Kansai-ben isn't hickish. It depends, of course, on where you live (It's perfectly normal for Osakans, of course!), but the stereotype in Kanto (Tokyo area) is of funny, sarcastic, straight-talking and open. Like NY in the USA or Manchester/London in the UK.
My wife read LOTR in Japanese and said it was a rubbish translation. However, it's almost impossible to read in a foreign language (English for her) because you can't tell which archaic words are made-up and which are real.
@Daedalus: I basically agree with you, but the only thing that makes Orientalism kinda exist is that the attributes ascribed to East Asia include 'unknowable', 'alien', 'weird' etc. It describes them as other, as opposed to, for example, Russians being 'gloomy', 'drunk', fatalistic'.
@Nostregar: I think we're probably differing only in semantics, but I would say that looking for any 'neutral' meaning to a text won't work, so an imagined reader is very important. Like with the Osaka-ben example earlier, if you translate it to a Southie or Cockney accent, that will come over differently to someone from Louisiana, Edinburgh, Boston or London.
@Qingu: Dunno Chrono Trigger, but that seems like fairly casual Japanese. The trouble is (and this connects to this whole thread) that Samurai are imagined to talk that way. In TV dramas, Samurai speak quite roughly. The main reason for this is that Japanese is a very hierarchical language and you don't speak politely to someone lower than you (and everyone's lower than an aristocrat with a sword). So it may be that what I call 'Samurai-go', which is an ultra-macho, guttural, casual dialect, might somehow translate well into 'thees and thous'.
East Asia has this same sort of spread. The Chinese language family has derivative languages (although when most people say "he's speaking Chinese" it's usually Mandarin). Some of these have interchangeably comprehensible parts, but generally Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese and such function as separate languages. I'm most familiar with the Germanic language tree, but Romance and some Slavic languages have a much easier time understanding each other (Italian and Spanish are very closely related, Czech and Polish are almost mutually comprehensible). Functionally the idea of Mandarin:Chinese::English:Germanic is more accurate than Japanese:Oriental::English:Western, but it's also much more complex. At least we've passed the days when Oriental also included the Indian subcontinent, right?
The various dialects of Chinese are considered that - dialects, not languages. Whether that SHOULD be the case is debatable, but that's what they're classified as currently. Therefore I don't find Mandarin:Chinese and English:Germanic to be analogous - English is not a dialect, while Mandarin is. A fair comparison would be Mandarin:Chinese and New England English(or whatever):English.
Chinese is a bit of a strange case, since what many linguists classify as dialects are not mutually intelligible when spoken (...although somehow Czech and Polish get to be separate languages despite being mutually intelligible but written with different alphabetic standards) and sometimes when written. When people talk about growing up learning Cantonese and they talk about learning Mandarin very few people will associate this with knowing only one language.
Then again, many mainland Chinese linguists attempt to lump all of the Chinese variants under a Chinese macrolanguage, while dissenters and separatists attempt to promote individual variants as distinct languages - people end up using it as a political tool. I believe mutual intelligiblity is an important judgement for distinguishing a language, but some linguists don't agree (understanding words but not the meaning, such as with crazy things like Cockney doesn't count in my book). Classifying modern languages can be a huge headache.
A better comparison than before would probably be
Beijing Mandarin -> Mandarin -> Chinese family -> Sino-Tibetan or
Beijing Mandarin -> Mandarin -> Chinese - > Chinese family -> Sino-Tibetan
which correlates to
Ullans/Ulster Scots -> Scots -> Germanic family -> Indo-European or
Ullans/Ulster Scots -> Scots -> English -> Germanic family -> Indo-European
(although there's a bit more classification going on with Anglo-Saxon/Frisian or the age/geographic subdivisions that get thrown around)
There are plenty of problems translating within the Germanic language family to and from English (or even between varieties of English). You don't need to go far to start reaching cultural roadblocks, connotation difficulties, double meanings and sentence structure problems. Even Middle English and modern English suffer from that old translator's conundrum: idiomatic meaning or literal translation? The best option is, of course, to try to do both if possible. But even the best translation is going to have a different layout, different pacing, and different connotations.
Certainly. So the question is, how do you try to solve these problems?
You can't effectively solve them. The best you can do is mitigate them. Mitigation relies on knowing the material and knowing the audience. If it's a highly technical manual, it's best to go the literal route making sure directions are clearly conveyed. If it's a narrative poem, it's likely more important that form and lyricism be maintained. I believe serving the original content alongside the translation is pointless (unless you're intended audience is students learning the language).
As a random example, seeing:
Und er sagte: „Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt.“ | And he said, "Not all that glitters is gold."
probably won't help anyone. Sure, "und", "ist" and "Gold" are probably readily apparent between the two, but that alone won't help anyone's deeper understanding of cultural or linguistic differences unless they were already aware of them.
"Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt" is the German idiomatic equivalent to "Not all that glitters is gold." But it relies on an impersonal construction that's impossible in English; word-for-word it equates to "It is not all gold, which glitters." Even transforming the words so that the sentence has passable English grammar does not convey the right meaning ("That which glitters is not all gold.").
For the non-German speakers you can try experimenting in the following examples to see if having the original nearby helps in some way.
Das beim Gut liegende Dorf besteht The village located near the
aus nur vier Bauerhöfen, einer estate consisted of just four
Zwergschule und einer Kneipe. farms, a schoolhouse, and a bar.
This showcases an extended modifier, which is essentially a phrase used as an adjective. Here "beim Gut liegende" is an extended modifier. Literally this sentence is "This by-the-estate-located village consists of only four farms, a Zwergschule (small school), and a bar." This puts a small emphasis on the estate in the German, whereas the English equivalent form focuses more on the village.
The only way to rectify that discrepancy would be by rearranging the sentence (Such as "The estate was located near a village which consisted of four farms, a schoolhouse, and a bar."). It's like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, though. You can't have it both ways. Either you change the layout or you change the focus (or you provide unhelpful word-for-word translations that don't follow English grammar).
Die Stadt selbst ist unangenehm, The town itself is disagreeable;
dagegen rings umher eine but then all around you find an
aussprechliche Schönheit der Natur. inexpressible beauty of nature.
Das bewog den verstorbenen This induced the late Count M- to
Grafen von M.., einen Garten auf lay out a garden on one of the
einem der Hügel anzulegen, die sloping hills which here intersect
mit der schönsten Mannigfaltigkeit each other with the most charming
sich kreuzen und die lieblichsten variety and form the most lovely
Täler bilden. Der Garten ist einfach, valleys. The garden is simple, and
und man... it...
Which showcases one of the more prevalent problems with translations - particularly of older works. The language in the original (German) is not particularly complex or pretentious, but somehow English translations end up fluffing it up. The layout, here, remains similar for the first three lines (from "Die Stadt...der Natur" they line up mostly word-for-word). But - unless intentionally spaced to compensate for this - long translated works will rarely line up (...and never will if your languages read in different directions, such as top to bottom or right to left).
Word choice can also be important. Unangenehm corresponds to unpleasant, awkward, and displeasing (or other words if you want to break out a thesaurus) in a literal sense. However, from connotation this could be a play on the fact that when meeting new people it's common to say angenehm as a greeting in German (meaning pleasant, or idiomatically "pleased to meet you"). Negating this with un- (just like English uses the prefix un-) provides a literary subcontext lost in the translation.
But it may not be that important, anyway. All you really need to know is that Werther's not especially fond of the new town he's in, right?
German also has that du/Sie informa/formal split for "you", although languages like Japanese would probably be much harder to work with in that regard.
UltimaGecko on
The facehuggers want to play with you in the AvP LP. Facehuggers also want you to check out the TF2 cards here. View the in-progress RE mansion recreation for L4D here.
All people speak a dialect all the time. That's the nature of language. But some dialects have certain prestige levels associated with them - most famously, people tend to look down on very strong Boston or New York accents as low class, and tend to see Southern accents as "hickish". It's just a fact of language that can be exploited to make a point when translating, if you know what the analogs are in the receiving language (if there are any).
I think you are grouping a lot of different speech varieties underneath one giant dialect umbrella, and I would disagree with your usage of "dialect" here. I realize this might be splitting hairs, and I realize you probably already know the difference, but we should probably distinguish between dialects, accents, sociolects and other language varieties. I'm going with the definition of a dialect as "a variety of a language which differs from other varieties of the same language in terms of phonetics, syntax, and lexicon." Of course it can get fuzzy in English when determining what to classify as a dialect and what not to. Black English Vernacular, Cockney, and even American English/British English are dialects, whereas people from Boston and New York are speaking with accents.
When I was talking about Italian dialects, a lot of them (Sicilian, Neapolitan, etc) can be, and practically always are, unintelligible to other regional dialects within the country. In fact there can be mutual unintelligibility between varieties of the same dialect within the same region (even from towns which are only 50 miles apart). Then from the dialects come many, many different sorts of accents. Therefore when dealing with translating Italian dialects in a text, it becomes difficult trying to convey a sense of difference (regional, social, etc) that is obvious to Italians, while keeping the language intelligible to an English reader. When a Sicilian is speaking in dialect or with heavily accented standard Italian, in the north he is going to be viewed as being rather backwater/uncivilized, but in a slightly different way from how we would conceive of "backwater/uncivilized" here in America. Italians are more likely to view him as a rural mafioso than as some hick living in a trailer, so it's hard to just directly map stereotypical American language varieties onto Italian ones because there can be huge differences in connotation and understanding.
This reminds me of a quote I read somewhere, "the standard language is merely the dialect with the strongest army."
Back to my Osakan question. Is the language variety spoken in Osaka a dialect of Japanese, i.e. does it contain 1) a different sort of pronunciation 2) a different sort of grammar and 3) a different lexicon? If it is, do other Japanese view the Osakan variety as being uncultured, uncivilized, etc? If no, then I wonder why those translators decided to interpret it that way.
German also has that du/Sie informa/formal split for "you", although languages like Japanese would probably be much harder to work with in that regard.
In my mind, most languages outside of English have this split. I would say that it's unnecessary trying to translate it into English since we no longer have differences in formality like that. Obviously if the usage of formal/informal is communicating information about a character, or used as a subject of discourse within a text, then it needs to be addressed, but I wouldn't know how to go about creating any global way of carrying it over into English. For me, this usually comes up when a character tells another character that they can switch from formal to informal, or someone is criticizing someone else's lack of formality. But it's going to be impossible to convey a lot of the nuances to an English reader.
Many of the Chinese dialects are in no way intelligible if you speak Mandarin. They're essentially different languages and very much like comparing English to German or Gaelic.
Generally speaking, many dialects can be viewed as essentially different languages as well. Going back to Italy, almost all dialects are seen as different languages: Sicilian, Neapolitan, Lombard, Sardinian, Venetian, etc.
Frog talks more or less normally if I recall correctly. Sort of hickish if anything in that he uses the informal more than anything else. Definitely DEFINITELY does not use the irritating medieval mode of speaking though.
I loved that he was the only character in the game who spoke with a medieval accent. Even including the rest of the people from the medieval time period.
Maybe just have all different types of translations of varying intent.
Some targeted at people with little knowledge (and/or interest) of the original language or culture, not getting too specific with footnotes, easier to digest etc; others targeted at the academic crowd, or people who have knowledge of and/or are interested in the work's culture and language of origin (with copious footnotes, or your headache-inducing dual-translation-on-opposing-pages method).
All I know is, I'm reading Dumas' Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, translated from French (duh). It has no footnotes or anything, and for all I know is not faithful at all to the original French. It only says who translated it on the modern library press catalog-list inside the dust jacket. Sure is a fun read though. Having the French taking up 1/2 of the pages might add something once I take a few more semesters of french, though.
Then again, the phrasing and word choice in this book only serve as ways to tell you how kick-ass Dantes' revenging is going, so who cares, right?
But that's kind of an issue to me. I find knowingly making a non-representative translation to be in some way unethical, so doing something like that seems wrong to me.
And then it randomly just has untranslated Elvish in places. What do you do with that? Do you just leave it in Elvish script, which probably won't work very well if you try to reorient it vertically? Do you change that to katakana?
I'd say that since the Elvish is unintelligible to English speakers as well, you could pretty much do either without losing the intent of the actual Elvish.
On the other hand The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has a jarring turn of phrase every page or so that reminds me that this probably sounds a hell of a lot better in its native tongue.
It's partly translation but also partly Murakami's style. He does write in a somewhat strange way. Either way, I don't find that to always be a bad thing - it constantly reminds you that this is a translation, and makes sure you read it as such. I think that is overall a good thing. Right?
@Nostregar: I think we're probably differing only in semantics, but I would say that looking for any 'neutral' meaning to a text won't work, so an imagined reader is very important. Like with the Osaka-ben example earlier, if you translate it to a Southie or Cockney accent, that will come over differently to someone from Louisiana, Edinburgh, Boston or London.
Yeah, you're totally right. It's always necessary to have the imagined reader. It's only that when I translate or when my professors do, you tend to imagine the reader as a speaker of the "standard" dialect of that language who has perceptions of other dialects that fall along the norm. Whether that is always the best assumption is up for debate of course, it's just generally the most reliable way to work.
Re: UltimaGecko - I really liked reading the German/English side by side despite not knowing German. I guess that confirms for me that I like it presented that way.
I think you are grouping a lot of different speech varieties underneath one giant dialect umbrella, and I would disagree with your usage of "dialect" here. I realize this might be splitting hairs, and I realize you probably already know the difference, but we should probably distinguish between dialects, accents, sociolects and other language varieties. I'm going with the definition of a dialect as "a variety of a language which differs from other varieties of the same language in terms of phonetics, syntax, and lexicon." Of course it can get fuzzy in English when determining what to classify as a dialect and what not to. Black English Vernacular, Cockney, and even American English/British English are dialects, whereas people from Boston and New York are speaking with accents.
It seems that I'm using the linguistic definition of dialect and you're using the more standard one. In linguistics, at least the way I've been taught it, accents, sociolects, etc are all examples of dialects. All a dialect is is a manner of speaking - this can come from a special lexicon, special phonological rules, special meanings associated to standard words, whatever. For that reason, I don't think I'm wrong to use dialect to describe all of those things. Certainly there are more specific words that could be used, but I find it easier to just consider them all different dialects. Thus, Boston and New York accents are dialects.
Also, since Gecko brought it up, I'm calling the variations of Chinese dialects because that is what they are officially classified as. As I said before, whether that should be the case or not is up for debate, but that's what they're classified as so that's what I'm calling them. I understand that they aren't always mutually intelligible when spoken, but I believe that most if not all of the dialects are written in the same way. Is that right? Because that would be a reason they are dialects rather than languages. Don't really know a lot about Chinese though, so maybe that isn't true. Quid might also know the answer to this.
And also on the dialect/language thing, I find a thick Southern accent in English to be almost entirely unintelligible most of the time. I don't think anyone would say that "Southern English" should be considered a separate language, though, right? There are more criteria for determining the shift from dialect to language than just being mutually unintelligible.
Also, since Gecko brought it up, I'm calling the variations of Chinese dialects because that is what they are officially classified as. As I said before, whether that should be the case or not is up for debate, but that's what they're classified as so that's what I'm calling them. I understand that they aren't always mutually intelligible when spoken, but I believe that most if not all of the dialects are written in the same way. Is that right? Because that would be a reason they are dialects rather than languages. Don't really know a lot about Chinese though, so maybe that isn't true. Quid might also know the answer to this.
And also on the dialect/language thing, I find a thick Southern accent in English to be almost entirely unintelligible most of the time. I don't think anyone would say that "Southern English" should be considered a separate language, though, right? There are more criteria for determining the shift from dialect to language than just being mutually unintelligible.
Chinese has a unique history which complicates the process of defining variations as dialects or separate languages. My familiarity is relatively limited, but I've encountered some Cantonese and some Mandarin and their relations between Taiwan and mainland China, so I'll stick with that.
Ostensibly, Mandarin and Cantonese use the same writing system in mainland China. This is somewhat equivalent to using the same alphabet, since Cantonese can use different word order and intonation, as well as featuring an abundance of words not present in Mandarin. However, in many cases words meaning the same thing are written and spoken differently in the two languages (see wikipedia's selected examples for some written differences). Cantonese is also mostly a spoken language, so much of its variation may remain unwritten.
Further complications arise when the writing system of Mandarin is considered. Taiwan uses traditional Chinese for Mandarin. Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters for Mandarin. Although simplified Chinese is derived from traditional Chinese, many of the characters are not mutually intelligible. Essentially a Cantonese mainlander will effectively have no communication skills with a Taiwanese person (not to mention the difficulties if they speak Min or another Taiwanese dialect).
I guess I'll let people versed in phonology, morphology, etymology and such declare whether they want to attach a dialect or language label to Mandarin or Cantonese, though.
UltimaGecko on
The facehuggers want to play with you in the AvP LP. Facehuggers also want you to check out the TF2 cards here. View the in-progress RE mansion recreation for L4D here.
Back to my Osakan question. Is the language variety spoken in Osaka a dialect of Japanese, i.e. does it contain 1) a different sort of pronunciation 2) a different sort of grammar and 3) a different lexicon? If it is, do other Japanese view the Osakan variety as being uncultured, uncivilized, etc? If no, then I wonder why those translators decided to interpret it that way.
Well Osakan does have different ending sounds. Between Kanto/Tokyo-ben which is standard Japanese you learn in school and Osaka-ben it sounds like a very different language. The grammar though isn't really that different it's more what sounds you do at the end. Sadly Osaka-ben isn't really my best knowledge since I have never really lived in the area. I usually think of it as a South Boston accent though, tough and kind of crude but not really hickish. Usually a lot of the characters you hear with the accent are blunt or rather up front compared to a normal Japanese.
The more hickish accents I hear are from the rural places such as Gifu. I learned a bit of Tochigi-ben. So the word 大丈夫（だいじょうぶ/daijobu) which means are you ok in Tochigi-ben is だいじ(daiji) which in Kantou/Tokyo-ben comes out to mean important. So in Japan there are changes in words meanings depending on region. I am not a great explaining this.
Now on the translation part I can really only speak about Japanese. Japanese is based on a lot on context. Part of this is that Japanese has one of the lowest number of distinct sounds out of any language. There are only 101 sounds total in the language so you get a lot of words that sound the same. So a lot of the mistranslation I have done and have seen in Japanese is because the context itself seems to be missing. One of the interesting things about Japanese how you drop the subject for extended periods of time
I can go on and on about stuff in Japanese, if you do read Japanese I recommend 日本語のカタチとココロ. It's an interesting look at the strange stuff in Japanese from a Japanese professor.
Also on Orientlism I am not a huge fan. I have read the original article for a modern Middle East history class. It was interesting but I think it is more useful looking at writings about history more than translation. Truly decent translators if possible have spent time living in the country so they do more the contextual based translation. Though this isn't always possible, it is important especially for languages like Japanese where an entire paragraphs meaning can have very subtle but important difference due to place, time and who they are talking to. Though this becomes really hard when something is written.
Also for the watashi, boku, watakshi, ore, washi and so in Japanese for the word I each is slightly different. I almost never hear boku out of an adult male or out a boy over out of the 5th grade except when they are required to give a formal speech. Though I haven't actually read the book you are talking about, the use of the word boku either means he is being more formal or child like which would change how I would translate the general feel of the book itself. Also I think I have only heard old men ever say watakshi in real life. And by old I mean real old.
Posts
Kansai-ben isn't hickish. It depends, of course, on where you live (It's perfectly normal for Osakans, of course!), but the stereotype in Kanto (Tokyo area) is of funny, sarcastic, straight-talking and open. Like NY in the USA or Manchester/London in the UK.
My wife read LOTR in Japanese and said it was a rubbish translation. However, it's almost impossible to read in a foreign language (English for her) because you can't tell which archaic words are made-up and which are real.
@Daedalus: I basically agree with you, but the only thing that makes Orientalism kinda exist is that the attributes ascribed to East Asia include 'unknowable', 'alien', 'weird' etc. It describes them as other, as opposed to, for example, Russians being 'gloomy', 'drunk', fatalistic'.
@Nostregar: I think we're probably differing only in semantics, but I would say that looking for any 'neutral' meaning to a text won't work, so an imagined reader is very important. Like with the Osaka-ben example earlier, if you translate it to a Southie or Cockney accent, that will come over differently to someone from Louisiana, Edinburgh, Boston or London.
@Qingu: Dunno Chrono Trigger, but that seems like fairly casual Japanese. The trouble is (and this connects to this whole thread) that Samurai are imagined to talk that way. In TV dramas, Samurai speak quite roughly. The main reason for this is that Japanese is a very hierarchical language and you don't speak politely to someone lower than you (and everyone's lower than an aristocrat with a sword). So it may be that what I call 'Samurai-go', which is an ultra-macho, guttural, casual dialect, might somehow translate well into 'thees and thous'.
Chinese is a bit of a strange case, since what many linguists classify as dialects are not mutually intelligible when spoken (...although somehow Czech and Polish get to be separate languages despite being mutually intelligible but written with different alphabetic standards) and sometimes when written. When people talk about growing up learning Cantonese and they talk about learning Mandarin very few people will associate this with knowing only one language.
Then again, many mainland Chinese linguists attempt to lump all of the Chinese variants under a Chinese macrolanguage, while dissenters and separatists attempt to promote individual variants as distinct languages - people end up using it as a political tool. I believe mutual intelligiblity is an important judgement for distinguishing a language, but some linguists don't agree (understanding words but not the meaning, such as with crazy things like Cockney doesn't count in my book). Classifying modern languages can be a huge headache.
A better comparison than before would probably be
Beijing Mandarin -> Mandarin -> Chinese family -> Sino-Tibetan or
Beijing Mandarin -> Mandarin -> Chinese - > Chinese family -> Sino-Tibetan
which correlates to
Ullans/Ulster Scots -> Scots -> Germanic family -> Indo-European or
Ullans/Ulster Scots -> Scots -> English -> Germanic family -> Indo-European
(although there's a bit more classification going on with Anglo-Saxon/Frisian or the age/geographic subdivisions that get thrown around)
You can't effectively solve them. The best you can do is mitigate them. Mitigation relies on knowing the material and knowing the audience. If it's a highly technical manual, it's best to go the literal route making sure directions are clearly conveyed. If it's a narrative poem, it's likely more important that form and lyricism be maintained. I believe serving the original content alongside the translation is pointless (unless you're intended audience is students learning the language).
As a random example, seeing:
Und er sagte: „Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt.“ | And he said, "Not all that glitters is gold."
probably won't help anyone. Sure, "und", "ist" and "Gold" are probably readily apparent between the two, but that alone won't help anyone's deeper understanding of cultural or linguistic differences unless they were already aware of them.
"Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt" is the German idiomatic equivalent to "Not all that glitters is gold." But it relies on an impersonal construction that's impossible in English; word-for-word it equates to "It is not all gold, which glitters." Even transforming the words so that the sentence has passable English grammar does not convey the right meaning ("That which glitters is not all gold.").
For the non-German speakers you can try experimenting in the following examples to see if having the original nearby helps in some way.
This showcases an extended modifier, which is essentially a phrase used as an adjective. Here "beim Gut liegende" is an extended modifier. Literally this sentence is "This by-the-estate-located village consists of only four farms, a Zwergschule (small school), and a bar." This puts a small emphasis on the estate in the German, whereas the English equivalent form focuses more on the village.
The only way to rectify that discrepancy would be by rearranging the sentence (Such as "The estate was located near a village which consisted of four farms, a schoolhouse, and a bar."). It's like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, though. You can't have it both ways. Either you change the layout or you change the focus (or you provide unhelpful word-for-word translations that don't follow English grammar).
Or there's something potentially more common, such as in this excerpt from Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers.
Which showcases one of the more prevalent problems with translations - particularly of older works. The language in the original (German) is not particularly complex or pretentious, but somehow English translations end up fluffing it up. The layout, here, remains similar for the first three lines (from "Die Stadt...der Natur" they line up mostly word-for-word). But - unless intentionally spaced to compensate for this - long translated works will rarely line up (...and never will if your languages read in different directions, such as top to bottom or right to left).
Word choice can also be important. Unangenehm corresponds to unpleasant, awkward, and displeasing (or other words if you want to break out a thesaurus) in a literal sense. However, from connotation this could be a play on the fact that when meeting new people it's common to say angenehm as a greeting in German (meaning pleasant, or idiomatically "pleased to meet you"). Negating this with un- (just like English uses the prefix un-) provides a literary subcontext lost in the translation.
But it may not be that important, anyway. All you really need to know is that Werther's not especially fond of the new town he's in, right?
German also has that du/Sie informa/formal split for "you", although languages like Japanese would probably be much harder to work with in that regard.
I think you are grouping a lot of different speech varieties underneath one giant dialect umbrella, and I would disagree with your usage of "dialect" here. I realize this might be splitting hairs, and I realize you probably already know the difference, but we should probably distinguish between dialects, accents, sociolects and other language varieties. I'm going with the definition of a dialect as "a variety of a language which differs from other varieties of the same language in terms of phonetics, syntax, and lexicon." Of course it can get fuzzy in English when determining what to classify as a dialect and what not to. Black English Vernacular, Cockney, and even American English/British English are dialects, whereas people from Boston and New York are speaking with accents.
When I was talking about Italian dialects, a lot of them (Sicilian, Neapolitan, etc) can be, and practically always are, unintelligible to other regional dialects within the country. In fact there can be mutual unintelligibility between varieties of the same dialect within the same region (even from towns which are only 50 miles apart). Then from the dialects come many, many different sorts of accents. Therefore when dealing with translating Italian dialects in a text, it becomes difficult trying to convey a sense of difference (regional, social, etc) that is obvious to Italians, while keeping the language intelligible to an English reader. When a Sicilian is speaking in dialect or with heavily accented standard Italian, in the north he is going to be viewed as being rather backwater/uncivilized, but in a slightly different way from how we would conceive of "backwater/uncivilized" here in America. Italians are more likely to view him as a rural mafioso than as some hick living in a trailer, so it's hard to just directly map stereotypical American language varieties onto Italian ones because there can be huge differences in connotation and understanding.
This reminds me of a quote I read somewhere, "the standard language is merely the dialect with the strongest army."
Back to my Osakan question. Is the language variety spoken in Osaka a dialect of Japanese, i.e. does it contain 1) a different sort of pronunciation 2) a different sort of grammar and 3) a different lexicon? If it is, do other Japanese view the Osakan variety as being uncultured, uncivilized, etc? If no, then I wonder why those translators decided to interpret it that way.
In my mind, most languages outside of English have this split. I would say that it's unnecessary trying to translate it into English since we no longer have differences in formality like that. Obviously if the usage of formal/informal is communicating information about a character, or used as a subject of discourse within a text, then it needs to be addressed, but I wouldn't know how to go about creating any global way of carrying it over into English. For me, this usually comes up when a character tells another character that they can switch from formal to informal, or someone is criticizing someone else's lack of formality. But it's going to be impossible to convey a lot of the nuances to an English reader.
But that's kind of an issue to me. I find knowingly making a non-representative translation to be in some way unethical, so doing something like that seems wrong to me.
I'd say that since the Elvish is unintelligible to English speakers as well, you could pretty much do either without losing the intent of the actual Elvish.
It's partly translation but also partly Murakami's style. He does write in a somewhat strange way. Either way, I don't find that to always be a bad thing - it constantly reminds you that this is a translation, and makes sure you read it as such. I think that is overall a good thing. Right?
Yeah, you're totally right. It's always necessary to have the imagined reader. It's only that when I translate or when my professors do, you tend to imagine the reader as a speaker of the "standard" dialect of that language who has perceptions of other dialects that fall along the norm. Whether that is always the best assumption is up for debate of course, it's just generally the most reliable way to work.
Re: UltimaGecko - I really liked reading the German/English side by side despite not knowing German. I guess that confirms for me that I like it presented that way.
It seems that I'm using the linguistic definition of dialect and you're using the more standard one. In linguistics, at least the way I've been taught it, accents, sociolects, etc are all examples of dialects. All a dialect is is a manner of speaking - this can come from a special lexicon, special phonological rules, special meanings associated to standard words, whatever. For that reason, I don't think I'm wrong to use dialect to describe all of those things. Certainly there are more specific words that could be used, but I find it easier to just consider them all different dialects. Thus, Boston and New York accents are dialects.
Also, since Gecko brought it up, I'm calling the variations of Chinese dialects because that is what they are officially classified as. As I said before, whether that should be the case or not is up for debate, but that's what they're classified as so that's what I'm calling them. I understand that they aren't always mutually intelligible when spoken, but I believe that most if not all of the dialects are written in the same way. Is that right? Because that would be a reason they are dialects rather than languages. Don't really know a lot about Chinese though, so maybe that isn't true. Quid might also know the answer to this.
And also on the dialect/language thing, I find a thick Southern accent in English to be almost entirely unintelligible most of the time. I don't think anyone would say that "Southern English" should be considered a separate language, though, right? There are more criteria for determining the shift from dialect to language than just being mutually unintelligible.
Chinese has a unique history which complicates the process of defining variations as dialects or separate languages. My familiarity is relatively limited, but I've encountered some Cantonese and some Mandarin and their relations between Taiwan and mainland China, so I'll stick with that.
Ostensibly, Mandarin and Cantonese use the same writing system in mainland China. This is somewhat equivalent to using the same alphabet, since Cantonese can use different word order and intonation, as well as featuring an abundance of words not present in Mandarin. However, in many cases words meaning the same thing are written and spoken differently in the two languages (see wikipedia's selected examples for some written differences). Cantonese is also mostly a spoken language, so much of its variation may remain unwritten.
Further complications arise when the writing system of Mandarin is considered. Taiwan uses traditional Chinese for Mandarin. Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters for Mandarin. Although simplified Chinese is derived from traditional Chinese, many of the characters are not mutually intelligible. Essentially a Cantonese mainlander will effectively have no communication skills with a Taiwanese person (not to mention the difficulties if they speak Min or another Taiwanese dialect).
I guess I'll let people versed in phonology, morphology, etymology and such declare whether they want to attach a dialect or language label to Mandarin or Cantonese, though.
Well Osakan does have different ending sounds. Between Kanto/Tokyo-ben which is standard Japanese you learn in school and Osaka-ben it sounds like a very different language. The grammar though isn't really that different it's more what sounds you do at the end. Sadly Osaka-ben isn't really my best knowledge since I have never really lived in the area. I usually think of it as a South Boston accent though, tough and kind of crude but not really hickish. Usually a lot of the characters you hear with the accent are blunt or rather up front compared to a normal Japanese.
The more hickish accents I hear are from the rural places such as Gifu. I learned a bit of Tochigi-ben. So the word 大丈夫（だいじょうぶ/daijobu) which means are you ok in Tochigi-ben is だいじ(daiji) which in Kantou/Tokyo-ben comes out to mean important. So in Japan there are changes in words meanings depending on region. I am not a great explaining this.
Now on the translation part I can really only speak about Japanese. Japanese is based on a lot on context. Part of this is that Japanese has one of the lowest number of distinct sounds out of any language. There are only 101 sounds total in the language so you get a lot of words that sound the same. So a lot of the mistranslation I have done and have seen in Japanese is because the context itself seems to be missing. One of the interesting things about Japanese how you drop the subject for extended periods of time
I can go on and on about stuff in Japanese, if you do read Japanese I recommend 日本語のカタチとココロ. It's an interesting look at the strange stuff in Japanese from a Japanese professor.
Also on Orientlism I am not a huge fan. I have read the original article for a modern Middle East history class. It was interesting but I think it is more useful looking at writings about history more than translation. Truly decent translators if possible have spent time living in the country so they do more the contextual based translation. Though this isn't always possible, it is important especially for languages like Japanese where an entire paragraphs meaning can have very subtle but important difference due to place, time and who they are talking to. Though this becomes really hard when something is written.
Also for the watashi, boku, watakshi, ore, washi and so in Japanese for the word I each is slightly different. I almost never hear boku out of an adult male or out a boy over out of the 5th grade except when they are required to give a formal speech. Though I haven't actually read the book you are talking about, the use of the word boku either means he is being more formal or child like which would change how I would translate the general feel of the book itself. Also I think I have only heard old men ever say watakshi in real life. And by old I mean real old.
Going to stop ranting now.