#reading and editing the english translation....... it sounds so much better in japanese i swear

[thegoodomensdumpster]

I WATCHED GOOD OMENS IN FRENCH SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

and it wasn’t that bad. Here are my thoughts, barely edited as I wrote most of them while watching the show.

EP 1

OK i like god’s voice so far

possibilité d’embarras gastrique is a good formulation, I wonder if it’s the same in the book ( I think I kinda need to read it in french now...)

aghghdhgs « primo-délinquants »

of course subtitles don’t match the audio for a variety of technical reasons but when you get things that have very different underlying meanings i find it… not good This one about Crowley being evil / a demon : subtitles : « c’est ton travail » - « it’s your job » audio : « c’est dans ta nature » - « it’s in your nature » i mean dang

crowley sounds like a little shit asking az about his sword

« T’AS FAIT QUOUA » - he just loses his shit (kinda giving me some le coeur a ses raisons vibe)

ok crowley sounds very nerdy when he tries to explain that he took down the phone network, i think i actually like this voice acting

ligur sounds… very suave (im a little ill at ease)

crowley getting called mon chou by satan freddie mercury is a thumb up from me

i see the part where aziraphale speaks japanese wasn’t dubbed over and we can still hear michael sheen. it’s a bit disturbing considering french aziraphale has a higher pitched voice (and he sounds soooo much more anxious than sheen, give this angel a xanax )

“sandwich bœuf cresson” ( beef and cress sandwich ) deirdre really who makes this kind of sandwiches

im being reminded that the chattering nuns prepared little cut outs for their explanation about the antichrist switch… such dedication to useless crafts (it made me laugh on my first viewing and it’s still funny to imagine that some of them either ordered or built these things themselves just so they could make this two minutes long presentation for the most important act of their satanic nun careers)

retire-toi vil démon infernal, créature des abysses XD i swear az doesn’t sound even remotely convinced when he is saying the « get thee behind me foul fiend » line in french, it’s just too over the top for credibility, it sounds like it’s straight out of some super intense dnd session

they still can’t say bouillabaisse (which, like, weird because french, but still valid). nice touch is crowley couldn’t say soupe de poisson (fish stew) either and said poupe de soisson (sish ftew)

warlock mah boy how can you be a teenager and not like dinosaurs

c’est un dinosaure un nullosaure plutôt - apply burn heal

La façon dont warlock s’est exclamé « C’EST NUL » m’a fait penser au nain de naheulbeuk

the english version has nothing on french speaking aziraphale for the second hand embarrassement during the magic tour. it’s over 9000 i literally hid my head in my jumper when he was presenting harry the bunny. Horrible experience, 0/20, would not recommend

EP 2

oooh agnes has a lovely voice !

why is young newton having such a quality dub for the three sentences he has to say

dick turpin’s name is jesse james (tbf dick turpin is not known AT ALL in france, i discovered him reading good omens)

shadwell is pure chaos (as expected). No particular accent for him though, the chaotic energy was probably enough. Would have made me laugh if he had like, a chti or a marseilles accent.

aziraphale is so fucking stressed out by crowley’s driving i thought he was gonna explode

« tu es un gentil garçon » => « you’re a nice boy » said az to crowley DANG THAT’S SO INFANTILIZING AZIRAPHALE YOU’RE TALKING TO A DEMON FROM HELL NOT TO PINOCCHIO

ARGH FIRST MON ANGE OF THE SERIES i’m hit straight in the heart

anathema’s mom doesn’t have a spanish / latino accent at all when talking in spanish…. why...

dog being called toutou is definitely adorable (it’s basically « doggy » but way cuter imo)

tickety-boo has become ça gaze. that’s valid. it’s corny but i still use it unironically from time to time so ... i stan

EP 3

« je répands la fomentation » « i’m here spreading foment » « quoi tu fais des crêpes au froment ?????? »  « what you’re making crêpes with wheat ??? » love the fact that we shoehorned in one more ref to crêpes

az called crowley mon cher camarade, unintentionnal communist propaganda ftw

« pas de repos pour les… bah, pour les bons » « no rest for the… good »  – az was so deflated about the ineptitude he realized he was saying, he felt zero percent commited to his sentence

i was wondering how they would play aziraphale not being able to speak french in the bastille and they opted to have him stutter a bit and say to his executionner « excuse me i’m anxious » XD

« vous êtes le 999e aristo à mourir par mes soins. Mais vous êtes le premier en costume beige » « you’re the 999th aristocrat I’m going to kill, but the first one in beige attire » yeah i guess now that az isn’t english anymore his most noticeable feature is his cream aesthetic

« c’est au cas où ça tournerait en eau de boudin » « j’ADORE le boudin » => « in case it all goes pear shape » - the literal translation featuring food in french is « turning into black sausage water ». I don’t know what pear shaped inspires to english native speakers but the mere mention of boudin always make me giggle, it’s such a funny word and such a funny food

OH !!! no terrence rampa for the tv series, we’ve got anthony J. rampa. Rip terrence petit démon parti trop tôt :’(

« tu roules trop vite pour moi rampa » SERIOUSLY i know we can still infer « rouler » (here as in driving, but literally rolling) as a metaphor for their relationship but you could have said TU VAS TROP VITE that would have been so much better argh

has anathema got an emergency stock of potteries to break in case of emotionnal crisis ?

« Rampa, un démon très futé, il m’oblige à redoubler d’effort » « crowley, a very clever demon, he forces me to make double the amount of effort » oh so admitting you’re making an effort there aziraphale ? :))))))

dang i really want to know how shadwell said that major milk bottle died because not only did he die in combat but aziraphale’s reaction is a bit intense, it must have been quite a tale (this could be a crack fic prompt : «The Epic Tale of the Death Of Major Witchfinder Milk Bottle, by Sargent Witchfinder Shadwell» )

des sorcières et des phénomènes sorciéreux x)

CROWLEY CALLED AZIRAPHALE DUCON ?????? EXCUSE ME ????? #NotMyCrowley #CrowleyWouldNeverDoThat  #CancelAnthonyJRampa2K20  => ducon would be an insult, the gathering of du and con, con being a very nasty but common swear word, and associating it with du- makes it extremely patronizing. it’s like « absolute pathetic digraceful moron +++ ». thanks i hate it *frowny face *

EP 4

l’apocalypse c’est pour aujourd’hui juste après le goûter : it could be translated as « apocalypse is scheduled for today right after tea time » except that « goûter » is not quite tea time but rather the little sugary snack kids take when they come back from school and that most adults drop out of (i haven’t and i’m sure az hasn’t either). thanks aziraphale for having exclusively food related notion of the time because tbh same

ligur has no right to be this sexy between ariyon bakare and his french voice actor that’s just not allowed

radio crowley’s voice vs french ligur’s voice, who has the sexiest voice : FIGHT

(jk french agnes nutter’s voice is by far the sexiest)

gender neutral doesn’t ‘quite’ exist in french but pollution has been assigned a female voice actress and masculine pronouns (i’m saying it doesn’t quite exist because officially we have no gender neutral, but it’s a serious wip among lgbt+ circles to the point where it’s started being used in a few medias)

hastur « en attendant qu’un plombier vienne » / « while waiting for a plumber to come » does hell have a special plumber unit or do demons have to call on human plumbers for their pipes damages ? Dang hastur having to call a human plumber for hell’s plumbery is another damn good writing prompt for a crack fic

Michael is called Michel in the subtitles but Michael in the audio *shrug emoji*

EP 5 

to get a wiggle on has become « il faut qu’on se remue les fesses », literally « we need to shake our butts » like, yes, se remuer les fesses is a common expression to say « we need to act in order to get things done » but it really casts the image of people shaking their booty to some music and obviously crowley thinks the same Weirdly enough I have almost nothing to say for that episode. Sorry. But we’ve discovered most voice actors and actresses so far and no bit of dialogue really struck me as worth discussing or pointing fingers to mock it.

EP 6 

« on va BROUTER quelques derrières » - « we’re gonna lick some butts » OK THIS IS UNQUESTIONNABLY FAR SUPERIOR IN FRENCH THAN IN ENGLISH you thought LICKING butts was good ??? you really thought that ???? AZIRAPHALE HERE SUGGESTS TO GRAZE BUTTS. TO NIBBLE THEM. TO EAT THEM. TO. MUNCH. ON. THOSE. BUTTS!!!! not just licking, guys. This is as serious step beyond licking. (oh yeah he should have said « botter » instead of brouter btw, which is really just kicking, fyi)

« moi je crois en la paix, pétasse ! » wow, language, pepper (fyi i think « pétasse » is far far worse than « bitch » even if it means roughly the same, pétasse is almost never used while bitch is rather common, so it’s a swear word +++)

Dagon sounds like she’s got a nasty cold. #GetDagonIbuprofen2K20

I can confirm that Crowley offers Aziraphale to not just stay at his place, but to move in with him. « tu peux t’installer chez moi si tu veux ». omg they were roommates.

Bad translation strikes again : i don’t know why, but the french dub doesn’t have the « tickety-boo » / « ça gaze » being referenced as Rampa / Aziraphale is being knocked down, which is… a real mistep. It was narratively significant and I’m quite mad the translators missed it.

The Jesse James explanation from Newt has become very nonsensical, instead of the neat and to the point pun « wherever I go I hold up trafic » we’re getting a circonvoluted « because it’s a crime to mechanic’s diligence ». I’m not judging that one too hard, I have no idea how to make it better, and that’s probably how it was translated in the book as well thirty years ago, but it definitely doesn’t have the same impact. On the other hand, it definitely IS a very bad joke that doesn’t even deserve a chuckle, so Anathema’s embarassement really matches the audience’s (aka mine).

OVERALL :

I wasn’t convinced by Crowley… I mean, Rampa’s voice at first, but as the nerdiness showed up it really grew on me. I still think that french dubs have often problems with some voice inflexions every here and there, and for instance in Rampa’s case it was when he was annoyed or frustrated ( at the Globe when complaining about horses and Shakespeare’s plays that aren’t comedies, and also when discussing Azirphale’s magic tricks, it’s like… there is a step between having the right amount of grumpy complaining and overdoing it that is overlooked. It’s overacted, it should have been a bit quieter imo. I don’t mean to criticize voice actors too hard either but as an audience watching french dubs this is a very recurring problem and it always feels off to me. It’s actually one of the main reasons I avoid french dubs whenever possible.)

I have a hard time judging Aziraphale’s voice dub because it clashes so much with both the idea I had formed with it when I read the book and Sheen’s delivery that I just… kinda filtered it. It was too high pitched for me, and too anxious (though for this last point I must admit it could be funny at times, but I’m not fond of this character portrayal). The rest of the cast was rather good, nothing to complain about. There wasn’t anything stellar either, but everything that needed to be conveyed was and it was professionnal. It was also very homogeneous, no voice really struck me as being way too bad or way too good compared to the others, so it was really consistant.

So I don’t have much to complain about overall despite a few wonky translations here and there, BUT there is one thing I felt very robbed of : Crowley calling Aziraphale « mon ange » happens only once, when giving a lift to Anathema, and I’m almost certain they translated it that way because otherwise the joke about Anathama mistaking them for a couple wouldn’t work. So, they were forced to make it that way. The rest of the time Crowley calls Aziraphale « l’angelot », and despite being literally translated by « little angel », it feels sarcastic more than anything else ( the « L’ » in front of « angelot » is part of the reason why, it creates some distance, the other reason being that this word in itself has a very corny vibe and people being affectionnate to each other wouldn’t use it as a term of endearment). So, that’s a shame.

I like the English dub much much MUCH better than the French, but the french wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be. The voice actors and actresses were quite good, the dialogues mostly faithful and endearing despite a few really missed steps. It really had its moments. Props to brouter des derrières, that one was fantastic.

#good omens #french #french omens #tv omens #my stuff #meta #review #long post #text post #i hope you found this entertaining :)

[aspirinaeffervescente]

Good Omens: Italian and French version.

I read for the first time Good Omens in English thinking that the religious topic would be a bother to me but was actually very enjoyable. 

Then I decided to read it in Italian and French, and I saw the series in these 3 languages to see the differences between the sub/dub and guys...what experience.  So here a list of strange differences that made me laugh/cry/get angry as fuck cause knowing different languages is always a funny road to Hell:

--In Italian, the tittle’s book isn’t Good Omens (that should translate in Buona profezia), but it would sound weird, so they changed it in “Buona Apocalisse a tutti!” (Happy Apocalypse, Everyone!) Honestly, a mood.

--Let’s take a moment to appreciate the two covers book of two different editions from the Italian version. I have the first one where we have this two cute thingy embraced and the second one is...ahahah just look how Crowley seems distraught by Aziraphale. I can hear him muttering “What the fuck, angel.”

--When in a book/series they change the name of some character it’s always a pain to me but at least in Good Omens made me laugh so hard that I felt sick so I think that at the end of the day is fine. In the Italian version, Aziraphale is “Azraphel”, and I can still hear the translators discussing: “Oh, Aziraphale is too difficult to pronounce, we should change it.” “Ok, how should we call him?” “Azraphel.” “But...” “It’s easier to pronounce.” *whispering* “Dude, it isn’t.” --But in the French version, they did even worse since that “Anthony J. Crowley” is “Terrence Rampa”. (Why. Just why. Have you all drunk too much champagne in the shadow of the Eiffel tower on a full moon? How could you ever think it was a good idea? It isn’t pronounced more easily, I don’t have a perfect French pronunciation, but Terrence Rampa doesn’t sound better in French. For the love of someone, stop it.) While in the series is Anthony J. Rampa. (You just decided to make angry, admit it.) --The “Angel” thingy. Ok, you see, Angelo in Italian is a common name (it’s one of my brother’s names lmao) and God forbid we get confused so in the book we have “Angioletto.” (little angel but 300% cuter) and we have “Angelo Mio” (My angel, but you should read it like a lover gently whispering this on your ear while you’re waking after a night you spent kissing in bed, cause I’m pretty sure 100% of the people thought about this while they were reading it.) --The “Angel” thingy in French is even more romantic. You can’t call me “Mon Ange” without make me going on a mental trip where we will get married in a summer day on the beach, and then spend the rest of my life cooking something nice for lunch while our children, Mohamed and Genevieve, play soccer together, and my lovely wife is tending the garden. (Cause we don’t stand for gender roles) --The voices. Ok, maybe is cause I saw Good Omens with the original audio too many times...but how is it possible that we fucked up with the actor dubber? Guys, we’re usually good at this. Crowley's voice is Christian Iansante that it wasn’t a big surprise and a little less disappointing since I spent all my childhood hearing his voice since he dubbed the tenth doctor. But Aziraphale’s voice is so wrong. Isn’t him at all. 0/100 guys, they didn’t even try.  --In the French version Aziraphale is perfect cause...he’s so anxious. It made me laugh so hard, there’s the car scene where is going to have a heart attack.  The Bastille scene made me crack cause I was curious to know how they would show that he didn’t know how to speak french (How’s that possible? I mean he talks Japanese but not french? but...during Madame Tracy’s possession he asks “Parlez-vous français?” Aziraphale, just admit you wanted to show your bomb-ass outfit to Crowley and get over it.) ahem, anyway, in that scene he just stutters and says “Sorry, I’m anxious.” My father reaction was: *whipping his own tears away* “Me too, Aziraphale.”

--Ligur French’s voice is sexy. Like...obscenely hot.  I watched the french version for the first time with my girlfriend (she’s French) and the conversation after his first line was like: *Ligur first line* My girlfriend: “Oh, oui, bend me over your desk Monsieur Ligur and punish me cause I’ve been a bad girl.” “Babe, I’m still here.” *Ligur’s second line* “Ok, I see your point, but still...” We also had a little fight over “Is the Crowley-radio-version voice or Ligur French voice sexier?” and seems like, after a night spent discussing, Ligur won, but I still stand for Crowley’s voice being sexier just for the principle of things.  --In the Italian version Crowley doesn't say “Ciao.” but “au revoir“ and when Ligur asked, “What does it mean?”  Hastur said “French, it means food.” but the word “French” is told with so much disgust that made me crack cause I see that we still put our long rivalry between French and Italians on display. Knowing this is so much funnier. 

--Again, the Italian's version book made a change that I didn’t understand for a long time (we discussed it with my father for so long and drag in this hellhole my whole family) cause in the book Crowley isn’t a demon but a devil. After so long, my grandmother just dropped the bomb informing us that “Demons are good or bad entities, but devils are the fallen angels who revolted against God and followed Satan.” so it’s more accurate say to say Crowley is a devil, not a demon.  Honestly, I think that in Good Omens universe works better the word demon since the whole point of the book was that angels and demons aren’t good or evil, they just playing their role but they can be as much good as evil. (Aziraphale is a bastard, Crowley is kind) --Remaining on this topic for a moment, I always had this feeling that the angels are more similar from the Muslim vision of angels. For them, Angels can have flaws and make mistakes and aren’t perfect since only God is perfect. Or at least, I’m atheist, and my cousin explained this to me, so I’m open to any discussion.

--Wow. In the french version Crowley (I refuse to call him Rampa) is rude. He calls Aziraphale “Ducon” that is a common swear in French but disagreeable, Crowley wouldn’t ever call Aziraphale that way. Crowley, I know that you just had a tough week but wow, not cool buddy.

  --I mean, I knew that watching Good Omens in French and Italian would make me cry considering we don’t have the whole gender-neutral pronouns, but I don’t see why you should confusing me this way. At least French decided to stay with one pronoun and deal with it while Italian is just...ok, I understand we are chaotic by nature but can we stop just for a moment? God has a female voice (good, cause I would have riot) but they use male pronouns for them. Why? Too worried to get excommunicated by the pope? We still get anxious at the idea that God could be a woman? Guys, it’s 2020, get over it. Michael pronouns are male, and this is fair to me cause I have a whole headcanon about this and I will write it soon.  Pollution pronouns are female, male, female again. The translator must have thought “If we change enough times, they won’t notice.” Beelzebub is female (Uhm), but they still use “Lord” Beelzebub and it’s ok I presume (Hey, women can be Lords too!) No, it sounds horrible considering we had this bad habit to translate everything...Signor Beelzebub sounds like they’re in charge of a carnival parade, not Hell. We could stay with “Lord” and no one would get confused by this cause we know that “Lord” is a noble title in England and this is a British comedy. We don’t have to translate everything-everything.  I mean, for these characters...why didn’t use the plural? Would sound a bit weird at start maybe but at least no one would be offended. (Not that I’m offended, to be clear, but someone could be.)

--The Italian version made me burst in flame at some point when I noticed that they tried to cancel the whole thing “Aziraphale and Crowley are a couple” avoiding every time the “my angel” in the dubb. I didn’t notice the first time, but Hell. Fortunately, Micheal Sheen and David Tennant make us saw the love even without words. Also, a point for Christian Iansante, Crowley’s dubber, cause he can make a high pitch voice when his character is panicking. We cried for “Non Voglio Andarmene.” (I don’t want to go) from Doctor who with him, we cried for the bookshop fire cause Crowley is 1000% more upset than the original version. (We stand for the drama) At the end of the day, I still remain on the facts that books and series/films should be read/watch with the original audio. I also think that reading/watching them in other languages is very interesting and a lot of fun, so I don’t think I have a definite opinion. It’s just fun. For the voices, I was convinced by Crowley for the Italian version and for Aziraphale from the french, while Italian Aziraphale is a big no and “Rampa” is rude and seems...he isn’t Crowley. I don’t know how to explain.  From the back, someone is saying that the only voice that is winning is PornFrenchLigur and I have to agree with this.

#good omens #italian good omens #french good omens #buona apocalisse a tutti #de bons presages #good omens meta #writer on tumblr

[bab-ybird]

Friday Nights with Defsoul

Pairing: Jaebeom x Reader

Genre: College!au, Best friend!Jaebeom, best friends to lovers, fluff, fluff, and more fluff

Word Count: 8,245 words

[ ft. GOT7 and some DAY6 members ]

A/N Yes, I am aware that I misspelled Jaebeom’s name here, but I wrote this before he clarified the spelling, so until I find time to edit this, you’re just going to have to sit through jAebUm lmao oops; thanks for reading tho! mwah

~

It's been a while since Jaebum last attended a party. Not because he was busy- even though he was- but because he just didn't feel like it. After all, parties were only fun when he was in the mood to get wasted and spend the night dancing with his best friends, so he didn't see the point of attending one when he felt like doing something else more productive.

Like hosting his radio segment. He'd only decided to join the campus' radio station as a DJ in the October of the previous academic year. It was in his third year of college that he composed a significant amount of songs and gained enough experience to be confident enough to share them with the world that was his university. Finally giving into Park Sungjin’s, his senior, antics about becoming a part of the crew, Jaebum now appeared on the station every Friday night to share his music in a segment he (lamely) liked to call "Friday Nights with Defsoul". Now, he was in his second year of hosting the segment, and his fourth year of college, set to graduate at the end of March- if he managed to not screw anything up.

Despite not being in the mood to party, Jaebum couldn't say no to his friend Jackson's invitation- not when Jackson was using this party as an excuse to finally relax from his hectic life. It was rare that Jackson was willing to let loose for the night (he was always so busy with his extra-curricular activities), and since Jaebum figured that his friend needed all his support during this tough time in his life, he agreed to be present. So here he was, half-heartedly sipping at a drink that his over-enthusiastic friend, Park Jaehyung, had given him, standing at the kitchen counter, and snacking on a bowl of chips that he had poured for himself.

"Jaebum! My man!"

Ah. The sweet sound of a dongsaeng forgetting to call me hyung.

Hong Kong native and fellow performance group member Jackson Wang carelessly calls out his hyung's name as he bounds through the kitchen door with a red cup in his hands. "I've been looking all over for you!"

"Have you really?" Jaebum asks sarcastically. "You seemed so eager to leave me alone, by myself, when you went to go mingle with your Chinese friends."

Failing to notice that Jackson didn't come up to him alone, Jaebum almost misses the small chuckle that comes from Jackson's friend. A girl with a lean frame, pale skin, long black hair, and the warmest brown eyes Jaebum had ever seen watches their exchange silently. You stand behind Jackson, watching amusedly as he playfully hit his hyung's arm. "Aish, hyung, don't be like that. They're Chinese, like me. They remind me of home."

Jaebum nods understandingly, patting his friend on the back. "Okay, okay, I get it. Go have fun- "

"EY, LUCAS! Glad you could make it, man!"

And just like that, Jackson forgets about his friends and leaves the kitchen to go mingle with a handful of people who look too young to be at a college party.

"Don't they look a little too young to be here?" Jaebum comments, eyeing the new arrivals and starting a conversation with the girl that Jackson had left him with to entertain.

You seem to know who he's talking about and nod. "Yeah, they are. They're just in high school."

Jaebum's eyes nearly pop out of his head. "Eh?! And Jackson invited them here? How does he even know them?"

Amused at his reaction, you smile. "They met at a summer camp a couple of months ago. You know what he's like, it's so easy for him to get homesick. I'm happy he's able to make so many friends that let him feel like he's at home, even if just for a little while."

Jaebum watches the kitchen door warily, largely aware of the trouble that the underaged teens could get into if they were caught drinking. Sensing his discomfort, you speak up again. "I wouldn't worry too much about them. I made Jackson swear that he would take care of them tonight. No alcohol, no drugs, no funny business whatsoever."

These words unexpectedly give him comfort, despite the fact that they come from a complete stranger. "Thanks." He says. "That makes me feel better."

You nod, but don’t say anything back as you reach into the fridge and grab one of the many smoothie bottles that Jackson liked to stock up on.

"You seem to be really close to him. How come I've never heard of you before?" Jaebum asks.

Swallowing the sip you had just taken, you sit on a counter stool as you answer. "Jackson and I go back. Summer before freshman year, I think? We met at summer camp."

Raising an eyebrow, Jaebum tilts his head, confused. "Oh, so you're-?"

"Chinese?" You chuckle. "No. I'm Spanish-Korean, actually."

Jaebum's head tilts in confusion. "Spanish-Korean? But then why would you go to one of Jackson's Chinese summer camps?"

"I speak Chinese. At least, now I do. Back then, I wanted to get a better grasp of the language before heading off to college, so I decided to attend a Chinese summer camp." You tell him, taking another sip.

"So how many languages do you speak? Or is it just Spanish, Chinese, and Korean?" Jaebum can't stop himself from asking.

You shake your head, smiling proudly. "I'm also fluent in English, Russian, Japanese, and French."

"Wow." Jaebum's voice comes out filled with awe. "That's amazing. It really is, I've never met someone fluent in so many languages. You could conquer the world, probably."

Chuckling softly, you brush the hair out of your face. "Thanks. I'm flattered."

"If you don't mind me asking, why so many?" Once again, Jaebum can't keep his nose out of your business.

"Oh, I want to be a translator or a travel guide." You tell him honestly. "I love travelling, and the only thing I'm good at is talking to people, so I figured I'd make a career out of it."

"That sounds fun." Jaebum comments. "So, your major is-?"

"Majoring in Linguistics, minoring in World History." You answer. "What about you?"

The conversation is suddenly about him, and he thinks it’s such a shame because he could spend all night learning the tiniest details about this very interesting girl.

"Major in Film, minor in Music Theory." He says.

"Oh, you're into music?" You ask. "Do you compose?"

Jaebum nods at this, takes a sip of his drink, and gestures for you to share his bowl of chips.

"Are you, perhaps, on the campus radio?" You raise an eyebrow.

Jaebum is shocked. Unless he told them directly, no one ever even guessed that he was a DJ for the campus' radio station. "How did you know?"

You snap your fingers, looking at him with a triumphant look in your eyes. "I knew your voice sounded familiar! You're Defsoul, aren't you? The DJ that comes on every Friday night?"

Oh, my god. For the first time in his life, Jaebum is speechless. How did this girl, who didn't even know him before this, figure that out faster than any of his actual friends?

"Um- I, uh- "

Taking a sip from your drink, you continue. "I love your segment. I've been listening to it ever since you started."

Wow. "Thank you. That means so much to me, really." Jaebum finally finds his words.

"Although..." You hesitate, and this makes Jaebum even more curious.

"What is it?" He pries.

"Well," You pause. "Have you ever considered, um...calling it by a different name?"

...excuse me? "Come again?"

"Don't misunderstand me, please!" You hurriedly apologize. "Not to be rude, or anything, it's just...your segment name is sort of..."

Jaebum senses that you’re having difficulty putting it nicely, so he offers words of his own. "Lame? Boring? Cliché?"

You nod, relieved that you don't have to say it yourself. "Exactly."

Jaebum gives you an expression of distaste. "I happen to like calling it that, thank you very much. My friends think it's a good name too!"

"I'm not saying that they don't! It's just that you could have a name that's catchier, more unique, more memorable- so maybe one with not too many syllables in it- "

"Okay, okay, stop. I get it." Despite himself, Jaebum finds himself laughing, thoroughly amused by this girl and her personality. "I still don't know your name."

"I’m Y/N." You tell him.

Jaebum offers his hand for you to shake. "Im Jaebum."

"Finally." You say, firmly gripping onto his hand as you shake it. "A name and face behind the lamest radio segment name in the world."

Jaebum's jaw drops as he watches you laugh with an incredulous look on his face. "Wow, you really- "

"I'm joking, I'm joking!" You cackle unreservedly. "Forgive me."

Jaebum decides to poke some fun at you. "No, I don't think I will."

Your face falls. "Ah, oppa, please! We only just met!"

Jaebum shakes his head stubbornly, taking a sip of his drink.

"Fine." You resolve. "If it helps my case in any way, I'll personally make it my mission to find you a better segment name."

Jaebum shrugs, swallowing his drink as he watches you munch on his chips. "I don't see the point of changing it, to be honest. I'll be gone in a couple of months."

"Okay, first of all, graduation's still in March. It's only September, you still have a long way to go." You point out. "Second of all, that's all the more reason to change it! You don't want to leave this school known as the guy who couldn't come up with a cooler name for his segment now, do you?"

Jaebum narrows his eyes. "As much as I hate to admit it, you make a valid point."

"Of course, I do." At this, Jaebum scoffs, making you laugh. "Look, since you're obviously incapable of doing it yourself, I'll do it, okay?"

Jaebum looks at you incredulously. "Yah. Don't you think you've insulted me enough?"

"Sorry! Sorry, I'm joking." You apologize quickly. "I can't help it. I'll stop, I promise. As an apology for my behavior, how about I make you a drink?"

Jaebum accepts, looking into his cup with distaste. "Why the hell not? You owe it to me to make me one, and this one tastes like shit anyways."

You get up from your stool. "I'll be right back."

The both of you fall into conversation so naturally that night, that neither of you notice how long you talk for until the music dies and the small crowd goes quiet. You exit the kitchen to be greeted by the sight of passed out bodies sprawled across the floor, the party host nowhere in sight. While you do a thorough check of the first floor for any conscious party-goers, Jaebum does a sweep of the second floor to find Jackson unconscious on his bed. Setting some painkillers and a glass of water on his bedside table, Jaebum goes back downstairs and leaves the house with you, locking the door as you walk out. You quietly chat about random things as he walks you back to your dorm, and Jaebum decides he wants to be your friend. Obtaining your number, the both of you text each other the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Suddenly, going to parties doesn't seem so bad anymore.

-=-=-=-

Jaebum feels his phone vibrate in his pocket as he exits his last class of the day.

Y/N: Hey, are you doing anything for the rest of the day?

He feels a smile growing on his lips, but he stops himself from smiling at his phone in public.

JB: No, why?

Y/N: Last class' prof isn't showing up, and everyone else is busy. Want to get dinner?

JB: It's like...5pm.

Y/N: Fine. Want to eat food, extend eating into the hours of the night, and call it dinner?

At this, Jaebum allows the corners of his mouth to curl up in a grin.

JB: Sure. Where do you want to meet?

Y/N: I'm at the convenience store in front of the social sciences building. Bring your wallet.

Jaebum can't help but chuckle at this. He immediately stuffs his notebook in his bag, and heads for the social sciences building. When he gets there, he sees you standing outside the convenience store across the street. He's about to cross when he sees you motion for him to stay put, crossing the street yourself. In your hand is a plastic bag of various snacks and drinks that you had just purchased.

"Take this, please." You heave, holding the bag out for him to take. Jaebum receives it, noticing red marks on your hand, left behind by the weight of the bag. "Thank you. God, that's heavy."

"You could've asked for two bags." Jaebum points out, falling into step beside you as the both of you walk in the direction of a nearby park. You shake your head adamantly.

"Tsk, tsk, Jaebum. Don't think like that. It's not good for the environment." You tut, imitating the tone of a mom scolding her child. "Do you want help with your bag?"

He raises an eyebrow. "You just gave this to me, and now you want it back?"

"Not the convenience store bag, dummy." You smile. "Your backpack, I meant."

"Ah. No, I'm fine." Jaebum refuses.

"You sure?" You press. "The bag I gave you is quite heavy, and I'm not carrying anything. I'd feel bad if you were the only one doing the work here."

Jaebum smirks, turning his head to look at you. "What kind of man would I be if I made you carry my bag for me?"

Your jaw drops and you put a hand to your chest dramatically. "Now why'd you have to bring gender roles into this? I'm just offering an exchange of baggage!"

Shaking his head, Jaebum's smile doesn't leave his face as the both of you arrive at the park and settle on the grass. He sits, crossing his ripped-jean clad legs. You mirror his position, sitting in front of him, comfortable in your leggings. Tugging the plastic bag closer, you pours out its contents onto the grass, revealing bags of chips, and four bottles of drinks, two of each kind.

"First things first," You start. "Don't think I'm some kind of gold digger or anything like that just because I told you to bring your wallet."

Jaebum smirks, looking at you with amusement. "Wasn't planning on it."

"I only asked you to bring your wallet because since I bought us snacks, I expect you to pay for dinner." You declare, ripping open a bag of chips. "And not in the gentleman-should-always-pay manner, but in the it's-my-turn-to-pay manner."

"Sounds fair." He helps himself to another bag, opening it and setting it in between them so that the both of them can share. "What are you, some kind of feminist?"

You cock your head to the side in genuine confusion. "Huh?"

"That's the second comment you've made today about gender roles."

"Oh." You laugh, understanding. "No, I'm not. I just don't like it when people hear my words but listen to a different meaning, so I have a habit of saying things explicitly. Miscommunication is so common these days, don't you think?"

He nods in agreement. "Too true."

"Besides," you add, lifting a chip to your mouth but not eating it yet. "it's easier to let people know what type of person you are straight up instead of having them judge every single thing you do."

Jaebum thoughtfully watches you as you continue to munch on your salty snack. As a student, he was too familiar with the saying 'honesty is the best policy', having heard it almost every day, but you take it to a different level, give it a completely different meaning.

Noticing his blatant staring, you raise an eyebrow in the middle of chewing. "Why are you staring at me like that?" You ask, voice muffled by the hand you raise to cover your mouth.

"Oh. Uh, nothing." Jaebum answers, averting his eyes. "You're probably the most honest person I've ever met."

The expression on your face is unreadable, Jaebum decides, as you nod.

"It's a good thing." He adds, just in case it isn't clear.

Not failing to pick up on this, you chuckle, tucking your hair behind your ear. "Really? Most people don't think so."

"Oh? Why not?"

You shrug. "A lot of people say I'm too blunt. Too brutal when it comes to expressing myself. That I don't know how to sugar coat even the harshest words."

"And how do you feel about that?"

You shrug, meeting his eyes. "I don't really care. They're all empty words. At the end of the day, the truth is the truth, and nothing can change that."

At that moment, Jaebum notices the sun starting to set. Its light tints everything in hues of orange and purple, reflecting off of the brown of your eyes. The last rays of the day kiss your skin and the strands of your hair, giving you an ethereal glow.

"Stay put." Jaebum orders, reaching into his bag and digging around for his camera.

"Didn't have plans of moving at all." You comment.

Jaebum brings out his camera and turns it on, hoping to capture the scene before him.

"Smile." He tells you.

Lightly grinning and striking a casual pose, you stare back at the camera lens. You watch as Jaebum frequently changes his position, making sure to not leave any angle uncaptured. He even plucks a random daisy he found, asking you to hold it up to your face and pose with it. You oblige, even moving your snacks aside so you could get up to stand and pose as Jaebum directs you from behind the camera.

By the time Jaebum decides he's done with the impromptu photoshoot, the sun's completely gone, and your space on the ground is dimly lit by a nearby streetlight. You finish the rest of your snacks and drinks while looking at the pictures he took, and when that's done, fall into natural conversation as you walk around, looking for a good restaurant.

"Was that for a project?" You ask as you’re seated at one of the tables in a barbeque restaurant.

"The pictures? No." Jaebum answers, picking up the menu card and scanning it. The both of you had previously decided that since he would be the one paying, he would be choosing the menu for tonight.

"Then why take so many?" You ask, thanking the waitress that comes to bring them your side dishes.

Before the waitress leaves, Jaebum places his orders and returns the menu card. "I had to take a photography class in my freshman year. It became a hobby of mine."

"Do you have a photography account on Instagram or something?" You ask. "Photographers are into that, right?"

"Yeah, I do." He confirms, somewhat baffled. "How are you so good at that?"

"Hm?" You raise your eyebrows. "Good at what?"

"You're the only person to ask me these without me having to mention it first. None of my friends asked about the radio segment or my Instagram. I've barely known you for a week and you've already figured out both!"

You shrug, smiling and sitting up as the meat is served. "Intuition, I guess."

As Jaebum gets to work in grilling the meat, you nibble on the side dishes. Dinner is quiet. The two of you fall into a comfortable silence, your chewing being accompanied by soft sounds of approval at the taste of the meat.

You guys finish eating just before the clock strikes 8pm. You wait outside as Jaebum settles the bill, and you both decide you want to take a walk before returning home.

"Before I forget," You start, brushing your hair back. From his angle, Jaebum can see the way the streetlights illuminate your face, giving your skin a warm glow. The shadows that fall across your features contrast greatly against the milky color of your skin, giving your face depth and definition. The moonlight kisses the highest points of your face and brings a twinkle to your eyes, nature giving you an ethereal glow for the second time that day. Despite it only being his second time to witness this kind of natural beauty, Jaebum didn't think he would ever get tired of seeing you like this, nor did he think he would ever stop craving to capture every single moment like it.

"Def's Soul." You say.

Jaebum blinks. "What?"

"I told you I would come up with a new name for your segment." You state simply. "I decided on one just in time for your next appearance on the station."

"But, that's just my code name."

You hum in disagreement. "No, it's not. Def's Soul. As in, the soul of Def. Your soul."

Jaebum looks at you in amusement. He has to admit; it is kind of catchy.

"Music comes from within, right? By sharing your music to the world, you're giving everyone who listens a peek into your soul, your mind. I thought of calling it 'Peeking Into Defsoul', but that's just not attractive to listen to, it has a weird connotation, and it's worse than what you've got now. You can also call it 'Soul in Seoul; by Def', but I think 'Def's Soul' is the best." You finish your mini ramble about the segment name, turning to look at Jaebum's reaction. Jaebum can see on your face that you’re happy with what you had come up with, and abandons all plans of bickering with you about not needing to change the name of his segment at all.

"Okay." He concludes. "Def's Soul it is."

-=-=-=-

"Hey, everybody, welcome back. I hope you all had a wonderful week, hung out with some friends, aced all your tests. I know I certainly did. Even if you didn't, there's always next week.

Before we get down to business and listen to some sick tunes, I just want everyone to know that I'm going to be changing my segment name. That's right, from now on this segment will no longer be known as 'Friday Nights with Defsoul', but 'Def's Soul'.  As in my soul.

If you want to know why, ask away and I'll reply in a bit, but for now, let's welcome the weekend with Sucker by the Jonas Brothers."

The live comments feed is suddenly full of questions on why he suddenly decided to change the segment name. When the song comes to an end, Jaebum turns the microphone back on.

"A lot of you are asking why I suddenly decided to change the name.

To be honest, it wasn't my idea at all. I was content with the previous name, but I met someone who recognized my voice from radio and told me that it was such a corny name. So, she helped choose a new name, and that's when she mentioned 'Def's Soul'.

Basically, it means that by showing you all my music and my personal playlists, I'm giving you guys a peek into my soul, my mind. A song says a lot about the composer and lyricist, the same way you can tell a lot about someone by the way they compile their personal playlists.

In my opinion, it's one of the most intimate things a person can bare, yet also one of the vaguest. As those of you who study the arts should know, art can be interpreted in many different ways. Some interpretations are exactly the message you want to convey, and others are the exact opposite. So, by sharing my music with you, I'm baring my soul while at the same time, covering it up for you guys to decipher and uncover.

Here's your next look: we have one of my personal favorites, Teenager, by yours truly, featuring my friend, Jackson Wang. Enjoy."

Jaebum switches off the microphone, leaning back in his chair and sipping on a bottle of water as he listens to one of his latest compositions blare through the speakers of the studio.

Things in front of my eyes look new...

You brighten even the deep part of my heart...

-=-=-=-

"You were right." Jaebum comments, sinking down on the grass. You look up, and, seeing the cat in Jaebum's arms, take hold of it immediately, cooing and petting its head. "Def's Soul is a much better name."

You raise an eyebrow, looking at him triumphantly. "Oh? What made you realize it?"

"A couple of kids in my cinematography class were talking about it." He says. "Then I passed a couple of people on my way here who were also talking about it. I guess it just rolls of the tongue more easily."

You grin as you strokes the cat's head. It purrs, nuzzling its head against your arm. "I'm glad."

You stroke it a couple of more times. "What's her name?"

Jaebum looks at you blankly, clearly not paying attention. You chuckle. "Your cat. What's her name?"

"Nora." Jaebum watches as his cat cozies up to you, looking the most content she ever had. "She likes you."

"Really? I like her too." You grin widely, bringing Nora to your face to rub cheeks with her.

"You should cat-sit sometime." Jaebum suggests. "I tend to get really busy with practice."

"Practice? For what?" You ask.

"Dance practice. I'm part of a performance group."

You stare at him unbelievingly. "No way. For real?"

Jaebum nods nonchalantly.

"That's so cool! You're so multi-talented, can I watch you guys practice? I'll take care of Nora in the practice room and I'll stay out of your way. Promise!"

Chuckling at your enthusiasm, Jaebum finds himself nodding. "Sure. You can stay with Youngjae's friend who always comes."

"Yes!" You cheer, then lean down to talk to Nora. "You hear that Nora? We're going to see Jaebum-oppa dance!"

A strange feeling appears in Jaebum's chest, one he can't explain. "What?"

Looking up innocently, you meet his eyes. "Hm?"

"What did you call me?"

Tilting your head confusedly, you answer. "Oppa?"

Calm down, Jaebum, your heart's beating a little too fast right now. Stop thinking about how cute she is when she does that. "Why? You never call me that."

"I was...talking to Nora..." You say, confused as to why it was such a big deal.

Oh, Y/N. If only you knew.

-=-=-=-

A couple of days later, you find yourself walking alongside Jaebum, Nora's carrier in hand. He's leading you to their practice room, telling you stories on the way there. Like how one time, the boys had a bonding night and ended up drinking too many bottles of soju. One of their maknaes, Bambam from Thailand, had apparently unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt and, singing wildly, started swinging around on a streetlight as if it was a pole. When the both of you arrive at the studio, your stomach hurt from all the laughing you did on your walk there.

As you approach the door, muffled sounds can be heard through the walls from the inside.

"Yah, get that away from me!" Youngjae, Jaebum notes.

"Kim Yugyeom, I swEAR to god I will kick your ass if you- " Youngjae's friend, Nayoung.

"I'm joking, noona, I'm joking!" That's Yugyeom.

"Hyung, please-!" Youngjae again.

"What happened to my hair?!" Bambam, in front of the mirror, probably.

"Really, no one cares." Jinyoung.

Plus, a loud cackle that can only belong to Jackson. That leaves Mark, though he's probably resting on the couch, so everyone's present.

As he slowly swings the door open, you clearly hear the commotion inside- though it sounds more like chaos to you.

"Sorry. They're a bit noisy." Jaebum tells you as he holds open the door so you can walk through.

"A bit?" You scoff. "I'll say."

Fully stepping into the room, your suspicions are only confirmed as you’re met with the sight of five guys and a girl causing a scene in the wide space. From where he stands, Jaebum can see Jackson chasing Youngjae with something furry in his hand, the latter not realizing that it was fake and running away screaming for his hyung to stop. Yugyeom's holding out something as equally furry, except it's directed towards the only other female in the room. The girl, Nayoung, then proceeds to take one of the few pillows on the couch, raising it above her head to protect herself from whatever Yugyeom is threatening her with, before knocking the thing out of his hands and chasing him around the room, ready to beat his ass. Bambam stands in front of the mirror in a state of distress as he runs his fingers through his now blonde hair. Jinyoung stands at his side, looking like he had better things to do, yet still taking the time to laugh at Bambam's situation. All this chaos and Mark is calmly perched on the couch, tapping away at his phone and playing a game.

At the sight of a newcomer, this all stops.

"Everyone, this is- "

"Y/N!" A loud voice that can only belong to Jackson yells. You laugh as one of your closest friends comes running and tackles you in a hug. Jaebum suddenly feels the need to unwrap Jackson's arms, but since he knows that you guys are close friends, he controls himself from following through with his tendencies.

One by one, the others unfreeze from their positions. Bambam is the first to approach, though for a completely different reason.

Sitting down in front of you, he unlatches the opening of Nora's carrier and lets her crawl onto his lap. "Hi Nora~ I missed you. It's been a while." He coos.

Jaebum sets his things down in a corner of the room and watches as Jackson introduces you to everyone. The group's practice ensues after that, and you and Nayoung sit on the couch, making sure to keep out of the boys' way.

While he dances, Jaebum steals glances of you in the mirror. His chest becomes warm and his smile only grows bigger whenever he manages to catch you enjoying the song they're dancing to- his song. Page.

By the end of it all, the nine of them gather in a circle on the floor, sharing tupperwares of Nayoung's homemade kimbap, stir-fried pork, and rice balls. Then, as if the heavy snack isn't enough to satiate their hunger, the group leaves the studio and heads for a restaurant just halfway down the block.

Jaebum ends up sitting beside you and across Jackson. The group place their orders for boxes of chicken and bottles of beer. Once the food arrives, everyone's mouth is soon preoccupied with eating.

"Hey Jaebum-hyung. Are we still up for that music video shooting next week?" Jinyoung pipes up, taking a sip of his beer. "I need to know whether or not I can visit home."

"I'm still looking for someone to help me film. A lot of the people in my class are too busy with their own projects." Jaebum answers. "If I don't find anyone by Thursday, you can tell your mom you'll be home for the three-day weekend."

"Why don't you ask Y/N to do it?" Jackson says, gesturing to you with nod of his head. "You were a videographer at one point, right? In high school?"

You narrow your eyes at him. "I don't remember telling you that, but yes, I was."

"Really? Would you be willing to help us film?" Jaebum asks, turning to his left to face you. "It's for my final project, and you'll be fully credited."

You shrug. "Sure. Just give me a time and place and I'll let you know if I'm free."

The following weekend, you help them film, and Jaebum finds that he really likes the way you do it. He also has fun editing the music video for his cinematography class, and decides that it would be a good idea to film more music and performance videos. The credits are always the same; you as the camerawoman, Nayoung as the hair stylist and makeup artist, Jaebum as the editor, director, and producer, and GOT7 as the cast. It's a fun little hobby.

Months pass and before you know it, it's the last month of your senior year. In a couple of weeks, you would be taking the last exams of your college career and a few weeks after that, you'd be graduating and leaving this place forever.

That should've been Jaebum's only worry.

But he started noticing recently that you were looking a little worse for wear. Your undereye area was looking a lot darker than normal, your skin turned a sickly pale tone, and you lost a lot of weight. He knew that you were aware of these changes as you started wearing masks more, and often hid behind baggy clothing- most of which consisted of his hoodies.

He'd tried talking to you about it, but you, like him, weren't the type to be open about your struggles and personal problems. So, he'd let you be, watching over you from afar, and taking care of you in whatever way he could. Jaebum would drive you to your part-time job if he was free, so you could rest in his car instead of tiring yourself out by taking the bus and walking. He'd show up at your apartment in the morning when he knew you would still be in there, more often than not holding a breakfast pastry and smoothie in his hands. He'd make sure you ate properly and didn't miss any meals, and even helped you study for your exams (Most of his were practical, anyway. He didn't have as much to memorize as you did.). He was the reason the amount of cup noodles you were accustomed to consuming lessened significantly.

Despite all of Jaebum's efforts, you didn't seem to improve at all.

On this particular Thursday morning, Jaebum knocks on your door holding a ham and cheese croissant in one hand and a jug of organic orange juice (courtesy of Jackson) in the other. There's a stumble from the inside of the unit, and you open the door, flustered.

Cute. Jaebum watches as you stand there in your mismatched pajamas, bare face, and messy hair that's sticking up all over the place. You cover your mouth, yawning. He frowns at the sight of your eye bags and sickly skin, but covers this up with a cheery grin. "Good morning!"

"Jaebum?" You mumble sleepily. "What time is it?"

He checks his watch. "Almost 10 in the morning. I wanted to wake you up so you'd have time to eat before your 1pm exam."

At the mention of the academic enemy, your eyes widen. "Shit. I was supposed to wake up two hours ago! I'm not done studying!"

You run back into the apartment, leaving Jaebum to let himself in and lock the door behind him. He watches as you frantically flip through your notes and continues studying your reviewer in obvious distress.

Setting the food beside her, he ruffles your hair. "Eat."

Without looking back to check if you listen, Jaebum makes his way into the kitchen and starts cooking up lunch for the two of you. He figures a healthy serving of spicy soft tofu stew would be just what you needed to get through the day.

Jaebum adds lots of meat to the pot, and even cooks rice for the both of you. While the stew is boiling, he sets the table, bringing out utensils, glasses, and a pitcher of water. By the time he finishes cooking, it's 11am, and he guesses that you have just enough time to eat, shower, and cram study some more.

He brings the steaming pot of jjigae to the dining table and literally has to peel you away from your notes. It doesn't take much to make you eat; you quickly figure out that the sooner you finish your share of the meal, the sooner Jaebum would allow you to return to your cramming. Scarfing down the food with no shame, you finish eating in less than ten minutes, while Jaebum sits beside you, leisurely consuming his portion. He eats slowly, calmly, and watches amusedly as you become frantic about studying again.

Jaebum finishes up his meal and cleans the table, even doing the dishes. When the clock strikes exactly 12:15pm, he forces you to take a shower, holding the door close from the outside. He only leaves after you stop trying to pry it open and he hears the water running.

By 12:50pm, Jaebum is walking you to your exam hall, where he stops a few feet from the door to let you go in by yourself. You stop in your tracks, turn to face Jaebum, and give him a shy smile.

"Thank you..." you start. "For doing what you did. You didn't need to, but you did. All of it."

Jaebum finds himself smiling, his chest warming up. "It's no big deal."

"No, but," you continue. "I'm really grateful. More than you could ever know. I owe you one."

"You don't owe me anything." Jaebum tells you. "Consider this as payment for all the times you filmed for us."

You start to shake your head, but Jaebum speaks up again. "Besides, as your friend, it's sort of my job to take care of you."

You chuckle and smile, staring at him with fond eyes. "Still. Thank you."

Jaebum doesn't expect what you do next. He's frozen in place as you step forward to stand on your toes and press a soft kiss to his cheek. There's no trace of shyness on your face as you step back, give him a bright smile, and turn around to enter the exam hall.

Jaebum's sure that his ears had gone red by the time he finally moves (a good five minutes later). Unable to calm his heart down, he takes deep breaths as he makes his way back to his apartment. The moment he steps in and closes the door behind him, Nora comes padding up to him with her soft paws- the exact moment he decides to let out an excited and joyful scream.

She kissed me. She actually kissed me.

The smile on Jaebum's face never leaves him for the rest of the day.

-=-=-=-

It's a couple of days later that Jaebum convinces you to finally take a break. Between your part-time job and studying for finals, you were exhausted, and it was starting to show physically.

Since he knows that you would study if he left you alone in your apartment, he manages to drag you out of yours and into his with the goal of hanging out by eating a big meal together. Jaebum had prepared multiple boxes and orders of delivery food; pizza, hamburgers, jokbal, fried chicken, bossam, you name it. He's rather proud of how he set it all up in his living room: a comfortable layout of pillows and blankets, the coffee table in front of them completely covered in the food, and his TV ready to play whatever movie Netflix could provide.

"So how do you think you did on your exams so far?" Jaebum asks as you both begin to open up the different boxes of food.

"Let's not talk about that, please. I'm going to want to study again and that completely defies the purpose of this break." You respond, helping yourself to the jokbal.

Jaebum nods. "Fair enough."

He clears his throat. "How are you, then?"

You shrug. "Fine enough. How are you?"

"Fine enough." Jaebum repeats, a small grin on his face. You mirrors his expression when you catch onto what he did.

Meeting with you was always like this. Somehow, you brought out the playful side of him and you almost always ended up giggling at nothing.

"I'm just a little tired but I'll be fine." You add, bringing a piece of meat to your lips and giving him a half-hearted smile.

Jaebum studies you as he eats, stealing glances at you every now and then. When you both decide you're done eating, Jaebum persuades you to rest on the couch while he cleans up. He walks back into the living room to find that you had started watching a movie, and sinks down onto the couch beside you. Hardly paying attention to the movie, Jaebum finds himself watching you.

He's under the impression that you’re completely immersed in the movie and didn't think you'd notice, but you pause the movie and set the remote down, turning to look at him with a questioning look on your face.

"What is it, Jaebum?" You ask.

Jaebum gives you an innocent look. "Hmm?"

"You've been staring at me since dinner. What's the matter?"

Jaebum sighs. He isn't getting out of this one. "I'm just worried, I guess."

"About what?"

"You. You suck at taking care of yourself. Every time I see you, it's like your eye bags have gotten darker, you've lost more weight, you have less energy, you're paler-"

"Okay, okay, I get it." You cut him off, chuckling. Jaebum stares at you incredulously.

"Are you laughing?" He asks. "Is this funny to you? I'm worried about your health and well-being and you have the audacity to laugh at me?"

You shake your head, smiling at him. "You're too cute, Jaebum-ah."

Jaebum stops and his body has no other reaction other than to huff and turn away.

"I'm not laughing at you. Promise. It's just cute how you're so worried." You say. "Why are you even bothered so much anyway? It's not like I'm dying."

Jaebum gives you a deadpan look. "This is what I get for being concerned? You're an ungrateful friend."

This makes you burst out into loud laughter, and it's so contagious that Jaebum can't help but join in. When the both of you calm down, you give him another smile. "You don't need to worry, Jaebum. I'm fine."

Jaebum doesn't agree. He always worries about you. But he doesn't say that and just nods.

You turn away. "Geez, you worry too much. It's not like you're my boyfriend or anything."

Jaebum freezes at that statement. For some reason, it hurt. A lot.

You’ve already resumed playing the movie, so he mumbles to himself. "What's so wrong with that?"

"Hmm? What was that?" You ask, pausing the movie again to look at him.

Jaebum turns his face to look at you. He has no doubt his emotions are displayed all over his face. His heart feels heavy- is it really so bad that he wants to be yours? You made it seem so...unappealing.

"Hey." Your voice comes out cautious, gentle. "You okay?"

Jaebum breaks his silence, raising his eyes to look at you properly. "Would it really be so bad? If I wanted to be?"

Your eyes widen. "Jaebum, I-"

"Answer me. You make it seem as if dating me is such an unappealing concept. Is it really that bad?" Jaebum's voice came out weak, insecure, and he hates it. He was never really the insecure one. Everything he did, he did it with the security of hard work and perseverance to support his confidence.

But not this. How could he ever have prepared for this?

"Of course not." You answer immediately.

"Then why say it like that?" Jaebum snaps.

Oops. Maybe that was a mistake.

You frown. "What are you getting mad at me for? I was just checking up on you, and now you're being all snappy!"

"I just-" Jaebum gives up. "Never mind."

He feels like collapsing. The conversation escalated pretty quickly from him checking up on you, and he hates feeling like he's on the edge of breaking your friendship. He hates not being able to do more. Why couldn't he just man up and tell you how he felt already? How hard could it be?

Evidently, it's extremely difficult.

"No, I will not. Talk to me. You keep avoiding the topic and it's obviously bothering you." You press. "What's the problem?"

Jaebum groans in frustration. "I said don't mind it. I'm fine."

"Do you think I'm stupid, Im Jaebum? You think I'm an idiot?"

"No."

"Then talk to me!"

"No!"

"You're being ridiculous-"

"I said I'm fine!"

"Why's it so hard for you to open up-"

"Because I like you, okay?!"

Oops. That wasn't supposed to come out.

"All I want to do is care for you and take care of you because I hate seeing you suffer. Why do you think I dragged you over here to rest? Why do you think I worked so hard to take care of you all these past weeks? Why do you try to deny everything that I do for you, saying I don't need to? Okay, maybe I don't need to do anything for you, but I want to. Why can't you let me care for you the way I want to?"

Jaebum's heart is racing. He'd never felt anything as overwhelming as this before. The pain of wanting to do so much for someone who didn't want him to- what did that tell him?

You’re frozen, quiet, so Jaebum continues. "If you want me to stop, if you really don't want me to do anything for you anymore, say it here and now. I'll stop for you. Tell me you don't like me back and I'll stop it all."

"It's not that I don't like it-" you start.

"Then what?" Jaebum cuts in, voice hard. "Why-"

"Jaebum!" You snap in a tone that had the ability to zip Jaebum's mouth shut. "Let me speak!"

Jaebum backs down immediately.

You sigh. "Look. I'm sorry I ever made you feel that way. I didn't mean to make it seem like I didn't want you to take care of me. I like it when you show that you care, I really do. It's nice to have someone looking out for you, you know?"

"Then why deny it?"

"I guess I didn't want to be a burden to anyone." You shrug.

Jaebum stares at you disbelievingly. "You'd never be a burden to me."

"And I know that now." You say. "I just- ugh, I didn't want to impose. I felt like I was just an extra load to everything else you were carrying. You already do so much, and here I am, like a newborn baby, terrible at taking care of her own body and needing one of her best friends to take care of it for her."

Jaebum's face lights up. "I'm one of your best friends?" He asks with a cheeky smile on his face.

You hit him on the arm. "Yah. Is that all you got?"

"Aish. I listened, I did!" He insists. "But am I really that important to you?"

You huff and turn away, but mumble under your breath nonetheless, "Yeah."

A wide smile breaks out on Jaebum's face and he can't help but throw his arms around you in a bear hug.

"Y-yah. Wha-what is this? Don't people usually hate it when their crushes call them a best friend? Why are you so happy?" You stutter.

Jaebum lifts his head to look at you. Your face is quickly going red and there's a nervous look in your eyes. He gives you a big smile. "You calling me one of your best friends means you consider me one of the most important people in your life. Even if you don't return my feelings, it's fine. I'll take what you're ready to give me, even if it's just a friend-zone."

And you understand. Jaebum sees it in the way your features soften and the way your body relaxes against his. Suddenly gaining a shot of courage, you lean forward a little bit, smirking lightly.

"I never said I friend-zoned you." You say lowly. You’re mere inches away from his face and Jaebum can feel your breath against his lips.

It's his turn to stiffen, his turn to grow nervous. "You just did..."

You daringly bring your hands up around his neck to bury your fingers in his hair- a sensation Jaebum realizes he'd never get tired of. You smile teasingly. "That was before."

Jaebum gulps audibly. "B-before what?"

You chuckle fondly. "Is the Im Jaebum stuttering? What a historic day."

"N-no, I'm not-"

Jaebum never finishes his sentence because his lips are suddenly trapped in a lip-lock with those of the woman in his arms.

And no, sparks don't fly. They never really do, Jaebum realizes. What happens is much better.

His heart beats faster than he ever thought was possible and his head goes fuzzy. Before this, he was frozen stiff, but the second your lips start to move together, electricity courses through his veins, his entire body awake- alive.

You take over all his senses- he feels intoxicated in the best way possible. His senses are heightened and he's suddenly aware of everything that is you. Only you.

He feels you smiling as you lean back into the couch, pulling him with you. Jaebum can't help but smile himself, as he crawls over your body on the couch, the kiss never breaking.

This. This is a billion times better than the friend-zone.

#got7 #jaebum #College!AU #got7 college #college! jaebum #best friend #best friend! jaebum #best friends to lovers #romance #fluff #GOT7 fanfiction #fanfic #mark #jackson #jinyoung #youngjae #bambam #yugyeom #jaebeom #lim #college! jaebeom #best friend! jaebeom

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 18 shownotes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics! I'm Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Gawne, and today we're talking about how to translate untranslatable words. But first, it's our Patreon anniversary!

Gretchen: Yay!

Lauren: And we are super excited to revisit the topic that we visited for our first episode, which is swearing. Yayyy, rude episode on Patreon!

Gretchen: So our first Patreon episode was all about the sounds of swearing and swearing in different languages, and this time we're talking about the grammar of swearing, and we already have reports that it made somebody laugh out loud in public, so maybe don't listen to it around young children or in public, because you might have to explain to them why you're laughing so hard. You can go check that out at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Lauren: We also, conveniently for our anniversary, unlocked a new Patreon goal, which we are really excited about. This one is a goal to commission some Lingthusiasm-themed art.

Gretchen: Yes! So we're very excited to have some exciting art and for you guys to get to see concept sketches and where things go from here! Stay tuned for more exciting Lingthusiasm art news.

[Music]

Gretchen: Untranslatable words! Lauren, have you come across any untranslatable words lately?

Lauren: It's because I came across, like, three in the space of a day that I was like, "We really have to talk about this topic." Because it's a bit of a linguist meme, or talking about language meme, is this idea that there are some words that just aren't translatable, or meanings for which we don't have a single word and maybe we should. So the first is a Language Log post from Mark Liberman. He was talking about how there was a big, windy, wintry, weathery event in Philadelphia that meant that there were a lot of discarded umbrellas left around, and he talked about how there's no word for a dead umbrella.

Gretchen: Isn't the word for a dead umbrella just "dead umbrella" or "broken umbrella"?

Lauren: Well...

Gretchen: I don't know why this has to be so hard!

Lauren: We can chat about it, but he felt like it was something that needed a word and a blog post. And the other one –

Gretchen: Is it an UNbrella?

Lauren: An unbrella.

Gretchen: We need to write in to Mark.

Lauren: Yep. We solved it!

Gretchen: You have your umbrellas and then you have your unbrellas.

Lauren: And the second blog post about untranslatable words, or no word in a language, was from my favourite gynaecologist, Dr. Jennifer Gunter, who has a really fabulous blog, and she she was talking about – I'll just read the quote. "I believe there is no word in any language to describe that unique experience that's simultaneously running out of both pads (or tampons) and toilet paper when you're sitting on the toilet and in immediate need of both."

Gretchen: This is a terrible situation, but I think she's described it! I don't know, like, am I the untranslatable word sceptic here? But I think she's, you know, just put several words together and it did a pretty good job of describing this relatable experience.

Lauren: But there's no single word that encapsulates – I mean, there are plenty of single words and most of them are more appropriate for a Patreon episode than this episode – but none that specifically encapsulates that meaning.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, so this is a thing that I've been thinking about in terms of what I've called "the schadenfreude effect," which is, you know when you learn the schadenfreude and you're like, "Wow! The Germans! They really do have a word for everything, like taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune! It's not just me who's uniquely terrible by doing this sometimes! Other people do this too! Whoa, mind blown!" And the thing that I think makes us resonate with these lists of untranslatable words or ideas that certain concepts are untranslatable or there should be a word for something is that words are way of packaging our experiences, and if we have a word for something, then we know that someone else has thought of packaging that particular experience before. And so saying, "Oh, is there a word for this?" is also kind of trying to reach for "haven't other people also had this common experience" or "isn't this something else that other people have also felt."

Lauren: I really like that you've coined the term "schadenfreude effect" to really encapsulate the meaning of feeling pleased that you found a word that neatly translates a concept that you thought didn't have an elegant word for it.

Gretchen: Yeah, it's kind of when you encounter a word that describes something you're already familiar with. And I came up with it actually because there's this paper that I really like about people learning words and how best to teach people new concepts and new vocabulary. And so they did this study, and I think was a biology class or an economics class, I don't remember, an intro class at a university somewhere, and some of the students got a reading, kind of your standard textbook reading that is, like, you know, "Mitosis is blah blah blah..." and "Supply and demand is blah blah blah" – I don't remember whether this was biology or economics, so...

Lauren: The biology/economics textbook.

Gretchen: In the highly in-demand Intro Bio/Econ course! So anyway, they got your kind of standard reading that had a bunch of terms with their definitions, and then the other people got a different reading which was a version where you had all the concepts explained to you, saying, "There is a concept in biology where cells divide blah blah blah" or in economics where people buy things at different rates. And then for those students, they got to class and they got a brief list of vocabulary words that said, "These concepts that you were exposed to in the reading, here are the words for them." And then they did a post-test on how well the students did in learning these concepts, and they found that the students that had been exposed to the concept before the jargon did better than the students that were exposed to the jargon and the concept at the same time or even the jargon first.

Lauren: So it's not just a matter of smashing words into your brain.

Gretchen: Yeah, and it's – you know, when you come across a word like "schadenfreude" and you're like, "Wow, this is so satisfying to learn this," the reason it's satisfying to learn the word "schadenfreude" is because you're already familiar with the feeling.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: And it's less satisfying to learn a word like, I don't know, "mitosis" or something because you're not familiar with this concept before you learn the word, so you're having to learn the word and the concept at the same time.

Lauren: I guess it's why – and this is gonna date this podcast horrifically – why "hygge" has resonated so much with people in the last 18 months. It's just been like a hygge bonanza of like –

Gretchen: Mm-hmm!

Lauren: – Danish/Scandinavian, cosy, thoughtful, living books.

Gretchen: Yeah, and it's all about this, like, okay here's this concept that we'd like to be able to reach for, or this idea that we'd like to be able to articulate better, like, doesn't everyone want more cosiness in their lives? And it comes with a lot of cultural stuff, but it's around the idea of people wanting more cosiness, or more of whatever it is that thing that the Danes have. I think this is the same reason why words like "tsundoku" often show up on untranslatable words lists as well. So this is the Japanese word for the pile of books that you haven't gotten around to reading yet.

Lauren: What's wrong with "my pile of unread books"?

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people who talk about their "TBR pile," which is their "to be read" pile, or their reading list?

Lauren: Mmm.

Gretchen: And as far as I can tell,  they're used pretty similarly to "tsundoku"! But we're familiar with the idea of "of course you have this pile of books you haven't gotten around to reading yet."

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: And, oh, isn't it convenient that there's this convenient package for this thing that you either are intimately familiar with, or that you would like to be more familiar with, as in the case with "hygge."

Lauren: It's interesting how sometimes these words will enter into English. So, like, schadenfreude I think is – I mean, you can tell from my very Australianising of it, like it's a comfortable piece of my vocabulary, I can use it actively in a sentence, and I feel really comfortable with it. But, like, I think "hygge" is kind of crossing into that at the moment? I don't – I think it's too faddy, personally.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it may still be too much of a fad at the moment, but it may be crossing over. I heard someone saying "tsundoku" in a sentence in English, but she was someone who'd lived in Japan for a while, so I don't think she was using it Anglicised? So I don't know which ones of these are crossing over.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: But one of the things that I always think about what I think about these lists of "oh, here's a bunch of words that are untranslatable," is first of all, well, here is this convenient column B where someone just provided a bunch of nice translations for them. So how untranslatable are they, really? And also that if you look at a language just through the lens of its lexicon, you can end up with some really weird conclusions.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And my favourite example of this is French doesn't have a word for "please." Therefore, obviously, the French, they must be very impolite...maybe. But what they do have is a four-word phrase, "s'il vous plait," which comes in another form, which is "s'il te plait," which both mean effectively "please." And in fact they come in formal and informal versions, this phrase that means effectively "please." And so, sure, if we look at the lexicon of French, the individual, atomisable words with spaces in between them, like, "Oh dang, there's no equivalent for please! Like, how do you even be polite in this language?" But if you look at it even just one step further in subtlety, of course there are lots of ways to be polite in this language! And so, seeing a language just through the lens of its lexicon – on the one hand, it gets us some of these interesting packages, but on the other hand it misses out on a whole lot of what a language actually is if all we're doing is looking at the lists of words and their translations.

Lauren: It reminds me of the "there's no way to say 'yes' and 'no' in Mandarin" meme?

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: That there isn't just a convenient word like "yes" we see that you can use to answer an affirmative, and no equivalent of "no" that you can just use to say no to a question that someone asks. And it's because you say – if, you know, someone says, "Do you want this?" you use the equivalent of "want" or "don't want."

Gretchen: Oh, Gaelic does this too.

Lauren: Yeah! So just because you can't find "yes" or "no" in a simple word list doesn't mean you're unable to say it.

Gretchen: Like, "Whoa, you can't do negation or affirmative in these languages!" Clearly the speakers are capable of agreeing and disagreeing with things.

Lauren: "Yes and no are untranslatable!" And it's just like, oh, they have some way of expressing affirmative and negative. Life is going on.

Gretchen: Yeah! But something that interests me is the subtler domains where things are actually harder to translate as well. And one of the big areas for me for that is poetry, because what makes a poem, essentially, is that you have a relationship with form and meaning that is aesthetically pleasing.

Lauren: And contextually dependent.

Gretchen: And different languages do have different relationships between form and meaning. So to take a very simple example, a pair of words that rhyme in English don't necessarily rhyme in another language you might be trying to translate a poem to. So if you have something like "roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and I love you" the kind of classic, four-line, parodisable poem in English –

Lauren: All versions of that poem are said in deep, deep earnest, Gretchen. It's the most moving piece of poetry.

Gretchen: So moving. Why wasn't this our Valentine's Day episode? 

Um, so you have something like this, but "blue" and "you" rhyme in English, and they don't rhyme in many other languages. There's no particular reason why they have to rhyme, it's just they happen to in English and so they make good subjects for poems, and that's why we don't say "violets are purple" because "purple" doesn't rhyme with "you." And so when you try to translate that in another language, either you've got to be unfaithful to the meaning and use a different pair of words that do rhyme, or you've got to be unfaithful to the rhyme and then not reproduce the aesthetic experience of getting the poem. And so because there's this inherent asymmetry, because different languages have different words – shockingly! – it's really hard to translate things that rely on both the form and the meaning simultaneously.

Lauren: I remember learning to read Old English poetry, and I just couldn't get my head around it – it involves alliteration, they weren't really big into rhyming.

Gretchen: Mm!

Lauren: And I was just like, "I don't have a feeling for this being good." You know, my Old English teacher would just be like, "Yeah, this is such a great poem, you can feel the rhythm!" and I'm just like, "Oh, but there's no rhyming..."

Gretchen: Everything's gotta rhyme.

Lauren: Yeah, I don't know how to evaluate this.

Gretchen: I remember I tried to read Hamlet in French once because, you know, whatever.

Lauren: How did that go?

Gretchen: Well, what was really interesting for me is, you know, the thing about Hamlet, and Shakespeare in general, is that Shakespeare is all in iambic pentameter, right?

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: And so you have your, like, duh-DUH beat, your iamb, with weak-strong –

Lauren: Yeah, even my "mm-hmm" was in iambic pentameter, I was really impressed. Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm! There you go. And you have five of those per line, but in French you can't do that, because French doesn't have word-level stress the way English does.

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: And I'm sure we'll probably do, at some point, a full stress episode, but in French you just only ever stress the thing that's at the end of the whole sentence or phrase. That's it, that's all you do, you have to do it that way.

Lauren: Okay. Yup.

Gretchen: And so you can't divide a poem into beats like that, because French doesn't do beats that way. And so what French poetry has instead that's, like, stylistically similar to iambic pentameter is something called the alexandrine, which is twelve syllables per line. So iambic pentameter gives you ten syllables per line, the alexandrine gives you twelve, which is pretty similar, and so this translation of Hamlet was all written in alexandrines with the twelve syllables per line.

Lauren: So they get an extra two syllables per line.

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: The whole thing goes for like an extra 20% of time.

Gretchen: But it often takes more syllables to say the same thing in French anyway.

Lauren: Oh, okay.

Gretchen: Because French is kind of spacious like that.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: So I think it kind of balanced out. But yeah, you just got this very different –

Lauren: And was it in modern French or ye olde French?

Gretchen: I... don't remember. I think it was in pretty modern French, though, it didn't feel super ye olde.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: But I also don't necessarily know what ye olde French would sound like, you know?

Lauren: Fair enough! Because sometimes, like, translating across time – you know, we talk about translating between cultures and what I think is, dare I say, a bit of fetishisation of, like, Scandinavian and Japanese social life that we overextend, one way of kind of borrowing their words that translate interestingly. And we forget that translating from older texts, like translating from Shakespeare, or going back further to something like Beowulf, there's actually a lot that's not easily translated between those.

Gretchen: Yeah, and when you're translating something like – you know, Shakespeare's stuff was written in current English to the original audience he was writing to, he wasn't writing in fake ye olde English, and so do you try to be faithful to that for the modern reader, or do you try to reproduce the experience of the modern reader in experiencing that as something old? Something I've been really fascinated about recently has been the Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey.

Lauren: Mmm!

Gretchen: Oh, it's so cool. I follow her on Twitter now, it's really great. So, she is heralded as the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English, which is kind of shocking that we've gotten this far and it took that long.

Lauren: I'd have to say most of the versions that I have ever come across have been quite dusty, dry, like they feel like they were written at the time of Homer, even though they're in English.

Gretchen: Well, not quite Homer, but like this kind of 1800s feel.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: And that's the thing, like even the ones that were written in, like, I don't know, the 1950s, often have this fake ye olde thing because, like, oh, well, Homer is a classic and so you need to make him sound olde.

Lauren: So what's Emily Wilson done?

Gretchen: And so Wilson doesn't do that. She's not doing ye olde, and her first line that she translates the poem as is, "Tell me about a complicated man," which is referring to Odysseus.

Lauren: Oh, that could be a text that I sent someone.

Gretchen: That's an Avril Lavigne song! Like, "Odysseus, why did you have to go make things so complicated? Right now I'm just unweaving this loom and man I really hate it!" You know, like, that's a very real translation! But she also – and this is something that the other translators also don't do – she also translates the whole epic poem in verse, and she does all of her lines in iambic pentameter.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: And the other translators tend to render it in prose, or in, like, shortened lines, but without paying attention to that beat in the same sort of way.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And so I'm also really holding out for the audiobook version of this translation of The Odyssey, because I want to hear it read. It was originally an oral piece of a literature, and I really want to hear someone render it to me in that sort of way.

Lauren: Mm, that would be fun.

Gretchen: Yeah! I'm excited. It's one of my post-book projects, I'm gonna dive into that pretty deeply, I think.

Lauren: Awesome.

Gretchen: Yeah! So untranslatability, when it comes to things like how do you render – and I think the Greek word that she's trying to render with "complicated" is "polytropos"? I'm probably getting that wrong. But it means, like, "many-turning"?

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: "Poly" meaning "many" and "tropos" is "turning," like a heliotrope is a flower that turns towards the sun.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: But "many-turned" is not really an idiom in English. And so different translators try to render that idiom in different sorts of ways that both try to make it legible for the reader and also try to make it sound somewhat idiomatic and give you a sense of the feeling of the source text, in a short amount of space.

Lauren: I mean, idioms are super difficult because they're often multiple words, or if it's just one word, alluding to the whole idiom. Like, idioms already come as complicated sets of words that have a specific meaning that you can't just go, like, "word + word." You know, "looking a gift horse in the mouth," you can't say "look + horse + gift + mouth = ..."

Gretchen: That's a nice Greek idiom, Lauren!

Lauren: Yeah, I'm just keeping on-theme. You have to know about how gifts work and how horses work – and actually I don't actually know how horses' mouths work, I just know that you want to make sure they're healthy and that's apparently the mouth!

Gretchen: Yeah, I remember I was reading a book that I'd – when I was practising French I was reading stuff in French I'd already read in English.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And the English passage of this book had said something like "doing this thing was carrying coal to Newcastle," which, I've never been to Newcastle, but I know that this is an idiom for, you know, Newcastle is a big producer of coal and so why would you bring coal to Newcastle, Newcastle already has the coals.

Lauren: Yeah. Was it "taking croissants to Paris"?

Gretchen: I wish it was! They just said something like "it was just a drop of water in the ocean".

Lauren: Taking mustard to Dijon.

Gretchen: I don't think those are idioms in French the same way that "coals to Newcastle" is an idiom in English, right? So that would be kind of bringing you out by saying, "Oh, what what is this weird idiom that they have?" So instead they had just "is a drop of water in the ocean," which is kind of idiomatic, but is also something you could interpret at a very literal level and it doesn't particularly require context for the idiom.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Because also the book wasn't supposed to be set in France, so it'd be weird to have a very French-y idiom.

Lauren: Uh-huh. So, we can have this kind of translatability complication over time in English, but we could also have it over space because English is a language that is spoken in many places, and many places have their own words that have their own specific meaning.

Gretchen: Yeah, I really do like adding to those "untranslatable" lists, like, here's this very specific meaning that this Japanese pile of books brings to you. English has a specific verb for "to deceive someone into watching a video of Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up.'"

Lauren: Hey, wait! We do!

Gretchen: What does it say about the English speakers that we have the verb "to rickroll."

Lauren: Oh my gosh. It's such a profound reflection on what it means to be an English speaker on the internet that we have created the word rickroll.

Gretchen: I know, right?

Lauren: I never thought about it like that before, it's really fun to flip this trope around!

Gretchen: Yeah! You know, like, the English speakers – like, it's gonna be on a French word list somewhere and be like, "Look at those English speakers, look what they've done!"

Lauren: Oh, that one's gonna date really badly as well.

Gretchen: Nah, rickroll's a classic. And there's different words in Canadian English and Australian English that sometimes have different connotations.

Lauren: And since we bump into this occasionally, I thought we would do a mini quiz round!

Gretchen: Okay! Are you gonna quiz me?

Lauren: I'm gonna quiz you. I have some words here that have very specific meanings in Australian English.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: And I want you to have a go at what you think they mean.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: The first word is "bogan."

Gretchen: I'm familiar with "bogan," but I don't know if I could actually define it? Is it kind of like a hick, but in Australia? Or like a chav, but in Australia?

Lauren: I like that you're going for definition by triangulation.

Gretchen: Yeeeah... like, it's kind of more like working-class, salt-of-the-earth, but also the people that politicians kind of try to make up to?

Lauren: Yeah, that's actually – you did pretty good there. That's good.

Gretchen: Yay!

Lauren: But you can identify them from the particular sports that they're interested in, like the footy, like the cricket, something something outdoors, something something wearing flannel.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: It's kind of a set of meaning that goes together to define –

Gretchen: I mean, in Canada they like the hockey, so I think I may somewhat understand this demographic.

Lauren: Yeah. The next word is "mateship."

Gretchen: So, because I know that you say – people say "mate" in Australian English to be like, "G'day, mate," or like, "What are you doing mate, that was a bad idea." So mateship is like the quality of having mates or like the relationship that you have with your mates? Or... this kind of thing?

Lauren: Uh, yeah! I mean, that is great, you've just kind of said the meaning of both of those words at the same time. Good start!

Gretchen: Is there something else I should be adding?

Lauren: It's something to do with the ineffable quality of reciprocal support. It's tied in a lot with the idea of community – not gonna lie, it has a kind of Anglo vibe. It's –

Gretchen: Oh my god, it's Australian hygge.

Lauren: It's Australian political dog-whistling to like –

Gretchen: Ohhh.

Lauren: – you know, the way things should be, i.e. back when Australia was quite Anglo. (It never really was, but that's another point.) Or this kind of idea of Australians as like battlers forged through hardship and adversity and are now somehow all kind of closely knit for that. Is my kind of definition of mateship.

Gretchen: Okay. Yeah, I definitely don't have the political context there.

Lauren: It doesn't stir your soul? That's what it's meant to evoke.

Gretchen: It just... ships my mates, mate!

Lauren: The final one is "early mark."

Gretchen: I have no idea.

Lauren: Have a guess, just make up...

Gretchen: A... like, something that... like, when you're like "on your marks, get set, go" so it's like the early... first thing you do?

Lauren: Mmm... no.

Gretchen: I told you I didn't know!

Lauren: This one is not even – like, so this is not a word that I have in my active vocabulary.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: And it shows that like even in a country like Australia, which has a really quite homogeneous use of language across Australia, given how big it is, this is from New South Wales and Queensland?

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: And an "early mark" means you get to leave school or work early.

Gretchen: Ahhh!

Lauren: I have no idea why. New South Wales never really explained it to me.

Gretchen: I have a word for that, but I don't remember what it is.

Lauren: Is it "leaving work early"?

Gretchen: Yeah, okay. No, no, there's like an idiom to it, and I'm sure my high school self is reaching through time and being like "how did you forget this??"

Lauren: It was very important to you.

Gretchen: Yeah, it was really important to me for 13 years, and now I can't remember. I can remember the concept, but not the term.

Lauren: Well, there you have – it's an untranslatable word for you, Gretchen! It's a concept you're very familiar with and you've never had –

Gretchen: No, it's a schadenfreude thing!

Lauren: It's the schadenfreude effect from English to English.

Gretchen: Okay, can I give you a Canadian one?

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: So, are you familiar with the Canadianism "toque"?

Lauren: I am, but I feel like I'm not gonna know where to draw the boundary on it.

Gretchen: Okay, well, try.

Lauren: So, I know it's a hat.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: Umm... yay for having Canadian rellos.

Gretchen: "Relatives" for the non-Australians.

Lauren: Thanks for translating for me! 

Gretchen: Welcome!

Lauren: Um, it's a hat, but it's like a hat you wear in the cold.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: Like, I'm gonna translate it into my English and say it's a beanie, which is like a knitted, or like thick, woollen hat that doesn't have a brim or anything, it's just like an egg-warmer for your head.

Gretchen: Yeah, Americans do call it "beanie," so I wasn't sure if you'd have beanie as a term, because it's like kind of warm to wear beanies in Australia. So yeah, people call it a beanie, I have a beanie as something very different.

Lauren: What's a beanie, then, for you?

Gretchen: A beanie is one of those, like, round caps that has like a spinny thing on top? That they wore in like the '20s or something?

Lauren: Ahhhh. No. Gee, that's so confusing. How do we even talk to each other? Sometimes it's a complete mystery to me.

Gretchen: I know.

Lauren: It's going to be very difficult if I ever come and visit you in the cold. "Don't come here with a beanie, you need to bring a toque."

Gretchen: I may own a few toques, but I do not own any hats with little spinny things on top, and I do not aspire to.

Lauren: Ah, well. So, even when we speak the same language, we still kind of reach these moments of translation where we have to hopefully figure out that we're not talking about the same beanie.

Gretchen: Yeah. I know, personally, I think that my favourite really difficult word in English to translate is "the."

Lauren: That's not gonna look nice on any lists, Gretchen.

Gretchen: But it's so difficult! Because, you know, some languages don't have articles like "the" and "a" and "an" at all! Russian doesn't have them, Chinese doesn't have them I don't think, and there's a whole bunch of languages that don't have this at all, and so trying to translate into those languages is really hard, and for speakers of those languages, trying to learn English and being like, "Should I be using the 'the'? But how do you know?" And then there's a bunch of languages that have, like, several of them!

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And then even languages which have what is ostensibly still a definite article don't use them in the same sorts of ways.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So in English, if I want to say "I go for a walk on Mondays," I don't put the "the" on Monday. But in French, if I want to say "I go for a walk on Mondays," then I have to say "le lundi," not just "lundi."

Lauren: Go for a walk on the Mondays.

Gretchen: Go for a walk the Monday. Singular.

Lauren: Okay. The Monday.

Gretchen: Yeah, so it's like, even in languages that ostensibly have things that map to this category, figuring out how to use them slightly differently depending on the language is a rich and difficult area of of investigation.

Lauren: So, we've established that it's not untranslatability, it's unable to translate into a single convenient word. And it's not untranslatability because it happens across Englishes, too...

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: So what is happening here?

Gretchen: I think it's about – there's two kinds of meaning that come with a word.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: There's the kind of one-sentence, easy-to-describe, dictionary sort of meaning.

Lauren: Yeah. Which is what we often think of as meaning.

Gretchen: Yeah. And then there's all of the kind of surrounding context: the social context, and when you learned a word, and what it means to you, and these kinds of things. You know, I was coming across in one of these lists a word about, I think it was a Swedish type of coffee break.

Lauren: Fika!

Gretchen: Fika!

Lauren: It's a good one.

Gretchen: And they were saying, "Well in the Swedish coffee break you're not allowed to talk about work, and you must only talk about things that are not related to work."

Lauren: Uh-huh.

Gretchen: And I don't necessarily think that it is an intrinsic property of "fika" as "fika" specifically. I think this is a Swedish property of coffee breaks.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Like, I know what a coffee break is.

Lauren: So it's conflating the coffee break and the – oh, I always think, 'cause with fika it's about having coffee and food, I think of it as, like, "let's do coffee"? You know, the act of doing coffee.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: That's what I think of fika as.

Gretchen: Let's get coffee, or let's do coffee.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Not just like you're sitting by yourself at your desk having sad desk coffee.

Lauren: That is definitely not fika. I know that, and I'm not Swedish.

Gretchen: But you know, the cultural things are like what you do at a coffee break, or, you know, if you talk about different – I don't know, to go back to the school example, different recess traditions, or different school break traditions, like do you go out and play in the playground, or do you stay inside because it's very cold in Canada in the wintertime sometimes and they wouldn't let us outside, even with our toques.

Lauren: So, now that we have the concepts of these two forms of meaning, do you want the jargon?

Gretchen: Yes, I'd like the jargon.

Lauren: Okay. So the specific, to-the-point meaning – dictionary meaning, more or less – is "denotation." Which I always remember because denotation and dictionary start with the same letter.

Gretchen: Mm!

Lauren: And then connotation is all the context to the meaning. (Do you see what I did there?)

Gretchen: Ah, good.

Lauren: So I'm gonna explain denotation and connotation using sandwiches.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: And of course we pulled sandwiches apart – not literally, just semantically – in a Patreon episode. But I want to come back to sandwiches and talk about a historical anecdote in my family that kind of explains where denotation and connotation are in tension. So as I've mentioned, my grandmother is an English second language speaker.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: I've mentioned it on the show before. She's a Polish and German native speaker, came to Australia, had to learn not only English, but also raise a family of very Anglo-educated children. So, my grandfather's English, they went to school in English, and they wanted to kind of fit in with the other kids. And so the denotation of a sandwich is very simple: it's two pieces of bread with filling between it.

Gretchen: Yep.

Lauren: And my grandmother would send my mum and her siblings to school with sandwiches, but where my grandmother fell down was on the connotation of a sandwich, because my grandmother took the "two pieces of bread with some kind of tasty filling" quite liberally.

Gretchen: Uh-oh!

Lauren: There are stories of her sending my mum to school with butter and peanuts? Because she couldn't get the hang that peanut butter was a specific thing? Or sending them to school with – and I've never tried this, personally – but like chocolate biscuits in bread.

Gretchen: That's very interesting!

Lauren: And so this is completely violating the idea of what a sandwich – what its connotation is. But she's still meeting the denotation of it.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I think in our sandwich episode she's passing the sandwich test with flying colours!

Lauren: She's doing better than a burrito!

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: Or a pierogi.

Gretchen: Yeah, or a pizza or whatever. Like, she's got the the two pieces of bread, which is pretty key, and you could make a chocolate chip cookie sandwich...

Lauren: And so when we have these ideas of untranslatable words, we're trying to pull all the connotation along with the denotation. I mean, sometimes it's just denotation?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: And the denotation that it has cuts the world in a particular way our language doesn't, and that would be nice to have. But often we're trying to drag a lot of the connotation along as well, and I think that's why "hygge" feels like such a complicated thing to bring into English, because we could just say it means cosiness, and we've kind of hit the denotation pretty well.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: But we want to bring alllll of the Scandinavian knitwear, candles, prettiness in along with it.

Gretchen: Yeah. And it's kind of aspirational, like, this is how it could be. There's a quote from Dinosaur Comics that I really like that expresses this. So they're talking about meanings of words and what's the opposite of various things, and T-Rex is getting more and more frustrated and says, "Language is hard!" And the other character says, "No, life is hard. Language is just how we talk about it."

Lauren: Oh, that's so true. And it does – these connotations make it really hard, they make it hard especially for machine translation, because machines can't weigh up all the different connotations of different words in a way that a translator can. And that's part of the skill of translation, is knowing what words to use that have the same connotations.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: You know, if you're translating a scene about someone at a market, then the word "cheap" as opposed to "inexpensive" – something that's cheap has this connotation of inferior quality compared to using the word inexpensive.

Gretchen: Yeah! Or "a good deal," you know, they could be the same thing, like a "bargain."

Lauren: Oh, yeah! Suddenly that's not only like – it's like good cheap.

Gretchen: "Wow, that's good cheap!" And, you know, "bad cheap," or "inexpensive," there's all these different levels there and –

Lauren: But words are connotation magnets. I mean, it's why we need euphemisms all the time, because as soon as we start using a word in a particular context, it just amasses all these connotations and they become either pejorative and negative and that's how slurs kind of get cycled through, which is not great, or they kind of make all these other cultural inferences.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I think that one of the things that talking about words as "untranslatable," even though it can be satisfying to say, "Oh wow, here's these new concepts!" or "Here's the thing that I hadn't thought about in this way before," in some respect, every word is untranslatable and yet we managed to learn them all anyway.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: How do we learn any new word if no word has an exact equivalent somewhere? Well, you know, we live a life and we figure it out! And in many cases, the word side of translation is very easy. It's the grammar side and the aesthetic side that's a lot harder.

Lauren: And all those connotations. I know when I learnt Nepali, I had to keep track of three different formality levels, which, like, I know how to be polite to different people to different extents in English, but suddenly I had to do it in another language and in the grammar, and I remember just knowing who to use which level of formality with was a whole set of translation that I took a long time to really feel comfortable with, so I would definitely agree that the kind of grammatical encoding of things adds a translation complication that can be quite hard to master.

Gretchen: Yeah, and yet you don't see different forms of "you" in "difficult to translate" lists, even though maybe they should be there.

Lauren: We're gonna start our own very exciting list.

Gretchen: Let's make a "difficult to translate for linguists" list! I'd be down for this!

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as SuperLinguo.

Gretchen: And I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistic questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include the semantics of sandwiches, language games, how to teach yourself linguistics, and a double feature: two episodes about swearing! And you can help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. Can't afford to pledge? That's okay too, we also really appreciate it if you can rate us on iTunes or Apple podcasts and recommending Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire, our editorial producer is Emily, and our production assistant is Celine. Our music is by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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