Nice story in the Chicago Tribune about teenagers getting into Japanese culture in general. I like the kid who says sushi is “the gateway drug to Japan.” As my kids are younger, they are more into the kawaii (cute) stuff—not so much Hello Kitty as her demented cousins, the San-X crowd. As much as I dread the day my kids start affecting a “Gothic Lolita” look, I like the fact that at least these kids are so enthusiastic.
Meanwhile Bella Online complains that many manga are poorly translated and often altered to boot. Their remedy: Learn the language. Failing that, try to get a few different translations.
I know what the writer means. When we lived in France and Switzerland, I used to go to American films and laugh at the subtitles, they were so off. It’s never easy to do a good translation, and often I can read something in French and understand it just fine, but I have trouble doing a word-for-word translation.
I was in a Japanese bookstore last month and picked up a copy of “Fruits Basket” in the original Japanese—a later comic that hasn’t been translated yet. With fruba-mania reaching a fever pitch in anticipation of volume 8, the girls have started flipping through it. We have books on hiragana and katakana so they can at least transliterate a bit, and they’re picking up a few words just by osmosis. There’s something enormously satisfying about being able to read even a small amount of a foreign language, and I’m glad they’re getting to taste it early. Plus I want to know what happens next.