My head is awash with harry potter lately... after watching all the movies again, on the tail of finishing the most recent audiobook, I'm working on the first book in Japanese now. I'm trying my damnedest to get through about 50 pages of it a day, and today, for the first time, I managed it.
This translation's kinda shitty. I haven't read the original book in English (audiobook), but this translation seems to be incautious about the coming rules of the HP world, and uses a lot of really awkward vocabulary... though, hey, what do I know about what's awkward to a 12 japanese kid? The real nastiness though is how the spoken language is translated. In order to bend the characters into palettable japanese archetypes, dumbledore has been converted entirely to old-man-speak. He never uses the word です for all his じゃろうing. Hagrid's even worse. maybe 1/2 of what comes out of his mouth is proper japanese that appears in a dictionary with the rest being as grossly chopped up a slang as the english language "Trainspotting" book.
Eh. you take the good; you take the bad; you take them both.
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2 comments:
this is still my first book in japanese, so I may find that every book in translation does the same mangling of spoken language.
I mean using ”じゃ” and "じゃろう" in place of です. Old man speak.
In English, old people don't really speak that differently from younger people. The truth is, most educated older people in Japan don't use that kind of language either. I don't know why writers insist on making young people speak 標準 and old people sound like they were born 400 years ago.
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