inflections of their language long before they know what a tense or a subject or an object is
As it must be one or the other, I'd rather lose something in translation than add in myself as a translator. Adding subtext as if it were a fact of the source is dishonest. There's too much potential for egotism to get in the way of improving as a translator, or for ulterior motives to slip in when you add to a translation.
Who would have ulterior motives in translation? Unpaid translators tend to translate because a work because of some personal investment in it. That means there's plenty of potential for bias; people want their ideas to be right, they want their pairs to be canon even if never textually consumated, they sometimes want to be the authority on the work more than they want the work to be accessed as it is. When you're a translator for people who don't know the source language, you're accountable to almost nothing but your own sense of decency. The more you intellectualize it, the more you can justify molding things to your view. So at the end of all my research, I decided I don't know enough to pass anything off as fact to readers. I've got thoughts on the grammar of novels and scenes, and with the lost tense many readers will not be able to discuss them, but short of translating the whole novel in the marked styles above, there's no way to do that. And doing that makes it less a story and more of an academic exercise--not what Shiki is first and foremost about.
If anyone wants to look at a novel as a linguistic academic exercise, I think it's fair to expect them to study the language. I don't think that's a fair requirement for anyone who wants to enjoy foreign stories in general. Likewise, I don't think it's necessary for anyone to know about this aspect to enjoy it--but some may, so, here it is.
Shigeru had been bedridden since three days prior, his breathing fizzling to a stop without anyone to care for him in the grey hours of the morning. When his family had come in the morning to try to wake him they finally noticed Shigeru was dead.
"To think that this could happen!" Shigeru's mother throws herself over the corpse sobbing. Toshio looked over that in irritation. Why, if he was ill, was he not made to go to the hospital, not brought into the hospital?
---Of course, he knows. Because it was over a weekend. It isn't that Shigeru's parents weren't worried about their son. Nor are they indifferent to his health. Shigeru became far worse than his parents feared. At first, they couldn't think it was something to call the doctor out for on his day off. All the same, because they were worried for their son, they planned to bring him in first thing at the beginning of the week. And that wasn't soon enough. The illness did not give Shigeru until Monday.
Toshio knows it'd be better to open the hospital even on days off. Those in the village are intimately familiar with Toshio. But that's why all the more they can't exploit him on his days off. There's no excuse for that, they think, most considerably. They mean well--it's absolutely nothing but the best of intentions but for those patients braving this disease, the two days of the weekend, just those two days of procrastination would become fatal.
It isn't just his patients. This is a problem for Toshio, too. Every time he's called out for an examination it's of a corpse---and unable to even do an autopsy, he can't observe its progress or observe it, leaving him unable to determine the source of the disease. Anyway, saying that he needed to fill out a death certificate, he asks about Shigeru's medical history, both parents' medical history, his habits past and present, pushing with all his might for who he'd seen recently, where he went, if there was anything there that could have infected him but nobody but the man himself could know all that. If he could at least ask Shigeru himself. While he was still lucid.
Lately the death reports had stopped. It is an incredibly short break. And then in came Shigeru's death notification. It was possible this is a beginning. After a small break ended the peak was coming.* The coming wave would probably be greater than the last one.*
It would be good to open the hospital on the weekend too.* He knows that. All the same, if he did decide to open the hospital, he would need staff. It wasn't as if he could tell his already busy staff to work any harder, and they weren't exactly surrounded left and right by places to try and recruit new staff from.
Toshio looked down at the Ohkawa husband and wife crumpled and crying, in a dark, somber mood.
Seishin received notice of Ohkawa Shigeru's death also at the usual time right after the morning services. Returning to the office for a short break Seishin and the others heard the phone ring and looked to each other. That a phone call in the morning was not a good thing was something all of them had come to feel in their bones this summer.
The one to take the call was Mitsuo, the one to say "again" in a small mumble was Tsurumi. Nobody else said a word beyond that.
When he went to the Ohkawa household in Mizuguchi for the bedside sutras, there unfolded the usual pathetic scene.
"If I'd known that it would come to this, I would have drug him to the hospital on Saturday!" His mother Norie breaks down sobbing. "It was because he said himself that he was okay!"
What happened with Fuki---when Gotouda Shuuji died, was repeating itself here. His father Choutarou and Norie both look to have rounded and become smaller too. Shigeru wasn't yet married. Seishin doesn't know whether he should say that the two having no daughter-in-law or grandchildren was fortunate or unfortunate.
For Ohkawa Choutarou and Norie, their son Shigeru's death was a disaster on par with their own deaths. It was a death so sudden they couldn't even imagine it in their dreams. The shock and significance was likely immeasurable to them, and yet to Seishin this was nothing more than another stereotypical scene he'd seen repeat so many times he felt nauseous this summer.
And so he found himself failing to ask indirectly about Ohkawa Shigeru's latest movements, too. Either way it there wasn't going to be any visible point of connection, he's feeling from the beginning in his heart. ---And, practically speaking, he couldn't find any point of contact between Shigeru and the dead to now.
Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney
Statements given by Akane (Ema) in case 1-5 (Yomigaeru Gyakuten):
"On that day... I was waiting for Onee-chan in the office at the police station.
The criminal came in there when running away... I was taken hostage.*
Prosecutor Zaimon Naoto-san had saved me but...*
I still haven't forgotten the sight I saw in that moment!
The criminal's knife overhead, above the prosecutor's chest...!
Even though I drew a picture from that time. It looks like it had gone missing....*"
"This 'picture'... is the one that I drew two years ago. *
The lightening was so bright that I could only see dark outlines, but...
After that, I... fainted, it looks like.*
....There is no mistake, the scene is drawn just as it was seen it at that time."
"Seeing the person who was the criminal with the knife above his head.... I,
without thinking, I rushed forward!* ...Towards the two shadows.
And then I knocked away the person holding the knife... I think.
At that moment in the flashing of light in the window,
I... saw Taiho-kun!*
Even though he wasn't in the room....
It was definitely Taiho-kun!*"
Statements by Yahari (Larry) in case 3-5 (Kareinaru Gyakuten):
"I was looking at the stars that night. At that lodge deep in the mountains.
That's, I walked around that bridge on food a few times but...
I didn't see nothing like a s, snowmobile!*
That night I didn't see no one at all around the bridge!*"
"Since I went to the mountain hut around 9... It was probably half past ten, I guess?*
I was lying down in my futon when... there was a bright white flash of light right before my eyes!*
And then, outside the window, that run down bridge's bursting into flames burning up!
The lightening was sounding but I went to see it right away. That's what I did.
There, I did meet Naruhodo. ...That's what I did."
"I'm a Tenryuusai (TN: Last name)! An artiste. It should be obvious what I do! (TN: in response to a question of what he did, past tense)
I drew it!* In front of the bridge! I was in a daze, throwing myself into drawing it out!*
The blow to my psyche... it's all taken down in the notebook just how I saw it!*
...When I realized the fire was out, that guy came staggering up.*"
"When I went to the run down bridge, she wasn't there anymore but...
I... I was worried about her, so I searched all over around the area!*
And then, I found a pretty crystal half buried in the snow!*
I'm sure Ayame-chan... was wearing a spare hood.*
There's no one else who could have lost a crystal that night is there? So yeah."
In the Gyakuten Saiban samples there's no doubt any present-tense background information is the speaking characters' cognition or perception. In the Shiki samples the background information is less discernible.
In both the Toshio and Seishin halves the immediate actions of Shigeru's parents over his corpse are put into present tense-as if happening on a different level than the narrative of what Toshio or Seishin are doing. It's practically filler fluff information. Coinciding with that, neither of the characters at the center of the sequential narrative interact with present-tense active Norie and Choutarou in their grieving, beyond witnessing it in a way that seems, to me, passive. This would make the present tense actions of the parents "background" or "told" details. In Toshio's portion the aspects formerly central to such scenes of his, namely the medical assessments or possible infection routes, are now based on how futile those are. When he does pursue those avenues as is his professional duty, it's in present tense and quickly dismissed for more narrative focus on we might assume are the topics more actively on his mind at the time. In Seishin's portion of the narrative, it's even explicitly outlined that the entire affair taken on a repetitive, removed nuance for him, to the extent that he even opts for inaction due to the ineffectiveness of it all. I think that we are shown what they think and told what's happening around them as they do. The sequential narrative is at first background.
Yet much of the non-sequential narrative, such as the 4th paragraph, is also present tense.
Is it cognition told over the past-tense events which are then shown in the rest of the 4th paragraph? If so, is it the narrator or Toshio doing the telling? What about the past tense events after; should that be taken as the perspective of the narrator showing us objectively it happened, or is it Toshio showing what happened? Who is our lens? Is it the narrator telling us what on Toshio's mind, or perhaps showing us Toshio's thoughts? If so the framing device of 'he thought' would likely be in place, or it could be put in parenthesis, both choices the author has made multiple times to show thoughts. With no framing device, is it simply the narrator narrating or is it as Murakami suggests, a reflection of the character that could even substitute the subject 'he' with 'I' for the following?
"To think that this could happen!" Shigeru's mother threw herself over the corpse sobbing. Toshio looked over that in irritation. Why, if he was ill, was he not made to go to the hospital, not brought into the hospital?
---Of course, I know. Because it was over a weekend. It's not that Shigeru's parents don't worry about their son. Nor are they indifferent to his health. Shigeru became far worse than his parents feared. At first, they couldn't think it was something to call the doctor out for on his day off. All the same, because they were worried for their son, they planned to bring him in first thing at the beginning of the week. And that wasn't soon enough. The illness did not give Shigeru until Monday.
If the present tense is meant to set off Toshio's own show and tell as suggested by Murakami, with italics suggesting his thoughts, it would also be possible to mark the question at the end of the first paragraph above as his; Toshio is taking action in the past tense, compared to Shigeru's mother in present tense, and the thought would better align with his narrative.Toshio is named as the one taking action in the next paragraph in present tense, and with him named as a third person, the distance between narrator and narrated is firmly restored. We come upon a similar problem if the focus is on Seishin's show and tell---Seishin is explicitly defined by name as a third person separate from the narrator, aside from the last paragraph, which is notably in telling mode. We have nothing to confirm that Toshio or Seishin were ever telling or showing. However that makes ascribing tense or mood to any tense come down to context, at which point it's not only very subjective as to whether it's more the character or the narrator, but increasingly moot to denote. Perhaps it's that I read it in Japanese and am aware of these details, but I think the same impression, that of Shigeru's parents being extraneous characters making some background noise while our main characters wallow in impersonal self-pity for dealing with so many dead. In that case risking attributing thoughts directly to the character that are only potentially theirs but lack all the specific hard markers thereof such as parenthesis or 'he thought' or 'he felt' doesn't improve understanding but does potentially put a thicker translator's lens over it.
The second problem, which readers familiar with Toshio likely noticed in the above sample, is that the narrative voice isn't in the character's voice, if it is supposed to be the character's. The non-character narrator is, aside from the right to use showing grammar in a unique way, to speak an utterly un-characterized standard. Kinsui noted that most main characters in fiction used less "role language" because they had to be easiest for the standard reader to identify with. I wonder if this relates to being easier for the narrator more easily merging the narrative with the character's thoughts at times?
A narrative opinion justifying the character's actions and adds too characterized a flavor to the narrator, one that opens them up to no longer being an observer/recorder but a potentially warped lens... which can be entertaining, but is not the impression given in the standard Japanese text of an omniscient narrator story.
Is there a significance in choosing this ambiguity without appending 'he thought' even when it seems strongly suggested that the narrative focus is on the type of thoughts the characters are experiencing while the action is happening?
It's possible that the narrator is choosing to present the character's thoughts, summarized, in more plain language, like a summary of a conversation. This would work with Kinsui's idea that audiences connect better with standard language than stereotyped character language. In that case, forcing it into a character show/tell in English would not be appropriate any more than rewriting it into their character voice would be.
Consider a Seishin portion in which the tense marking sequential action is present tense. That would make the single past tense one stand out as potentially showing us Seishin's thoughts while the rest is telling us what's going on.
"If I'd known that it would come to this, I would have drug him to the hospital on Saturday!" His mother Norie broke down sobbing. "It was because he said himself that he was okay!"
What happened with Fuki---when Gotouda Shuuji died, is repeating itself here. His father Choutarou and Norie both looked to have rounded and become smaller too. Shigeru wasn't yet married. Seishin didn't know whether he should say that the two having no daughter-in-law or grandchildren was fortunate or unfortunate.
This tension on the thoughts of the coming, larger wave in present tense discussed in the next paragraph may support that. I'm more confident in my read on it, but that's based on the surrounding text highlighting that theme, and my subjective observations tend towards assuming apathy or colder emotions. That text highlighting what I think is the theme will be there whether I translate other aspects according to it or not... and so, I default to not making an effort to emphasize or de-emphasize anything, and let the text speak for itself.
There are only three incidences of explicit telling markers in the given Shiki sample, all of them past tense. These involved "no da" and "hou ga ii" after paste tense verbs, making them arguably a present tense telling.
Lately the death reports had stopped. It is an incredibly short break. And then in came Shigeru's death notification. It was possible this is a beginning. After a small break ended the peak was coming.* The coming wave would probably be greater than the last one.*
It would be good to open the hospital on the weekend too.* He knows that. All the same, if he did decide to open the hospital, he would need staff. It wasn't as if he could tell his already busy staff to work any harder, and they weren't exactly surrounded left and right by places to try and recruit new staff from.
It would be good to open the hospital on the weekend too.* He knows that. All the same, if he did decide to open the hospital, he would need staff. It wasn't as if he could tell his already busy staff to work any harder, and they weren't exactly surrounded left and right by places to try and recruit new staff from.
Putting aside that the tense may demark showing or telling or narrator or character as we've discussed that enough, the red marked sentences have telling mood markers.
On these it may be that just as in the Gyakuten Saiban samples we're being told the narrator's cognition. 'No da' is further removed than plain da, and this degree of narrative removal draws attention to the fact that these details are not at the forefront of his mind as he's thought past that. We're shown that 'he knows that' but when it goes into the less removed past form without the explicit telling marker, that's where his real current thoughts are. The narrator-tell thoughts are necessary for context, and it may suggest that they really deserve more weight than Toshio gives them, even if his own excuses for inaction win out.
However, another possibility, more visible in the first paragraph, is that the no da is another layer of removal highlighting a different timeline of Toshio's own thoughts. They're future/conjectural. It may be telling us his thoughts and using the narrative distance marker as Toshio's own; non-narrator can and do use these telling markers in regular daily conversation. Perhaps the narrative is showing a change in his thought from past to considerations for the future. Perhaps it's showing different levels of thinking of the character in terms of his relation to them; students of Japanese are likely very aware that Japanese is a language near pedantic about setting the psychological distance and direction of things.
Recall that Hopper distinguished the potential for there to be two timelines in any story--the narrator in the present overlaying things onto a past narrative which also had to happen in its own order. Just as we think and speak on these multiple planes, so too may fictional characters, and the idea of only two moods or two timelines is a simplification made for the ease of explaining subjective theories in a more definable reference. This doesn't mean anything is truly limited to them. There may be the narrative foreground and background and Toshio and Seishin's own in-scene foreground and background.
Conclusion:
The fact that linguists study this through example rather than simply asking modern writers what they're doing and why shows that the authors themselves may not be certain what their exact intention is, only that it bares out a certain feel and expresses what they want it to express. The rules of language and linguistics were not made before the language, and native speakers can tell the appropriate conjugations and inflections of their language long before they know what a tense or a subject or an object is
As it must be one or the other, I'd rather lose something in translation than add in myself as a translator. Adding subtext as if it were a fact of the source is dishonest. There's too much potential for egotism to get in the way of improving as a translator, or for ulterior motives to slip in when you add to a translation.
Who would have ulterior motives in translation? Unpaid translators tend to translate because a work because of some personal investment in it. That means there's plenty of potential for bias; people want their ideas to be right, they want their pairs to be canon even if never textually consumated, they sometimes want to be the authority on the work more than they want the work to be accessed as it is. When you're a translator for people who don't know the source language, you're accountable to almost nothing but your own sense of decency. The more you intellectualize it, the more you can justify molding things to your view. So at the end of all my research, I decided I don't know enough to pass anything off as fact to readers. I've got thoughts on the grammar of novels and scenes, and with the lost tense many readers will not be able to discuss them, but short of translating the whole novel in the marked styles above, there's no way to do that. And doing that makes it less a story and more of an academic exercise--not what Shiki is first and foremost about.
If anyone wants to look at a novel as a linguistic academic exercise, I think it's fair to expect them to study the language. I don't think that's a fair requirement for anyone who wants to enjoy foreign stories in general. Likewise, I don't think it's necessary for anyone to know about this aspect to enjoy it--but some may, so, here it is.
no subject
I like the idea that the different writing patterns, the methods of expressing their work that authors use isn't them following some rule--it's a feeling that they themselves choose to infuse into a work, and I suppose that those feelings, those writing styles gradually become a significant element of that time period, and maybe even shapes narrative styles for the future. (Like for example, the stream of consciousness-type styles that were popular among the Lost Generation after WWI became a trend, although it didn't stick.) But then what if a trend does stick? I wonder if it could be partly because of this that the tense merging occurs.
Well, literature has to come from somewhere. Before writing systems, stories were told by word of mouth--so perhaps when they were making the transition from verbal records to writing them down, they just did it differently. Like if in the West, the most popular way to do it was to have it be "this is a past event we're talking about, so it will have to be explicitly stated to be in the past" and in Japan they made the transition more conversational.
This wouldn't even have to happen at the very very beginning of writing systems like scrawls on cave walls, but during a period of that influenced all literature onward, kind of like the Renaissance art's significance has endured ever since.
On another note though, the "raw" translation of Shiki that you had up there actually wasn't so hard to read. I imagined that the tense changing would be so confusing that it would get in the way of comprehension - and to be honest, it kinda did - but nowhere close to the degree that I expected. I expected it to be like Ghost Hunt's, but I guess now that maybe it was just that that translation was particularly bad, or maybe it was just that simplistic because it's a light novel.
And I definitely learned something new--I was kinda surprised to see that the tense changes weren't random as I had always thought that they were, or at least random in the way that conversational speech sometimes is. Even without the different colors and bolded words, I could still somehow feel the significance of the tense changes, especially when a tense was surrounded by the other; it just /worked/. I got the feel of the emphasis (?) that the tense changes implied, which is likely what the author (and other Japanese authors) were going for, something that Japanese readers are likely so familiar with that they don't even realize it.
I think I mentioned everything I had in mind~ anyway, like I've said before at one point, I like the way you're handling the translation now, so I wouldn't urge you to start mixing the tenses. It's a win-win for everyone to just have the good translation of the novel, and then some cultural/linguistic notes as 'extra' for anyone (me!) who's interested :D
no subject
I don't think it'd be catastrophic to keep the verb tense. It's easy enough to follow. If I were doing a visual novel, I would keep the tenses, but visual novels are almost always from a character's viewpoint, one who's in the moment and whose decisions you often make, so it seems less like a violation of the omniscience and detached wording we demand of our invisible narrators.
Right now I'm translating the narrator as if they're a character whose role language is "narrator." Just as things sound like a narrator in Japanese, certain things sound like a narrator in English, too. "It wasn't that his parent's didn't care, nor were they indifferent to his health" absolutely does not sound like a way anyone would speak. It's narrator speak. I don't consider translating tense to past tense for the narrator any worse than translating the Gyakuten bits into past tense English even when they technically end with present tense modal markers ("(It is the case that this) past tense event happened").
no subject
Yeah...kind of like with our speech conversation earlier about how eliminating 'um's and pauses made you sound unnatural, that's probably similar to tense changes. A speech that changes tenses seems more natural than one that's just talking in past tense or present tense without ever slipping, right? It also denotes the tempo, like if sentences start getting choppy and the speaker doesn't even bother with tenses anymore, that's seen as excitement (although in novels, it's still kept at an unrealistic minimum or else it'd be impossible to read).
Translating the narrator as past tense then would actually kind of preserve the Japanese intentions in a way; if the original text meant the narrator to be a disattached character, then the past tense in English would reflect that better than keeping tenses. So sometimes the literal translation isn't always the most faithful, you wanna break even on Comprehension vs. Exact Wording.
no subject
I'm not sure I recall any immediate examples of -keri, -ki, and the old fashioned -tari in anime or manga, but I'd be surprised if they were never used. I haven't been hard-core into too many period pieces--just things like Lupin and Ranma that may have a character with those traits. I'd have to both study the old fashioned language to better understand it, and sit down and watch some shows specifically looking for them. Which actually sounds fun, but I've got enough other projects for now. Maybe someday!
I'm uncomfortable with that "preserving the spirit over the letter" translation thing on most levels, though. That kind of thing leads to things like translating "thank you" as "I love you" and saying it's more accurate in terms of intent because of cultural differences in openness. But the work and its character will reflect (or intentionally subvert) its native culture and it's wrong to translate that out and claim you're facilitating understanding.
I could probably maintain the narrator feel even with tense switching now that I look it over. Some parts do seem to convey something in their tense shift, such as the present tense mourning parents, while others only strike me as ill written inconsistencies, like the sudden switch to "it is an incredibly short break." Am I adjusting for grammatical differences like I do when adding a subject to a sentence (I don't think anyone would argue that my choice of assumed subject in the grey sentences is even up for interpretation) or am I adjusting for tense because that's more culturally common in English?
no subject
I actually read Beowulf sometime in September, and the book was made so that the right pages had the modern translation we were supposed to read, and the left had the original Anglo-Saxon language text. It was totally unrecognizable. But Bara Teacher had this recording of Beowulf being read in original Anglo-Saxon, it was really cool! I also got a chance to hear The Epic of Gilgamesh being read in ancient Akkadian. I love history! Especially ancient history. If there was some place I could take community classes in ancient history, I'd do it.
If you decide to sit down and watch shows to look for old fashioned language, make sure you pick one that's entertaining! They'll probably be old-school anime too, it doesn't seem like the new series that come out are much historical.
"Preserving the spirit over the letter" is a slippery slope because there's a line between making a cultural translation, and putting your own interpretation over it. Like with the "thank you">"I love you" translation, that's kind of similar to finding all kinds of symbolism and double meaning in works that might not have any. It might mean one thing to one person, might mean something else to the other. To leave it ambiguous would be right if that's what the original text is; part of reading something is interpreting it as you think is best, and if you do that on top of someone else's interpretation then you're two interpretations away from the actual meaning.
Adjusting tense because it's more culturally common in English isn't a bad thing; I actually think that it's better because it makes the novel flow easier, whereas if the tenses change it sounds kind of choppy and not as 'smooth' as the original work--which might've been the author's intent. I think if there's a part where the tense change is really significant and helps express the mood of the scene, it won't be so bad to keep that part, but if it doesn't contribute one way or the other just keeping it past tense is fine. I'd still read it either way, but I guess that's how I'd go about translating. Decisions, decisions!
no subject
Historical anime was in vogue pretty recently with the big Shinsengumi kick, but while a ton of anime are in the older time periods, they use modern language. In InuYasha it was even a point made at the beginning that the people of the past spoke differently from Kagome, but that got dropped quickly.
Sadly, that Thank you > I love you is an example from very popular media, Final Fantasy X specifically. Alexander O. Smith, one of the biggest names in the J>E translation business, decided that Yuuna should say I love you rather than thank you to Tidus in the end. Admittedly I don't think the dub actress has the skill to convey the nuances of that thank you, but there's so much lost with a translation that's meant to give more. Ironically, there's a part where Yuna says "I love you" to Rikku and it's translated as "thank you," too. I've read some of his translations of the Fullmetal Alchemist novels he did and found points at which he completely changed what was written even in tone; one example being the end of the novel where Roy's supervisor demands an explanation. Smith's translation has Roy sit there quietly as if hoping his superior officer will forget he's there (in Smith's own added/made up words); the original has him wonder how he's going to answer that. Both have him being silent, but the narration recharacterizes him significantly. He's attributed lines of dialogue to the wrong speaker despite clear speech style markers of who's speaking, and mistranslated character's ranks.
If this is our leading J->E translator in the business, we're in trouble. I'm by no means perfect and may make errors but I'm also not a paid professional. If he's screwing up like this because of professional demands for localization (He did the Ace Attorney translation which I will not hold against him as a translator because it's not a translation, it's a very, very, very loose adaptation) then there's really no hope at all. But I think many of the examples of mistakes or unnecessary changes I've found are matters of personal choice; he Thank you > I love you was his own idea he ardently defends. Translating Hawkeye as a captain instead of a first lieutenant would require some real mental gymnastics to make necessary. Perhaps he wanted to make the end of the book funny by making Roy an idiot, but the original ending was more clever. ("How are you going to explain this?!" / Roy wondered how he was going to explain that, himself. vs. "How are you going to explain this?!" / Roy sat silently hoping if he said nothing he would forget he was there. --The first one seems funny enough if not funnier.)
Sometimes we're torn between keeping the author's intent (which we must both assume and assume our way conveys) and what the author puts down. For example, what if we're translating, but the original work is poor at conveying the intended mood? Subjectivism abounds. Translators should constantly be doubting themselves.
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I haven't watched Inuyasha, but if they're gearing a show towards a younger demographic that's there for the action, it would make sense to just drop everything and speak in a modern way that they'd understand. That doesn't fly very well with me because although I really enjoy action, I also like historical pieces that capture the time period, and some movies think it's okay to mix in modern stuff with an older era. Like the new Great Gatsby movie that came out this summer, it had hip hop music playing during party scenes, and that was not okay; I had been hoping for some smooth 20's jazz.
Frankly, I don't think translators should take the liberty of changing some original dialogue to suit what /they/ think it should be interpreted as. For instance, I read the official English translated Battle Royale manga and I heard that the translation absolutely butchered it, so it's nothing like what the original was. For instance, the English translation actually had the characters mention that The Program was videotaped and then televised, kind of like the Hunger Games, whereas in the original and in the book it's not like that. Also the translation is riddled with American pop culture references and slang terms which carry with them that feeling of adults trying to imitate teenager speak and failing miserably. So after I found thaat out, I don't feel like I really read the manga at all.
Subtle changes in translation don't seem like they could be avoided though; for example there's more than one way to say 'thank you'--you could say, 'my gratitude', 'I am thankful to you', 'You have my thanks'--which all mean similar things and are all valid translations of 'thank you', but each one has a different tone behind it and where one translator can think that 'my gratitude' carries the appropriate tone, another might disagree in favor of 'You have my thanks'.
I would frown upon that FMA novel. I feel like if a translator starts putting more 'me' into it, the work won't be the author's own work anymore. All of the text is there for a reason, and by changing it, any intent behind putting it there is lost.
Is there a special way you translate to make sure that nothing's lost in translation?
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Inuyasha was a pretty decent balance of action, romance, and drama, but it was definitely heaviest of all on action, being a shounen manga. Overall I'd still call it a solid little series, even if historical accuracy isn't a strong point. As for Gatsby, as a general fan of what I have red of Fitzgerald, as well as a big fan of 20s music and fashion, that they went with hip hop is really disappointing. I love big band jazz and swing and stuff.
Man, Battle Royale's not really a good mainstream manga either. Why'd they did that and add the videotape/televise thing, I wonder? Was it Tokyo Pop who published it in the West? Tokyo Pop is notorious for lots of American references, to my chagrin. I remember reading their redux of Fake and cringing a lot... and that's a series taking place in New York, so I'd be more forgiving of heavy US slang. But even the adult characters sound like a 90's hip hop kid's show parody.
Yeah, I'm less picky when the difference is 'my gratitude' or 'You have my thanks.' At least in both cases, each translation is clearly taking a formal translation; likewise, I don't much fuss over whether people translate Mikami as saying eliminate, delete, remove, etc. Though, I tend to assume people who go with 'delete' are dubbies because I know that's what the dub used, while I think eliminate is better and use it myself, I don't think it's too significant. Going again back to the FMA novel translations, Ed, who speaks keigo (desu/masu polite speech) to Izumi and is generally very verbally respectful of her (because he values his life--in the manga she berates him the one time he doesn't keigo her) is translated as saying "Thanks, Teach." That's just too far out of the ballpark, unlike eliminate vs. delete or thanks vs. sorry (for the trouble).
I tend to look for unfamiliar words in various contexts using weblio, Google, Bing, and ALC. Since those all include real sentences, you can get a feel for how the word is used. Sometimes, dictionaries will also even tell you if it's a more 'newpaper' term or informal term. There are more tricky ones, like knowing the difference between yatto and youyaku, naze and nande, etc. that you just have to expose yourself to a lot of character media to learn the feel for, but fortunately the Japanese are frequently willing to talk about or think about this kind of stuff, too.
It's kind of like how in English, we tend to hear "charming" as pretentious and fake, or sarcastic. Fabulous, likewise, is usually used sarcastically or implying some degree of overdone gaudiness that smacks of sequins and camp gay. We don't use the word 'merry' outside of Christmas greetings, either, though a Chinese chick I know used it once and made me think "We need this back in our language, it's classy as hell." If a girl on a full scholarship and living stipend to Yale is using it, it's a good word, by God. You just have to try to keep a look out and try to look for patterns, then if you think you see one, see how well it holds up. It's imperfect and I have something of a complex about it. But like I said, I think it's good for a translator to always be kicking themselves and wallowing in doubt.
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As a freshman, I had this awesome biology class and I really think that class played a big role in getting me interested in medicine. I really liked the anatomical parts and we also watched a lot of videos about diseases and stuff. I think one especially memorable one was Lorenzo's Oil, about a kid who had a genetic illness adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) and his parents tried to find a cure for it. As Lorenzo got older, he stopped being able to walk and speak and see and it was a hard movie to watch; half of the class was almost crying. Althooough, I don't really have that much interest in genetic illnesses; I'd prefer to work with those that I can cure, I want the satisfaction of helping a person feel better because everyone deserves good health. Next year I'm really excited because I can take basically any classes I want, and I signed up for both AP Bio and Anatomy!
Historical accuracy is important to me only if I actually know the history...otherwise you could fool me. I don't know anything about Japanese history (except that they bombed Pearl Harbor a while back) so you could fool me with Inuyasha. To be honest, I kind of expected Gatsby to be like Baccano, although it's set about a decade earlier. But I thought the Baccano jazz OST was pro, and Gatsby would've done better to reflect the charm and class of the Roarin' Twenties instead of the wild partying. We see enough partying in blockbusters anyway, c'mon! Gatsby was perfect apart from the music (which was actually a pretty big flaw) so I'd recommend it. Sadly, the only Fitzgerald book I've read is Gatsby.
Tokyo Pop did publish Battle Royale, unfortunately! Battle Royale's not even that mainstream, so I wish they had gotten a non-mainstream and better company to do it. I could've settled for fan translations online, but I actually wanted the row of 15 volumes on my bookshelf so I went ahead and bought them all. It was still an okay read; I bet if I read it in original Japanese, I'd be less okay with it. They should've had Yen Press or something at least do it; they did a pretty good job on Kieli, that one book I sorta talked about earlier, and the writing style sort of reminds me of your Shiki translation because it has some sentences that are just obviously Japanese--which is good because I think it means they translated it as literally as possible. I dislike slang in works of fiction in general, mostly cause it sounds kind of forced. In movies it's not as obvious, but in books even if I understand the pop culture references it's still ridiculous because nobody really talks like that. Do they think the reader is stupid enough not to understand the material if it doesn't include some weird slang that'll be outdated in 3 years?!!
Heh, I actually thought the 'delete' scene was pretty good in the English dub, because the actor went all crazy on it. Again, that kind of depends on the connotation too because you could make an argument for 'delete' seeming better because since Mikami is organized and mathematical, he would see criminals as errors in the program of humanity, to make an analogy, and then he would want to 'delete' them, like anyone would 'delete' mistakes. That's up to your interpretation, though, since nobody's ever going to agree on their being one specific way to translate something. Just like there's more than one way to say something in a language, there's more than one way to translate it.
What context did the Chinese girl use it in? Some words should be brought back. I really like the word 'pusillanimous' (cowardly) and use it whenever I want to tell people not to be afraid. "No, airlynx, I'm don't think I want to shoplift..." "Don't be pusillanimous." But yeah, the key is to just not get arrogant as a translator, I guess. You should always be looking out for fan advice or feedback. But then again, you can always be sassy because where else is anyone going to find a Shiki translation? Don't like, don't read, guise.
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I'm not sure there's a significant difference in translating it as delete or eliminate. Sakujo's used to mean the delete key and to omit a line from a paper and for just 'erase', it's pretty catch-all. I go with eliminate because it's the most natural translation in context ("I realized some people needed to be eliminated" vs. "...to be deleted" vs "...to be erased."); delete may fit a precise image of him, but his speech in Japanese is normal, so if the original doesn't attempt to convey that through his dialogue, neither will I. I'm not that finicky on it; my screen-name for him is 'eraser_rain' to make a pun off of sakujo and that terrible second ending theme. There are definitely bigger problems with the dub than that.
She said "let's be merry.". It somehow feels more poignant than "let's be happy!" or "...cheerful!" It's a good word, it seems to indicate a different type of happiness than the other two.
The fact that I am the only Shiki translator gives me less grounds to be sassy. Anyone who argues (unless they know Japanese) could just run up against the "well I said so and I'm the one who knows Japanese" blockade which is intellectually pusillanimous.
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Jazz is ageless, but Pitbull's bilingual rap will fade away fast. I mean...call me old fashioned, but I just feel that the music should fit the time period that the film is portraying. I don't want to be a music purist saying "Oh, today's music is trash. I wish I lived in the 80's when they had REAL music" but I do think that jazz is more appropriate. I'm allowed to have a little bias, and I like jazz. Actually, I used to be kind of an opposite music purist; a few years ago I thought that techno (and by extension dubstep) was 'the music of the future' and encouraged everyone around me to listen to it. ...As you can probably guess, I didn't have that many friends.
There's no natural way to convey that you want to eliminate people either, really. The fact that Mikami refers to it as that shows how much his sense of justice is overplayed to the point of abnormality (he kind of reminds me of Tosen from Bleach) so all of those variants, "erase"/"eliminate"/"delete" all make it sound like there's no consequences from killing criminals. "Killing" them implies that although they're dead, they leave behind memories, mysteries, legacies, etc. whereas "eliminating" them removes them from life in general, as though surgically removed from Earth. I didn't really like the second half of Death Note...but yeah, the dub makes Light sound like a pedophile.
Huh, "merry" does sound cool if you think about it. It's like, not only happy or even lively, but denotes having fun and being in a good mood (and who wouldn't want to have fun and be in a good mood?) She's right; we all should be merry.
Some readers should be blockaded, though! Granted, you don't have any obnoxious regular commenters here that throw misspelled criticisms your way but if you did people like that are hard to reason with. That's another reason why Shiki's obscurity is good; the obnoxious fans who are in it for the bishonens wouldn't be interested in a novel that has a focus apart from said bishonens. Not that I don't like bishonens, but at least you don't have to deal with that.
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Ozaki and Seishin are pretty bishounen... I kinda wish more bishounen fans were interested in them. Then I could find more doujinshi of them. Every time I search I have to swim through a sea of Natsuno/Tohru.
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Are there any dubs that you like, or thought did a good job?
Bishonens are much easier to look at, I'll give them that. I don't know how long I would have stuck with Shiki if Ozaki was built like Atsushi. At least Ozaki/Seishin are more popular than our better and regretfully more obscure pairing, Atsushi/Takami!
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I liked the Samurai Pizza Cats dub of Kyatto Ninden Teyande; they apparently completely threw out the script and made it up from the animation, added a sarcastic narrator, and made it very tongue-in-cheek. It's both funny, AND doesn't have to suffer just being as close to the original vision as it can get. It's its own work with its own merits, and doesn't rely heavily on the original's script to succeed.
I've seen some Japanese dubs that seemed pretty close to their English equivalent; in the Japanese dub of The Jungle Book, they got someone who is a dead ringer for Louis Prima, and Moguli's spot on, too. Sadly, Balloo, my favorite, sounded terrible, just stupid without any of that lovable slyness. The Japanese dub of Boondocks opted to just keep a lot of the English terms like Nigger and Fuck and Bitch, and even "A Pimp Named Slickback" was said in full English; songs were kept in English, too. I thought that was a good choice and they were sincerely trying to maintain a lot more of the original flavor compared to most dubs, but I still honestly wouldn't call it good so much as interesting. Most of the side characters were badly acted, too.
Anime and video games in general not only tend to lack fidelity in word choice and vocal choice, they tend to scrape the very bottom of the barrel in acting talent. There are amazing English language voice actors, but they're not working in anime and games or, when they are, it's really not their best work. It's nost just the dub hate talking. There are a lot of English language original games whose acting are solidly terrible; Nier Replicant, No More Heroes, Devil May Cry. No More Heroes's Japanse dub might be what I'd call "well acted" but not "good." I've said before, I have mixed feelings on whether it's appropriate given the original acting may have been intentionally terrible, and the characterization feels entirely different. I assume the English characterization is what the director intended, and so the "better acting" is still a "bad dub."
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So I think the best parts of Death Note's story--Light and L, Higuchi, Misa, Naomi--all occur at the beginning when the authors feel that they have a lot of time. The pacing isn't fast, but then that just /works/ for Death Note, kinda like it works for Shiki too. Oftentimes in general pacing increases towards the conclusion of a story, but the breakneck pace at the end of Death Note didn't seem natural. Maybe I just really like slow stories?
This goes against most of the internet, but I never really saw what the big deal about L was. Yeah, he was undeniably awesome and watching him get on Light's nerves all the time was interesting, but the guy himself....I dunno. Other than being a diabetic emo, he wasn't really fleshed out in my opinion. The only reason he held together the task force was because he was just really good at his job, but he never cared if they wanted to follow him or not, and just kind of saw them as pawns. At least he seemed like he always knew what kind of person he was all along. They could have taken more steps and have him learn some kind of lesson in the end or, I don't know, have some revelation that he can rely on other people after all, although that would be a cliche. It just seemed like the instances where he did get some background, like when he said that Light was his first friend (and even then, the author said he was lying when he said that) and in his death episode during his childhood flashback, were tacked on and not really expanded upon. My favorite characters were Misa and Matsuda.
So it seems like the dubs you do like are the ones that aren't trying to adapt to the original that well, right? They'd somehow successfully make it their own, but then it's a totally new work and shouldn't be considered a translation of the original. It's like, I read the first Earthsea book by Ursula LeGuin (I couldn't really get into the series) and those books were also apparently loosely adapted into a Miyazaki movie, which I also haven't seen but whatever. So LeGuin said something along the lines of "It's a good story. It's not my story, but it's a good story." So it's kind of like that.
I bet if anime and video games were taken more seriously, more good voice actors would take them up and hypothetically, dub quality would increase too. I doubt that people who decide to go into voice acting as a career aim to become anime dubbers; if you want mainstream success, that's not what you do. There are some that do it for the art, but most just don't seem to care about it that much, thinking it's okay to show up and say the lines. They're like people who are in school plays; they think they're good at acting, but they're........okay at it.
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A dub that tries to adapt the original well is just going to end up, at best, close to the original. It can't surpass the original at being the original. So I'll just take the original, thanks. If it's trying to surpass it while maintaining the best parts of the original, then liking the dubbed version is like saying "I like Shiki because it'd be awesome if Seishin and Ozaki got into an epic battle in the church at the end because he was there instead of Ohkawa, and Seishin had to kill him instead to save Sunako." You're liking it for something that's not there canonically, and the entire build up to that "awesomeness" is blatantly taken from the original. That "awesome what-if" won't make sense if you present it to someone not familiar with Shiki as the context. The beloved dub-only line, dub voice, etc. is in the stolen context of the story, the stolen context of the basic character, etc.
If it's a manga or anime or move adaptation, then new elements are added--even a "perfect" port from a novel or manga to anime involves motion, timing, color, voice, sound, music. From anime or novel to manga involves picking the "key frames" of each scene to draw into the panels, involves body language, setting, character design, angle. I'm fine with changes in adaptation as long as that adaptation has something that justifies it on its own. I may not LIKE the adaptive choices (see: Brotherhood), but can accept its own direction and attributions even if I think they're poor ones (see: Brotherhood). No dubs outside of parodies which provide a unique comedic (or at least commentative) context have provided anything I can say stands on its own merits.
So even with good actors, I wouldn't like or approve of dubs. But it helps my anti-dubbed anime position considerably that English dub actors also happen to be in general poor actors. If I enjoy an actor, I want to hear them make a character their own as a given liberty by the creative staff as many US Cartoon actors do, or hear them in a role the director supposes they suit. There are good actors in unsuiting roles, and those aren't enjoyable unless they're so ill suited they're funny... like the dramatic Youtube argument renactment series by those two older guys.
Coincidentally, the Weiss Kreuz dub is terribly acted, but the outtakes gag dub scenes are hilarious. I'd rather the dub just not exist at all but I can acknowledge that something funny came out of it. But then, if some fans who didn't wreck the whole series with their audio-error track had recorded the same thing, I'd laugh just as hard. Harder, probably.
I'm also not against fandubs as fans ways of enjoying the character, the same way people write fanfics and enjoy fanworks. But everyone accepts those as not canon, not an acceptable substitute for canon. Sadly most people think of dubs as an acceptable alternative to the original for discussing canon, characters, quotes, etc.
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Haha yeah, the epic fight between Seishin and Ozaki is best left to fanfiction...although I wouldn't hate to read a really well-written fanfic about that.
I see, so any dub isn't even the original at all. I definitely agree with that, and if not for the reasons you mentioned then just because I also think that sound is just as important as visuals in a media. Just because you keep the OST, doesn't mean that changing the voices will make it the same show. Also, this is just a personal preference but one of my favorite parts about watching anime is enjoying how Japanese it is (maybe that's why I like Shiki, it's so unashamedly Japanese). This is more relevant if the story is in a Japanese setting (again, like Shiki...but then also Fate/Zero takes place in Japan too, so there's another example), but I really feel immersed in the culture if I hear the Japanese words, even if I don't understand them well. The intonations and differences I can still discern, I don't understand why some people favor dubs because they "can't tell the voices apart" --screw that, yes you can. But if I hear an English dub, it stops being something foreign and cool, and just becomes an imitation of the original, kind of like if America adopted a new trend of wearing kimonos, but with, like, pictures of ancient historical figures on them (but wouldn't it be awesome if you could wear a portrait of Abe Lincoln on your back?); they would still be a basically Japanese idea, but Americanized for no apparent reason. That's how dubs are too, changed for no apparent reason.
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(Anonymous) 2015-06-14 05:18 pm (UTC)(link)no subject