Re: Need help choosing a novel to read

From: necoandjeff (spam_at_schrepfer.com)
Date: 01/13/05 

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:04:15 GMT

Chris Kern wrote:
> 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.

Because part of what they are trying to convey is fun'inki, not just the
language. And Americans just have conversations differently and say
different things than Japanese. I don't think it can be avoided with
languages as different as English and Japanese. I think it is far less
pronounced in a translation between French and English or between Japanese
and Korean.

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

Really? What do you mean by strange? Do the characters in a Japanese novel
hold normal native sounding English conversations, or do they hold
conversations that evoke "Japan" or "Japaneseness."

> 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.)

Not that I've done any big scientific comparison, but I think a contemporary
novel written in Japanese would be far better for your Japanese than Harry
Potter or some translation. Note if you are only talking about acquiring
vocabulary, there probably isn't that huge of a difference. But if you are
talking about acquiring typical phrases and conversation patterns, native is
probably the only way to go.

Jeff

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