Jaw meets floor.

[nenena]

Oh my. It's been a good several years since the last time that I've had the comments section of a post devolve into such a stunning example of case in fucking point.

Edited to add: Okay, look. I am hardly the only person who has publicly called out proglution and the others in that thread on bleachness for their BS. Many, many people on fandom_wank are making the same points. kuromitsu in particular is someone whose opinion ought to carry some weight, being a damn good translator of Japanese.

Protip: It is never a good idea to start a wank about translation by insulting a professional translator, and it makes you look like even more of an ass when you then go on to twist around and bullshit about what was actually said. When enough people with enough accumulated knowledge among them are continually pointing out that you are wrong, then it is time to step back and consider the possibility that maybe you might be wrong.

proglution and suzukaze are right to argue in my previous post that pobody's nerfect. The same applies to them as well. I have had people more knowledgeable than me point out my translation errors before. And I've corrected them right away. It does nobody any favors to write ten pages worth of comments defending your shitty translation and continuing to insist that the professional interpreter in question was "misleading" when she wasn't.

This, then. This is pretty much the perfect example of the type of posturing behavior that I was trying to call out in my first post.

ETA again: Meni just pointed out one of the bigger, ickier issues that got buried by the translation wank, and I tried to articulate a coherent response on the matter. But this is another one of the things that I wanted to discuss in my first post (before it got so spectacularly derailed): the difference between showing cultural knowledge vs. expressing stereotypes. There's definitely a Pretendian/Wapanese inclination to attempt to speak for people from other cultures, rather than letting them speak for themselves. And that is exactly what happened in Moritagate, when the shippers relied on oversimplified, essentializing cultural stereotypes to deny the possibility that Morita might actually mean what he straight-up said. Talk about twisting cultural knowledge to fit a personal agenda.

Comments

[annalouise.livejournal.com]

'the difference between showing cultural knowledge vs. expressing stereotypes.'

ahaha, I get so paranoid about this (and the fine line). When trying to explain some kind of linguistic feature my Japanese teacher will often say 'well in Japan we speak/do/feel like this....' But regardless there is a difference between *her* saying it, and me saying it. idk if it would be considered xenophobic or not, but I would feel the same way about England as well.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

It is indeed a very, very fine line. I think a lot of it has to do with the way that you phrase things. A lot of it also has to do with the difference between discussing cultures (which usually are described in terms of broad, simplified generalizations) versus how you discuss, describe, behave toward, and think about individuals.

Like, for example, I can say in general, ramen noodles are a popular and much-beloved food in Japan. But if I approach any individual Japanese person and say, "Oh hey you're Japanese, I bet you like ramen noodles!" Now I'm being racist. I also shouldn't talk about any individual Japanese person in similar terms. Like, I shouldn't say "Morita Masakazu must love ramen noodles because he's Japanese!" Because the very act of making those types of assumptions about a person based on a general characteristic of their culture denies individual experience and individual diversity within a culture.

Granted, issues like "cultural attitudes toward relationships" are much more complicated to discuss than my ramen noodles example. But that's kind of the gist of it.

[meni-tan.livejournal.com]

Sadly the media and advertisement also plays a big part in how we see different cultures.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. This is exactly why it's so important to talk about stereotypical and/or racist depictions in movies, books, TV, music, and advertising. (The same is true for sexism, homophobia, albism, transphobia, etc. Media hugely impacts the way that we think about others, particularly groups and cultures that we might not have any contact with other than what we see depicted on TV.)

[meni-tan.livejournal.com]

Say that they had a advertisement for ramen noodles (using your example)
they would be more inclined to have a Japanese person in the commercial then say a white person.
That is also how they sell products.
like in beer commercials they have a lot of white men, but because of this we assume that every white man drinks beer.