Characters, length, twitter, and manga.
Sep. 20th, 2011 06:22 pmThe Atlantic: How Much Can You Say in 140 Characters? A Lot, if You Speak Japanese
Japanese is a combination syllabic/logographic language, which means that it has a phenomenally high character efficiency. Those of us stuck with a language that uses a crummy alphabetic writing system have to deal with crap like, say, using a whole bucketful of characters to write a single word, or even having to resort to using multiple characters (i.e. th, shi, ch, etc.) to represent a single sound in a word.
"Sushi" is five characters in written English. It's either two (すし or 寿司) or just one character (鮨, although that kanji is admittedly not very commonly used) in Japanese.
What this means is: You can say a heckuva lot more within a small character limit in Japanese than you can in English.
I can definitely attest that this is true. What I can say in one Japanese tweet would take me three, four, or even five tweets to say in English, even with liberal use of textspeak and abbreviations in the English tweets.
This explains why Twitter is more popular in Japan than in the United States, believe it or not.
It also explains, in case any of y'all were ever wondering, why a lot of the dialogue in translated manga seems to be clipped, shortened, or written in a suspiciously tiny font. The former two are accounted for by the fact that manga word bubbles are often too small for a complete, keeping-all-the-nuances English translation to fit (because English uses too many freakin' letters!) and the latter is a necessity when a really important word bubble that just can't be shortened occasionally rears its ugly head.
One of the reasons why I recap Soul Eater in text format is because when I'm not limited by trying to fit the translated lines into a tiny word bubble, I can write a much clearer and more accurate translation. I also know that I personally don't have the editing skills to be able to take a lengthy translation and pare it down into something that could be said with half the word length yet still retain all of the vital meaning, so that's why I don't. The best professional translators and translation editors, however, DO have those skills. In fact, being able to significantly shorten sentences without losing vital meaning is one of the most important skills that a professional Japanese-to-English translator can bring to the table. (Well, that, and having a keen sense of how to write natural-sounding dialogue that flows in English.)
So the next time that you're reading something translated from Japanese and it feels like it might have been shortened a bit here, or abbreviated a bit there... Well, your suspicions are probably correct, and now you know why!
ETA: Now with SCIENCE! in the comments.
Japanese is a combination syllabic/logographic language, which means that it has a phenomenally high character efficiency. Those of us stuck with a language that uses a crummy alphabetic writing system have to deal with crap like, say, using a whole bucketful of characters to write a single word, or even having to resort to using multiple characters (i.e. th, shi, ch, etc.) to represent a single sound in a word.
"Sushi" is five characters in written English. It's either two (すし or 寿司) or just one character (鮨, although that kanji is admittedly not very commonly used) in Japanese.
What this means is: You can say a heckuva lot more within a small character limit in Japanese than you can in English.
I can definitely attest that this is true. What I can say in one Japanese tweet would take me three, four, or even five tweets to say in English, even with liberal use of textspeak and abbreviations in the English tweets.
This explains why Twitter is more popular in Japan than in the United States, believe it or not.
It also explains, in case any of y'all were ever wondering, why a lot of the dialogue in translated manga seems to be clipped, shortened, or written in a suspiciously tiny font. The former two are accounted for by the fact that manga word bubbles are often too small for a complete, keeping-all-the-nuances English translation to fit (because English uses too many freakin' letters!) and the latter is a necessity when a really important word bubble that just can't be shortened occasionally rears its ugly head.
One of the reasons why I recap Soul Eater in text format is because when I'm not limited by trying to fit the translated lines into a tiny word bubble, I can write a much clearer and more accurate translation. I also know that I personally don't have the editing skills to be able to take a lengthy translation and pare it down into something that could be said with half the word length yet still retain all of the vital meaning, so that's why I don't. The best professional translators and translation editors, however, DO have those skills. In fact, being able to significantly shorten sentences without losing vital meaning is one of the most important skills that a professional Japanese-to-English translator can bring to the table. (Well, that, and having a keen sense of how to write natural-sounding dialogue that flows in English.)
So the next time that you're reading something translated from Japanese and it feels like it might have been shortened a bit here, or abbreviated a bit there... Well, your suspicions are probably correct, and now you know why!
ETA: Now with SCIENCE! in the comments.
