Re: Need help choosing a novel to read

From: Chris Kern (chriskern99_at_gmail.com)
Date: 01/13/05 

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:32:08 +0900

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:29:07 GMT, "necoandjeff" <spam@schrepfer.com>
posted the following:

>I think Japanese translated from novels, and particularly the furikae in
>television shows, etc. is necessarily odd. It would take an amount of poetic
>license and rewriting that most translators are not willing to make to
>transform an English novel or script into natural sounding Japanese.

This is, in fact, the response I got from asking my conversation class
about this tonight. They seemed to think that it wasn't Harry Potter
specifically that's odd, but that there's a certain style of Japanese
employed by translators of English books that seems "odd" when
compared to normal Japanese. They weren't able to clarify it any more
than this.

I do find this a bit strange; the same doesn't seem to be true of
English translations of foreign works.

Does this mean that reading a translated novel in Japanese is a bad
way to try to improve your Japanese? (I'm sort of just using this as
an excuse to read Harry Potter again, but if it doesn't help my
Japanese much I might as well just re-read them in English.)

-Chris

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