Writing thoughts, Mary Sue meme

[springgreen]

So, for those of you who write for anime and manga fandoms: do you ever have problems translating the characters in your fic?

I've found that it's much easier for me to get character voice for manga, provided that I've read the manga in translation, but with subtitled anime, I've been having a very painful time. There's always a small mental disconnect in which the characters are speaking Japanese in my head, but English in the fic, whether I'm reading or writing something.

I keep hearing the characters saying things like "Sou ka naaaa..." and I can't figure out how to do that in English. And I don't want to pepper my fic with too much random Japanese, as a) reader accessability is a good thing, b) it furthers the disconnect somewhat (i.e. I as a reader have to flip between Japanese and English even more often), and c) I have had too many bad experiences with fangirl Japanese.

How much Japanese throws you out of a fic (or does it ever)? How much do you personally try to keep in (if any)? Do you try to keep suffixes like -san and -chan, and do you try to keep interjections like "ne"?

And how in the world do you translate things like "Sou ka" and the not-quite-yes "Un" that often goes with a nod and all that stuff?

*wanders off, confused*

And now for something completely different!

I've been endlessly amused watching people I know write themselves as Mary Sues in SPN ficlets, but alas, since I don't watch SPN, I will instead apply this to my currently most active fandom!

Mary Sue Saiyuki!

"And an order of meat buns, and a dish of the beef chow fun, and some Fuzhou fried rice, and the chicken noodle soup but with the noodles and the soup separate, and some of the crispy-skinned duck, and the duck with mashed taro, and the drunken chicken, and..."

The waitress scribbled as quickly as she could.

"And some of the barbequed pork buns, and..."

"Um, would you like to try our soup dumplings, sir?"

Goku grinned. "Yeah! Hey, what else do you like?" To the table: "She called me sir!"

"Uh. Lots of stuff?" she said. "What do you like?"

"The monkey likes everything," Gojyo said, cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. "Couldn't you tell?"

Hakkai and Sanzo had long since let their attention wander after Goku's order went past the twentieth item.

"Oh! You should get the warm mochi rolled in peanut powder and sugar with sesame on the inside. Get two orders. Or maybe more. But the kitchen takes forever to make them."

"Okay!"

"Oh!! You forgot to get green stuff! We have really good kongxin vegetables today; I like them stir-fried with garlic. And we have bok choi and Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce and bean sprouts and cabbage, but the cabbage is sort of boring, and um... OH! We have those veggies stir-fried with the little white fish that sort of look like maggots but really taste good and salty and aren't gross at all really!"

Hakkai looked up. "Maggots?"

"Only a little, but I swear, they're so good, and really they're just fish!"

"I suppose we should try to feed Goku more green things," he mused.

The waitress nodded enthusiastically. "They're tasty!"

Sanzo glared. "Are you paid by commission?"

"No, no! I just like vegetables, that's all!"

Sanzo glared more.

"I swear!"

Goku peered at her, somewhat baffled. Goku liked food a lot. But Goku's affinity was toward meat buns and rice dishes and fried things, and he was curious. "You like vegetables? 'specially?"

"Well, I sort of like everything. But vegetables are tasty, and they're crunchy, and they're just green and fresh and did I mention the crunchy and the green?"

Goku nodded. "Hey, Sanzo, can we keep her?"

The waitress smiled uncertainly.

"Are you out of your fucking mind? We have a hard enough time just feeding you!" Gojyo yelled. "Sanzo, c'mon!"

Sanzo sucked at his cigarette. "For once, you've said something intelligent."

Hakkai leaned over and whispered to the waitress, "I think you're probably better off without us." The waitress nodded, eyes glued on Sanzo's gun. "Why don't you order yourself some of your favorites after we leave and charge it to Sanzo's card?"

"Really?" she squeaked.

"Goku's orders are so large that he probably won't be able to tell."

"COOL!"

A few weeks later: "What the fuck? How could even you eat this much?" Sanzo yelled, waving a very long credit card bill in Goku's face.

Hakkai laughed.

You are all grateful that I never got around to trying to knit the ikkou socks. Stripey, candy-colored socks. Or possibly a gun cozy.

Comments

[the_rck]

I do tend to keep the honorifics when I write anime/manga fandoms. I think that they say something important and extremely hard to translate about the way that the characters relate to each other. I also miss honorifics in manga when the translation has dropped them (partly because I keep wondering if they were there in the Japanese or not and partly because I want to know the relative intimacy or formality of how the characters relate to each other). I actually ran aground briefly on a recent manga based fic because the translation had a brother and sister both using each other's names without honorifics and so I had no idea which one was older.

I think that sometimes there are connotations to words in Japanese that the English doesn't carry (it's true the other way around, too). For example, I often want to use 'hai' because there isn't a single English word that does quite the same things. It is perfectly possible to translate the various permutations, but all of those translations lose the ambiguity of the Japanese. There's a vast difference between 'yes,' 'yes, sir,' 'I hear you,' 'I disagree, but you outrank me, so I can't say so,' or 'I think you're full of shit but don't dare say so.'

I've also seen people mention that they don't like seeing 'osuwari' (not sure I'm spelling that right) translated as 'sit!' It comes up a lot in InuYasha and is apparently a word only used to command dogs to sit. The anime rendered it as, 'Sit, boy!' which seemed a reasonable compromise, but many fic writers prefer 'osuwari.' I'm not sure where I'd come down on that one if I wrote InuYasha fics.

Just some babbling...

[springgreen.livejournal.com]

I find that as a reader, pretty much anything that isn't honorifics or specific vocabulary ("shinigami" or "youkai" or etc.) tends to throw me out of the fic; otherwise I have to keep switching back and forth between Japanese-mode and English-mode. When it's all in English, there's that moment of disconnect at the beginning of the fic, but after that, I tend to do ok.

But I find that as a writer, I'm having horrible difficulties translating, heh. Mostly it's for anime, when I can hear the characters' voices over the subtitles; for well-translated manga, I find it much easier keeping with the translated voice.

[octopedingenue]

I fall on the side of translating "osuwari!" for fic/English sub because it is more entertaining than mentally translating a line of "osuwari"s whenever Kagome flips out and goes "SIT SIT SIT SITSITSITSIIIIIT" until Inuyasha is pulp. Which will never not be funny in either language.

On the flip side (and on the "yay honorifics!" side), it drives me nuts that the Inuyasha official English translations have Sango address Miroku as "Miroku," when in Japanese she only ever refers to him with, very formally, as "houshi-sama" (lord Buddhist monk). Even when she's beating him up, even after they've hooked up. Ditching it is like Scully calling Mulder "Fox" from the get-go.

[springgreen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I almost always prefer to keep the honorifics, and it seems like most of the readers like them there too.

[the_rck]

::laughs:: 'Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit!' definitely works better in English than 'Osuwari! Osuwari! Osuwari! Osuwari!' For me, some of that is that I see the string of 'sit' as a unit but see the string of 'osuwari'as a bunch of separate words (probably because of the need to translate that you mentioned).

I do wish that more translations kept the honorifics and specific forms of address. I keep reading manga in which characters address each other by their personal names, and I'm never sure if that's because they do so in Japanese, because the translator decided that they *ought* to because people like them in the U.S. would, because the translator decided that that using personal names was the English equivalent of [surname]-kun, or because of something else that I haven't even thought of.

I think you're quite right about Sango. There's a lot of nuance and characterization lost in having her call Miroku 'Miroku' instead of 'houshi-sama.' Am I correct in recalling that she's less formal with Kagome, InuYasha and Shippo? (It's been months since I last watched any InuYasha, so I've forgotten details.)

[octopedingenue]

I'm happy that Inuyasha is one of the anime I love in both dub and sub, since both versions have nuances that just don't carry over from the other version to me. (Inuyasha calling Sesshouaru "aniki-sama/ani-kisama" = MADE OF WIN)

The personal politics that go into surname translation are pretty interesting. I wonder how much audience goes into it as well: translating terms for an assumed younger or more more mainstream audience, maybe also?

(Yes, obsessively plotting out Inuyasha honorific use continues to entertain me way too much.) Sango is definitely most formal with Miroku's "houshi-sama;" she & Kagome call each other "-chan" and the others are "Inuyasha" and "Shippo-chan." On the flip side, Miroku uses "Inuyasha" and "Shippo," while the badass Shinto priestesses get the formality of "Kagome-sama" and "Kikyou-sama(!)" but Sango is always "Sango." He outranks her and has a crush on her. (Veering off-topic, Kohaku calls Sango "ane-ue," which I don't see as much as "ani-ue," and which also kills me.)

[springgreen.livejournal.com]

Inuyasha calling Sesshouaru "aniki-sama/ani-kisama" = MADE OF WIN

I don't watch/read Inuyasha, but that is an awesome pun!

I also keep wanting to pick up the Japanese original of Yakitatte! Japan just to see the puns and compare it with the translation (which does fairly well).

[springgreen.livejournal.com]

Reasons why I really like what Del Rey's been doing with their manga line, at least in the series I've been reading!