Throwback to the time my poor German teacher had to explain the concept of formal and informal pronouns to a class full of Australians and everyone was scandalised and loudly complained “why can’t I treat everyone the same?” “I don’t want to be a Sie!” “but being friendly is respectful!” “wouldn’t using ‘du’ just show I like them?” until one guy conceded “I suppose maybe I’d use Sie with someone like the prime minister, if he weren’t such a cunt” and my teacher ended up with her head in her hands saying “you are all banned from using du until I can trust you”
God help Japanese teachers in Australia.
if this isnt an accurate representation of australia idk what is
Australia’s reverse-formality respect culture is fascinating. We don’t even really think about it until we try to communicate or learn about another culture and the rules that are pretty standard for most of the world just feel so wrong. I went to America this one time and I kept automatically thinking that strangers using ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ were sassing me.
Australians could not be trusted with a language with ingrained tiers of formal address. The most formal forms would immediately become synonyms for ‘go fuck yourself’ and if you weren’t using the most informal version possible within three sentences of meeting someone they’d take it to mean you hated them.
100% true.
the difference between “‘scuse me” and “excuse me” is a fistfight
See also: the Australian habit of insulting people by way of showing affection, which other English-speakers also do, but not in a context where deescalating the spoken invective actively increases the degree of offence intended, particularly if you’ve just been affectionately-insulting with someone else.
By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.
Also note that different modifiers radically change the meaning of particular insults. Case in point: calling someone a fuckin’ cunt is a deadly insult, calling someone a mad cunt is a compliment, and calling someone a fuckin’ mad cunt means you’re literally in awe of them. Because STRAYA.
case in point: the ‘Howard DJs like a mad cunt’ meme.
ALSO I’M SORRY IF I KEEP TAGGING YOU IN AUSTRAILIAN RELATED SHIT
BUT YOU”RE THE ONLY AUSTRAILIAN I KNOW
AND I MUST VERIFY
It’s all true, believe me. I reckon it has something to do with being geographically isolated and having a massive convict background during colonisation. Then you have huge immigration influxes from all over the world, and the fact that we like to shorten names into things like “Dazza”, “Maccas”, and “Shaz.”
Also, when they shout “Fang It!” in Mad Max Fury Road, that is a thing that is regularly shouted in the suburbs.
I don’t know why we evolved our language like this.
I’d wager a portion of it comes from the social structure originally applied to the country. Because so much of the population were convicts, the society built up around the notion of fighting authority or at least resisting it in some fashion. A lot of people came from poverty, obviously (because why the hell else would you be in prison for stealing bread?), lacked formal education and were illiterate. There was a tie-in with the influx of rural people in Britain looking for work if I remember correctly, which fed this problem of overcrowding in prisons in the first place. The point is that a large chunk of the prison population were poor, disenfranchised, from a certain geographical area or social group disproportionately affected by law enforcement.
For awhile (in the 1800′s there around) people from other countries joked you could tell if a person was Australian because of how they walked (the iron ball and chain).
And most of Australia’s current terminologies for homesteads and things were built around military or police terminology (that’s why we have stations, homesteads etc. instead of farms or ranches, whatever). Slang that was common to local dialects or communities (cockney for example) stuck around, presumably because a fair few of these people were poor and ran afoul of the law. So already just at Australia’s founding you have a culture that hates people in power. And my guess is that fed an attitude of disdain for authority in any form and a camaraderie towards those in the same boat as you. Social structures (and later political structures) reformed to favour or support the people fucked over by the system.
Which leads to the idea if you’re one of us, you’re a mate and we can slag you but we’ll act very nice to you if you’re in power but we all know how we really think of you.
I never knew any of this?
If I had ever gone to Australia before reading this I would have probably ended up insulting everyone I met … might still, because ‘excuse me, ma’am’ or ‘excuse me, sir’ is just ingrained in how I learned to speak english.
And I thought english people were crazy for having you in the singular person and you in the plural person…
(You in the plural person is Voi in Italian, which is a deferential way of referring to someone, possibly stronger than the ‘Lei’ [which no, has no relation to the female she (though that is *also* called lei), but is a specific form of respectful address] and definitely league above (as far as formality goes) about the ‘tu’ which is the singolar person you equivalent and is considered informal and colloquial.
This is 100% accurate for Aussie. New Zealand is slightly less so, but it does still sorta apply.
This is not “I’m too fucking macho to tell you”, it’s “I can’t handle identity right now or maybe ever”.
IIRC, Furiosa naming him “Fool” is the only time in the whole show that one character teases another. It’s not completely devoid of jokes – Toast makes a sex joke about a pistol, Dag tells her baby to stay put, it’s lost it’s novelty out here. We see affection and care between different characters, especially the five, but we don’t see any teasing in the forms of status games – no physical play, or insults, or reminders of past embarrassments, except this one.
And this is an incredibly high stakes moment. Why does Furiosa do it? She’s insulting Max when he’s already really damn on edge, and she’s about to give him control of the rig and make him responsible for their escape plan. At first glance it looks like a really stupid idea to take a poke at a guy who’s currently holding a gun on you.
The obvious reason is that teasing (when it’s not bullying) is an indicator of a close social bond. You only tease people you’re comfortable with. She’s giving Max an insulting nickname because when you act as though you’re comfortable, it helps you become comfortable. She’s trying hard to deescalate the situation and win him over, and this is one tool for doing so.
I think there’s a more subtle reason too, and it’s that Furiosa sees right through him. She already knows that Max was human once, and is afraid to be human again. Teasing isn’t unique to the human species, but it’s one of our higher order functions and it’s very, very relational. Furiosa isn’t just trying to fake a bond with Max that doesn’t exist yet, she’s trying to remind him of his humanity. He’s just denied his humanity and avoid relationship by refusing to give his name. She’s going to drag him back into humanity by the scruff of his neck if he has to, and by calling him a fool she’s pointing out that she sees his attempts to avoid attachment and that it’s, well, foolish. Not helpful for survival, either physically or emotionally, and she needs him, dammit.
The obvious Doylist explanation of the scene is that names are important in this show (such good meta about that today!), and naming Max ‘Fool’ is symbolic on a number of different levels. It’s one of a million pieces of heart-rending meaning that Miller and co. packed into this thing. But I think that explanation works on a Watsonian level as well. Furiosa doesn’t have time to think all of this through rationally, but she intuitively knows how to draw Max into the group and she does it with consummate skill. By calling him names.
IF IT HAS BEEN A VERY LONG DAY, YOU ARE ‘WEARY’. IF SOMEONE IS ACTING IN A WAY THAT MAKES YOU SUSPICIOUS, YOU ARE ‘WARY’.
ALL IN ‘DUE’ TIME, NOT ‘DO’ TIME
‘PER SE’ NOT ‘PER SAY’
THANK YOU
BREATHE – THE VERB FORM IN PRESENT TENSE
BREATH – THE NOUN FORM
THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE
WANDER – TO WALK ABOUT AIMLESSLY
WONDER – TO THINK OF IN A DREAMLIKE AND/OR WISTFUL MANNER
THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE (but one’s mind can wander)
DEFIANT – RESISTANT DEFINITE – CERTAIN
WANTON – DELIBERATE AND UNPROVOKED ACTION (ALSO AN ARCHAIC TERM FOR A PROMISCUOUS WOMAN)
WONTON – IT’S A DUMPLING THAT’S ALL IT IS IT’S A FUCKING DUMPLING
BAWL- TO SOB/CRY
BALL- A FUCKING BALL
YOU CANNOT “BALL” YOUR EYES OUT
AND FOR FUCK’S SAKE, IT’S NOT “SIKE”; IT’S “PSYCH”. AS IN “I PSYCHED YOU OUT”; BECAUSE YOU MOMENTARILY MADE SOMEONE BELIEVE SOMETHING THAT WASN’T TRUE.
THANK YOU.
*slams reblog*
IT’S ‘MIGHT AS WELL’. ‘MIND AS WELL’ DOES NOT MAKE GRAMMATICAL SENSE.
IT’S NOT ‘COULD OF’, THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE WHATSOEVER. IT’S ‘COULD HAVE’. SAME APPLIES TO ‘SHOULD HAVE’.
That last mistake gets made because of the contraction “could’ve.” So if you want the casual there ya go.
ALSO, IT’S “VOILA”, NOT “WALLA”
Reblogging for the additional of Voila.
IT’S NOT ALL RIGHT TO USE ALRIGHT IN STANDARD ENGLISH
QUITE==QUIET as in “she was QUITE pleased on how QUIET the car was”
LOSE – WHEN A THING IS NO LONGER WHERE IT SHOULD BE
LOOSE – WHEN A THING IS NOT TIGHT
DESSERT = SOMETHING SWEET SERVED AT THE END OF A MEAL
DESERT = A LARGE, DRY BARREN REGION USUALLY HAVING SANDY OR ROCKY SOIL AND LITTLE TO NO VEGETATION.
YOU MIGHT DESERT A PERSON, IN WHICH CASE YOU ARE ABANDONING THEM IN A TRECHEROUS WAY, BUT IF YOU DESSERT THEM I AM GOING TO ASSUME YOU ARE EXHIBITING TENDENCIES HANNIBAL LECTER WOULD APPROVE OF.
ALSO, IT’S JUST DESERTS, BECAUSE IT COMES FROM AN OBSOLETE MEANING OF DESERT NAMELY SOMETHING DESERVED OR MERITED.
JUST DESSERTS MAKE ME THINK YOU EARNED A CAKE AFTER EATING.
Related to ‘could’ve’:
I COULDN’T CARE LESS – ZERO SHITS GIVEN I COULD CARE LESS – POTENTIAL FOR SHITS TO BE GIVEN
Douglas Adams is the best when it comes to describe characters
they need to teach classes on Douglas Adams analogies okay
“He leant tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis.”
“Stones, then rocks, then boulders which pranced past him like clumsy puppies, only much, much bigger, much, much harder and heavier, and almost infinitely more likely to kill you if they fell on you.”
“He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off.”
“It looked only partly like a spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a small upended Italian bistro.”
“If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not as a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly – again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.”
And, of course:
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
the one that will always stay with me is “Arthur Dent was grappling with his consciousness the way one grapples with a lost bar of soap in the bath,” i feel like that was the first time i really understood what you could do with words.
Jack: Salut, ça va?
Tadpole: Ça va. Ça va?
Jack: Ça va.
Holster: Here we see the French-Canadians in their natural habitats.
Ransom: The French-Canadians need very little to communicate.
Holster: Hence why they only use two words as greetings.
Ransom: According to research, it does not happen in other languages of latin origins. Making the French-Canadians a very rare specie.
Jack: Alright guys that’s enough, you’ll freak out the tadpole.
Holster: ONE OF THEM SPOTTED US!
Ransom: ABORT! ABORT!
Years ago I once mentioned to a coworker at a theatre where I was interning that my boss was bi (he was out, I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t) and she said “Oh! He sometimes shops at the other market!”
I almost fell over laughing at the expression, and I reported the conversation to my mum later. She picked it up and would joke about it for like, YEARS after. It became a running joke in our family, the expression “He shops at the other market.”
This ended up being REALLY funny about five years later when we were trying to find a grocery store on a family road trip and ended up buying what we needed from a grocery store with a big sign out front reading BI-MART. We pulled into the parking lot and I leaned over to my mother and said, “This is the other market he shops at.”
PEAK/PEEK, LIE/LAY, DRAGGED/DRUG: DON’T MIX EM UP, KIDS
We’ve been through this before. I will probably go find the last time I wrote about this and link it, but for now have the quick version.
1) Peak/peek
A peak is a pinnacle, highest point, summit. Mountains have peaks. So does sufficiently whipped cream. One’s emotions can reach a peak.
A peek is a furtive or clandestine glance at something. A sneak peek is an exclusive glimpse into a thing others don’t get to see yet.
A sneak peak is a mountain which is trying not to be seen. It is not what you wish to convey. Saying “sneak peak” when you actually mean “sneak peek” does not do you or the thing which you are peeking at any favors whatsoever.
2) Lie/lay
This one is complicated. You lay something else down; you yourselfliedown. When you cause other people or animals or substances to drape themselves on you, they are lying down on top of you.
You lay a table. You do not lie a table. A chicken lays an egg, rather than lying it. Here we see the verb to lay directly meaning the act of oviposition, but as the chicken goes through the process of laying the egg, it also sets or places the egg upon whatever is underneath it, thus laying the egg as an object onto that substrate. You may lay yourself upon the table, but in the act of doing so, you are lying on it.
The verse “now I lay me down to sleep” is in fact perfectly concurrent with the use of lie vs lay: the speaker or singer is stating that they are laying themselves, as a physical entity or object, down to sleep. “I lay me” = “I am lying.” Someone who can do grammar can explain the different tenses involved here, but when you say I lay me you are saying I am lying or about to lie down in a ceremonial way such that [myself] is the thing I set or am setting down.
If you are describing the act of reclining your person on or against something, you are lying down. If you are depositing something else upon that something, you are laying [it] down. If you want to tell people that you spent some time reclining, you say “I’ve been lying down,” or “I was/had been lying down.” Do not say “I was laying down,” or even “X was laying down with/on/beside me,” because this is wrong.
3) Dragged/drug
This one is rarer but still extant. One drags a thing; one has dragged a thing. One has not drug a thing – drug itself is either the noun medicament or the verb to medicate. One can drug a thing, in terms of giving it drugs; one has drugged the thing if this has occurred already, and the thing can be described as having been drugged or just straight-up drugged once you have done this. It has absolutely nothing to do with physically taking hold of something and moving it to another location.
Drug is not the past participle of the verb to drag: that is dragged. I do not know the particular rules governing how this type of verb is conjugated in English or why – English is basically the linguistics equivalent of the kid turning you upside down for your lunch money and then shooting up in the bathroom – but this is straight-up wrong. Do not do it.
I suppose you could make a case for “drug” based on the tacit acceptance of “ain’t” and “y’all” but it is wrong. It is as wrong as yunk for yanked or grub for grabbed. It is extremely jarring and will make people blink at you. Do not do it.
I refer the explanations for why these rules are rules to people who know and can explain them: but they are the rules, and you have to learn them, and you have to prove you have learned them before you can go breaking them because otherwise people will blink quite a lot at you and wonder if you know that you’re fucking up.
OH AND BONUS ROUND
one dyes one’s hair; one is in the act of dyeing it, with dye
one does not dy one’s hair or be in the act of dyingit, with dy
dying is the act of shuffling off the mortal coil; dyeing is the act of changing the color of a thing
the E is of crucial importance here
‘drug’ instead of ‘dragged’ appears to be a southern american dialect thing. there are a few other altered past tenses i’ve run across from the same sources – for instance, ‘grit’ as its own past tense, instead of ‘gritted’. ‘he grit his teeth.’ considering how wacky english tenses are, with stuff like shut and drunk and swim/swam/swum (seriously what’s going on there), i can’t blame dialects for throwing a few similar noises at the wall to see what sticks.
just don’t do it unless your speaker or POV character is speaking a type of english that’s full of those words. and also probably says y’all unironically.
Okay so apparently what happens to me if I actually sleep eight hours and the sun is out and I have coffee and no immediate horrible tasks is that I want to talk about The Strong Verb In English
because the dragged/drug dialect variation is real and true (though @ceruleancynic is absolutely right that in Standard American English the grammatically correct form is dragged). But @jumpingjacktrash is also right in a) noting that Southern dialects of American English often preserve ‘drug’ as well as other oddities like ‘grit his teeth’ (that one is more widespread than Southern, as it’s in my personal idiolect as well and I’m a native New Yorker – for me ‘to grit’ is conjugated ‘he grits (currently) / he grit (in the past)’ and ‘gritted’ is kinda weird); b) pointing out that dragged/drug and grit/gritted are related to the weirdness of drink/drank/drunk and swim/swam/swum. They are! They totally are!
because there are secretly two kinds of verbs in English, and we make the past tenses differently with Kind A and Kind B. Linguistics has a bunch of names for the two different kinds, but the one I learned are STRONG verbs and WEAK verbs.
I will explain. (I will explain for American English, as this is my native language.)
your standard or regular English verb, the kind that if you were lucky enough to have a grammar class was taught as ‘the regular verb’, is in fact a Weak Verb. Weak verbs are grammatically differentiated using suffixes – stuff tacked on to the end of the verb. Let’s use ‘to jump’ as an example, and let’s stick with third person singular (so one dude/lady/individual, doing a thing). I’m going to avoid singular they just for the moment, because it can confuse grammar prescriptivists and we want to make them go away for a minute, this is hard enough.
he/she/it/xie jumps – in this present moment, the individual is going up and down under their own power. We have the base form of the verb (also called the ‘verb stem’), ‘jump’, and then we’ve added a present-tense marker (’-s’) to the END of the base form. This process is called inflecting the verb – adding or changing something about the verb to tell us some information about its tense (…or person or number or mood, but we’re working with tense.)
he/she/it/xie jumped – in the past, the individual went up and down under their own power. Here’s the verb stem again, with a different suffix. jump + ed. The ‘-ed’ suffix is how English marks the past tense.
he/she/it/xie had jumped – in the past, BEFORE SOME OTHER PAST EVENT, the individual went up and down under their own power. Ah, the past perfect. Fuck the past perfect, seriously, no one explains this thing. Basically, languages can sometimes pay a lot of attention to sequencing, and mark when stuff happens in relation to other stuff grammatically. We use the past perfect to make clear that one event happened before another event in the past. So, in this case, the individual jumped, and then some other thing happened in the past, and now both those things have happened. We form the past perfect for a weak English verb by using the past tense (jump + ed) and adding an auxiliary or helping verb to the front of the word. In this case we are using the past tense of the verb to have to make our helping verb. Auxiliary verbs are a little beyond this explanation, so let’s just leave it as a pattern: to make the past perfect for a weak verb, you have past tense auxiliary (had) + stem + past suffix (-ed)
now for the STRONG verb. Which in English grammar class is often taught as the irregular verb. It’s … not. Like, it’s not as common, but it’s totally regular, it’s not weird and pattern-breaky at all. (A real irregular verb is ‘to be’ or ‘to have’. Those things are fucked.) The thing is, though, we don’t have that many strong verbs in English, and most of them are really old. As in, the sounds they have haven’t changed all that much from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of English (… and German and Latin and Greek and Russian and Armenian and Farsi. PIE got around.) Some of the strong verbs are ‘to sing’ and ‘to swim’.
What do all of these strong verbs immediately have in common? Their verb stem has an i vowel (and they’re all one syllable.) This is important in telling us how to change their tense. Let’s work with ‘to swim’, it’s a nice one.
he/she/it/xie swims – So far, so identical to the weak verb. Stem + third person singular present-tense marker (-s). An individual is currently moving themselves through water.
he/she/it/xie swam – There’s no -ed here! Instead, to make the past tense, we change the VOWEL of the strong verb from i to a. He swam, he sang. (Also he drove, but that’s a spelling weirdness.)
he/she/it/xie swum – And here we don’t even have a helping verb; the vowel has changed again, gotten darker and lower in the mouth. He swum, in the past before some other past event. He sung.
Why the hell does this happen?
Well. There’s a rule in Proto-Indo-European called ablaut, which basically means vowel changes. The vowel that appeared in any given syllable is called its “grade”. In
many words, the basic vowel was *e (e-grade), but, depending on what syllable of a word the stress fell on in PIE, this could change to *o (o-grade), or disappear altogether (zero grade). Both e and o could also be lengthened to ē and ō (lengthened grade). In Proto-Germanic, a daughter language of PIE, ablaut was one of the ways to determine the tense of the verb. An e-grade verb was in the present tense, an o-grade verb was past, and a lengthened grade verb was past perfect (I am simplifying this process iMMENSELY. Historical linguists – forgive me. This post is getting long.)
Now, in modern English (and modern German, for that matter), strong verbs are gradually disappearing. This is because all languages tend to get simpler as they get older. And we have this perfectly understandable weak verb, which conjugates in very predictable ways, and it’s just a hell of a lot easier to say jumps/jumped/had jumped than swims/swam/swum. We find the strong verb confusing. So we … turn it into a weak verb. In a hundred years, we will probably be saying swims/swimmed/had swimmed.
This process – the simplification to weak from strong – is about 4/5ths of the way done for drag. Drag used to be a strong verb – drags/drug/drug – and it is normalizing to a weak verb. There are still placed where the strong form persists in dialect.
… okay wow I have gone on for AGES and probably been somewhat confusing – I’m not a historical linguist, I’m a historian who knows a bunch of dead languages and likes reading linguistics stuff for fun. But hopefully this helps a little.
The 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences
The 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences
The 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences
The 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences
The 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences
The 7444 most common words make up 90% of occurrences
The 13374 most common words make up 95% of occurrences
The 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurrences
This article has an excellent summary on how to rapidly learn a new language within 90 days.
We can begin with studying the first 600 words. Of course chucking is an effective way to memorize words readily. Here’s a list to translate into the language you desire to learn that I grabbed from here! 🙂
EXPRESSIONS OF POLITENESS (about 50 expressions)
‘Yes’ and ‘no’: yes, no, absolutely, no way, exactly.
Question words: when? where? how? how much? how many? why? what? who? which? whose?
Apologizing: excuse me, sorry to interrupt, well now, I’m afraid so, I’m afraid not.
Meeting and parting: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, hello, goodbye, cheers, see you later, pleased to meet you, nice to have met.
Interjections: please, thank you, don’t mention it, sorry, it’ll be done, I agree, congratulations, thank heavens, nonsense.
Space: into, out of, outside, towards, away from,
behind, in front of, beside, next to, between, above, on top of, below,
under, underneath, near to, a long way from, through.
Time: after, ago, before, during, since, until.
DETERMINERS (about 80 words)
Articles and numbers: a, the; nos. 0–20; nos. 30–100; nos. 200–1000; last, next, 1st–12th.
Demonstrative: this, that.
Possessive: my, your, his, her, its, our, their.
Quantifiers: all, some, no, any, many, much, more, less, a few, several, whole, a little, a lot of.
Universal: everyone, everybody, everything, each, both, all, one, another.
Indefinite: someone, somebody, something, some, a few, a little, more, less; anyone, anybody, anything, any, either, much, many.
Negative: no-one, nobody, nothing, none, neither.
ADVERBS (about 60 words)
Place: here, there, above, over, below, in front, behind,
nearby, a long way away, inside, outside, to the right, to the left,
somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere, home, upstairs, downstairs.
Time: now, soon, immediately, quickly, finally,
again, once, for a long time, today, generally, sometimes, always,
often, before, after, early, late, never, not yet, still, already, then
(=at that time), then (=next), yesterday, tomorrow, tonight.
Quantifiers: a little, about (=approximately), almost, at least, completely, very, enough, exactly, just, not, too much, more, less.
Manner: also, especially, gradually, of course,
only, otherwise, perhaps, probably, quite, so, then (=therefore), too
(=also), unfortunately, very much, well.
CONJUNCTIONS (about 30 words)
Coordinating: and, but, or; as, than, like.
Time & Place: when, while, before, after, since (=time), until; where.
I love it too! I love it mostly because it makes me feel less overwhelmed. When you break it down like this, everything seems so much more manageable. Like, hey, I could memorize 20 words at a time (even if ‘at a time’ varies wildly for me), and just do that like ten times. That’s a HUGE chunk of a language.
(And since I have the habit of doing languages that are similar to ones I’m already familiar with, the grammar part usually comes pretty easy, too.)
the thing you need to realize about localization is that japanese and english are such vastly different languages that a straight translation is always going to be worse than the original script. nuance is going to be lost and, if you give a shit about your job, you should fill the gaps left with equivalent nuance in english. take ff6, my personal favorite localization of all time: in the original japanese cefca was memorable primarily for his manic, childish speaking style – but since english speaking styles arent nearly as expressive, woolsey adapted that by making the localized english kefka much more prone to making outright jokes. cefca/kefka is beloved in both regions as a result – hell, hes even more popular here
yes this
a literal translation is an inaccurate translation.
localization’s job is to create a meaningful experience for a different audience which has a different language and different culture. they translate ideas and concepts, not words and sentences. often this means choosing new ideas that will be more meaningful and contribute to the experience more for a different audience.
There was an example during late Tokugawa period in Japan where the translator translated, "Я люблю Вас” (I love you), to “I could die for you,” while translating
Ася, (
Asya) a novel by Ivan Turgenev. This was because a woman saying, “I love you,” to a man was considered a very hard thing to do in Japanese society.
In a more well-known example,
Natsume Soseki, a great writer who wrote, I am a Cat, had his students translate “I love you,” to “the moon is beautiful [because of] having you beside tonight,” because Japanese men would not say such strong emotions right away. He said that it would be weird and Japanese men would have more elegance.
Both of these are great examples of localization that wasn’t a straight up translation and both of these are valid. I feel like a lot of people forget the nuances in language and culture and how damn hard a translator’s job is and how knowledgeable the person has to be about both cultures. [x]
Important stuff about translation!
Note that you can apply this to your own translations even if they aren’t big pieces of literature or something. Don’t feel bad about not translating word for word. An everyday sentence may sound odd translated literally – it’s okay to edit a little bit so it feels right!
Oh my god, I’m about to go on a ramble, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, the inner translation nerd is coming out. I’m so sorry. The thing is–there is actually no such thing as an accurate translation.
It’s literally an impossible endeavor. Word for word doesn’t cut it. Sense for sense doesn’t cut it, because then you’re potentially missing cool stuff like context and nuance and rhyme and humor. Even localization doesn’t really cut it, because that means you’re prioritizing the audience over the author, and you’re missing out on the original context, and the possibility of bringing something new and exciting to your host language. Foreignization, which aims to replicate the rhythms of the original language, or to use terminology that will be unfamiliar to the target culture–(for example: the first few American-published Harry Potter books domesticated the English, and traded “trousers” for “pants”, and “Mom” for “Mum”. Later on they stopped, and let the American children view such foreignizing words as “snog” and “porridge.”)–also doesn’t cut it, because you risk alienating the target readers, or obscuring meaning.
Another cool example is Dante, and the words written above the gates of hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
In the original Italian, that’s Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. Speranza, like most nouns in latinate languages, has a gender: la. Hope, in Italian, is gendered female. Abandon hope, who is female. Abandon hope, who is a woman. When the original Dante enters hell, searching for Beatrice, he is doomed, subtly, from the start. That’s beautiful, subtle, the kind of delicate poetic move literature nerds gorge themselves on, and you can’t keep it in English. Literally, how do you preserve it? We don’t have a gendered hope. It doesn’t work, can’t work. So how do you compensate? Can you sneak in a reference to Beatrice in a different line? Or do you chalk her up as a loss and move onto the next problem?
You’re always going to miss something–the cool part is that, knowing you’re going to fail, you get to decide how to fail. Ortega y Gasset called this The Misery and Splendor of Translation. Basically, translation is impossible–so why not make it a beautiful failure?
My point is that literary translation is creative writing, full of as many creative decisions as any original poem or short story. It has more limitations, rules, and structures to consider, for sure–but sometimes the best artistic decision is going to be the one that breaks the rules.
My favorite breakdown of this is Le Ton Beau De Marot, a beautiful brick of a translator’s joke, in which the author tries over and over again to create a “perfect” translation of “A une Damoyselle Malade”, an itsy bitsy poem Clement Marot dashed off to his patron’s daughter, who was sick, in 1537.
This is the poem:
Ma mignonne, Je vous donne Le bon jour; Le séjour C’est prison. Guérison Recouvrez, Puis ouvrez Votre porte Et qu’on sorte Vitement, Car Clément Le vous mande. Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur fade Tu prendras, Et perdras L’embonpoint. Dieu te doint Santé bonne, Ma mignonne.
Seems simple enough, right? But it’s got a huge host of challenges: the rhyme, the tone, the archaic language (if you’re translating something old, do you want it to sound old in the target language, too? or are you translating not just across language, but across time?)
Le Ton Beau De Marot is a monster of a book that compiles all of Hofstader’s “failed” translations of Ma Mignonne, as well as the “failed” translations of his friends, and his students, and hundreds of strangers who were given the translation challenge (which you can play here, should you like!)
The end result is a hilarious archive of Sweet Damosels, Malingering Ladies, Chickadees, Fairest Friends, and Cutie Pies. It’s the clearest, funniest, best example of what I think is true of all literary translations: that they’re a thing you make up, not a thing you discover. There is no magic bridge between languages, or magic window, or magic vessel to pour the poem from one language to another–translation is always subjective, it’s always individual, it’s always inaccurate, it’s always a failure.
It’s always, in other words, art.
Which, as a translator, I find incredibly reassuring! You’re definitely, one hundred percent absolutely, gonna fuck up. Which means you can’t fuck up. You can take risks! You can experiment! You can do cool stuff like bilingual translations, or footnote translations! You write your own code of honor, your own rules that your translations will hold inviolable, and fuck it if that code doesn’t match everyone else’s*. The translations they hold inviolable are also flawed, are failures at the core, from the King James Bible right on down to No Fear Shakespeare. So have fun! It’s all in your hands, miseries and splendors both.
Steel Phoenix Studios 