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Entry tags:
Characters, length, twitter, and manga.
The 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.
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(Anonymous) 2011-09-20 11:55 pm (UTC)(link)Cool beans, thanks for the info :)
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(Anonymous) 2011-09-21 02:01 am (UTC)(link)But seriously thank you very much. I always learn something genuinely fascinating from your posts :)
good points!
Fandubs of songs, often Japanese songs though just as often songs of other foreign languages, are translated to their most accurate meanings on lyrics websites. Kind of like what you do.
Where what I'm talking about comes in is that a lot of fandubbers just take that direct translation and try to squash a long-winded english verse into what was originally only a couple of syllables in Japanese. @-@ It sounds really bad when people sing this way.
So in comics and in music, the best kind of translator is one who can make the words fit the length and meaning of the original language!
Re: good points!
What's even more frustrating with translating songs or spoken dialogue is that sometimes you'll run into the opposite problem, too - written Japanese may be a lot more condensed that written English, but spoken Japanese can sometimes have a lot more syllables than the equivalent statement in English. That's one of the joys of a phonetic language!
I.E. "friend" may have six characters, but it's still just one syllable when you say it out loud. The equivalent Japanese words are either two syllables (such as 友人) or three syllables (友達), despite being written with fewer characters.
That's why in dubbed anime a lot of times you'll see extra information added to the English dialogue that just wasn't there in the Japanese dialogue. (Princess Mononoke is a notorious example of this.) This is done because it takes a lot more mouth-flaps for the characters to say in Japanese what the English translation of their lines would be, so extra English words have to be added to match the mouth-flaps in the animation.
no subject
I noticed it. The few times I write tweets using Japanese I'm able to tell half my life. In English I always have to think what words to remove without losing meaning.
People who complains about Kanjis don't know how useful can they actually be.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2011-09-21 05:40 pm (UTC)(link)Thanks for sharing this. I always love it when people discuss languages.
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And reading below, yes, I did notice when watching subbed anime that something it takes little time to say or sing in English has more spoken sounds in Japanese.
no subject
I do scan a lot of Japanese twitter feeds for video game news, and they do seem to hold a lot more information than US tweets.
no subject
from jpopasia.com lyrics
Selenite by Rurutia
ああ、揺らめく灯火 瓦礫の町に
鳴り響く 透明なしらべは 願いを讃え
今 焼け落ちた空は水の底へと沈んでゆく
満ちてゆく月明かり ああ
蒼く燃える夜が 君を染める 儚いほど
細い肩を傷く 抱いていても
君は消えて 終いそうで
(130 characters, two full verses)
English version from kiwi-musume.com
Ah, a light flickers in the ruined city
And an invisible tune, full of wishes, echoes around
Now, the burned-down sky sinks to the bottom
(140 characters, incomplete first verse)
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