RE: [LoGH] LoGH
Justin Ho (iluvatar45@hotmail.com)
Fri, 01 Dec 2000 12:55:45 +0800
>From: "Rob Ketcherside"
>Reply-To: logh@soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
>To:
>Subject: RE: [LoGH] LoGH
>Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 20:29:35 -0800
>
>BTW, do you speak Japanese, Chinese and English, or just Chinese and
>English? Just curious.
English and Chinese. More specifically Cantonese, which bears more
resemblances to Japanese than Mandarin does. Enough for certain words and
phrases to be picked out word for word correctly on audio basis alone. A
very very small smattering of Japanese through exposure and friends but not
enough to base any translation on, save the most blatantly obvious and
simplistic phrases.
> > From my own personal experience, my first response to the English
> > subs were how much more awkward sounding they came out. A
> > function no doubt
> > of language but even so, my version of season 1 is more than suffcient
>to
> > reproduce the entirety of the English sub near word for word, bar
> > a line or
> > two.
>
>Anything in particular that you're not happy with? Is it all post season
>one, or do you have any comments for that or the movies or Gaiden eps 1-4?
>I mean the recent (last year or so) edited translations. I was upset
>enough
>with the quality of the translations that I've been going through them
>slowly and re-editing them. I'm no professional, so I know that it's not
>perfect still.
The structure of the languages is the primary stumbling block IMO. More
information can be compacted spacewise into Chinese and Japanese than an
equivalent amount of English. More problematical is the construction of
certain sentences. Purists may disagree with me, but for those sentences a
word by word translation just doesn't work very well. For those, sometimes
a front-end flip is required to make a more coherent English sentence.
Likewise there are certain word and phrase usages (even ideas) that have
historical weight or implied meaning behind them, which unfortunately is
very hard if not impossible to convey concisely in a translation. It's
still possible to do without them, but you lose some nuances along the way.
> > Might I also add that I was unimpressed with how the existing English
> > translation of episode 27 not only skips over the only explicit
> > breakdown of
> > a fleet in the main series but also manages to make the far more serious
> > error of actually calling the carrier Amltat the "Fugoh" (error I
> > think in
> > misinterpreting the word for carrier as a name) ESPECIALLY as it is
> > explicitly called the Amltat a few moments later! The VCDs at
> > least never
> > make that kind of error.
>
>Yeah, feel free to add that. I haven't gotten around to editing episode 27
>yet. I'm assuming that the translators of the VCD got some sort of
>payment,
>so that probably accounts for the difference in quality right there.
>
>Rob
>
My main gripe is not with differences in romanizations but with small
errors like this which can be easily corrected with a context check and with
small errors that have a big difference in meaning. Things like a double
negation or a negation where there shouldn't be one.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
