I haven’t been able to blog for the past few weeks because of pressing family responsibilities, but I’m back to report that my daughters, ages 11 and 12, are engrossed in a new project: Translating a volume of Fruits Basket from Japanese to English. So far we’ve been able to determine the following: The conversation in the first frame is about the school cultural festival. The girls are learning the kana pretty quickly, but the way the comic is lettered, it’s hard to divide the characters correctly into words. We have much to learn, but as a vacation activity it beats watching “Full House” reruns all day.
Also, Shojo Beat is huge in my house right now. I have only been able to glance at it, but already I have a beef with them. It’s over the title. I quote from their website:
Note: The word shojo normally appears with a circumflex or macron over the first o, as in shôjo; we removed it for the sake of simplicity and readability in the magazine.
Now, I’m not unsympathetic to this. I lived in France, and I hate those damn diacriticals as much as the next person, but you don’t get to change other people’s languages just because they’re inconvenient. If we could, life would be much easier: Japanese would have only one alphabet, say, instead of three, and Gaelic would be spelled like it sounds, and French wouldn’t assign masculine and feminine genders to everything, including tables and chairs. But we can’t.
In fact, my understanding is that “shojo” means “virgin” in Japanese, so by eliminating that pesky diacritical they have changed the meaning of the title in a rather weird way.
We get a big laugh out of Japanese products that have weird English names, like Pocari Sweat and Pocket Wetty. Now I guess they get to laugh at us in return. You’d think a company as invested in Japanese culture as Viz could at do better. Sigh.
I take it from the reference to “learning the kana pretty quickly” that your daughters don’t know any Japanese, but are trying to translate the book using only a J-E dictionary, and perhaps a reference grammar or textbook. I don’t like to be discouraging, but if that’s the case, I’m afraid they may have set themselves an impossible task. For one thing, as you’ve already noticed, written Japanese doesn’t put spaces between the words. For another, not only is Japanese unrelated to English, but its structure is completely different. For us English-speakers, it’s perfectly possible to know the meaning of every word in a sentence, but still not know what the sentence as a whole means. This happened to me quite a bit when I started reading manga in Japanese, even though I had worked my way through a textbook. And it still happens sometimes, even after over a year of experience reading Japanese.
In fact, of all the manga I’ve read, Fruits Basket is the one I’ve found the most difficult, more so than any of the manga written for young adults or adults that I’ve read. Kare Kano is also difficult.
Incidentally, I really like your blog.
Thanks, Adam!
You’re right about the futility of trying to do word-by-word translations, and I know this from my own experiences in France and Geneva, where my attempts to speak the language provided much amusement to the locals.
Right now, my kids are approaching Japanese as sort of a code (a cipher, really), and it’s just fun to them. I’d like to get actual Japanese lessons for my younger daughter, who has the stronger interest in Japanese culture, but they’re not so easy to find, especially for kids. In the meantime, we picked up an introductory book so they can start learning a bit about structure and usage.
Brigid