sometimes we just need someone to pay enough attention.
for the longest time i had been trying to read The Lord of The Rings. everyone had sung the praises for it, over and over. i'd seen clips of the movie and it seemed like it could be fun, but actually reading it was fucking horrible.
my parents had the omnibus - all the books squished into one big tome - and in the 4th grade i started sort of an annual tradition: i would start trying to read TLR and get frustrated after about a month and put it back down. at first i figured i was just too young for it, and that it would eventually make sense.
but every time i came back to it, i would find myself having the exact same experience: it was confusing, weird, and dry as a fucking bone. i couldn't figure it out. how had everyone else on earth read this book and enjoyed it? how had they made movies out of this thing? it was, like, barely coherent. i would see it on "classics" list and on every fantasy/sci-fi list and everyone said i should read it; but i figured that it was like my opinion of great expectations - just because it's a classic doesn't mean i'm going to like experiencing it.
at 20, i began the process of forcing myself through it. if i had to treat the experience like a self-inflicted textbook, i would - but i was going to read it.
my mom came across me taking notes at our kitchen table. i was on the last few pages of the first book in the omnibus, and i was dreading moving on to the next. she smiled down at me. only you would take notes on creative writing. then she sat down and her brow wrinkled. wait. why are you taking notes on this?
i said the thing i always said - it's boring, and i forget what's happening in it because it's so weird, and dense. and strange.
she nodded a little, and started to stand up. and then sat back down and said - wait, will you show me the book?
i was happy to hand it over, annoyed with the fact i'd barely made a dent in the monster of a thing. she pulled it to herself, pushing her glasses up so she could read the tiny writing. for a moment, she was silent, and then she let out a cackle. she wouldn't stop laughing. oh my god. i cannot wait to tell your father.
i was immediately defensive. okay, maybe i'm stupid but i've been trying to read this since the 4th grade and -
she shook her head. raquel, this is the Silmarillion. you've been reading the Silmarillion, not the lord of the rings.
anyway, it turns out that the hobbit and lord of the rings series are all super good and i understand why they're recommended reading. but good lord (of the rings), i wish somebody had just asked - wait. this kind of thing is right up your alley. you love fantasy. it sounds like something might be wrong. why do you think it's so boring?
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Everything that promotes LGBT will now be banned: a rainbow without a light blue stripe, all kinds of themed patches, badges on clothes, as well as parades, processions, rallies and themed parties.
For that - up to 12 years in prison.
Hi! What! Literal murder can get you 2 to 8 years in prison. Killing a man gives you less years! Hello! Can anybody fucking hear me!
Updating this post because. WELL. If anyone, ANYONE supports LGBTQIA in here. Even if they're the straightest people ever. THEY FALL UNDER THE SAME CATEGORY. LGBTQIA ALLIES ARE CONSIDERED EXTREMISTS TOO.
Moreover, everyone could get in trouble - even if the person isn't an activist or part of LGBTQ, but speaks out that LGBTQ people must have equal rights with everyone else.
You can get in trouble for a LGBTQ-symbolic repost from 10 years ago - if the policemen can capture it after Supreme Court's decision will take effect.
And another update: this "law" will only be valid after January 10, 2024
The court decision will come into force on January 10 of the following year - unless an appeal is filed.
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Is it OK to translate your comic into other languages? .
ONLY if you have my permission and attaching a link to this blog under your posts/videos :)
If you are seeing someone translating my comic and not adding links and credits - they are stealing it.
If you are translating my comic without my permission - please stop.
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Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It's so interesting. I'd wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of "yeah, that's what it literally translates to, but that's not what it means" or has answered a question like "how do you say _____ in (language)?" with "you don't, it's just … not a thing, we don't say that."
I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.
Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show.
When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.
Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.
And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse.
And that's even before cultural assumptions come in.
It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.
Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).
Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.
This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!
As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).
For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …
ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I'd love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don't speak the material's original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we're basically working from a secondary source, and if we're doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there's nothing substantial being (literally) lost -- or added! -- in translation?
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