Author Topic: No. 6 translations  (Read 2193 times)

Ahiku

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Re: No. 6 translations
« on: December 17, 2014, 06:33:12 pm »
@listenforthelove
Yeah, English is more flexible. Of course you have some points where you definitely need some personal pronouns, but you have way more possibilities from the beginning, because nouns are genderless. That’s a huge advantage.

Words like “inhabitant”, “lender”, “singer”, “owner” etc. are genderless. (They have all male and female versions in German... Bewohner/Bewohnerin, Verleiher/Verleiherin, Sänger/Sängerin, Besitzer/Besitzerin...)
And if you’re able to play with words it should be possible to express whatever you like without using personal pronouns. But you have more possibilities when you can use nouns, at least.

Well, let’s check out the English translation.

“Let me introduce the owner. Real name unknown. So everyone settled on dogkeeper.”

Loosley translated: „Lass mich dir den Besitzer vorstellen. Richtiger Name (ist) unbekannt. Daher haben sich alle auf Inukashi festgelegt.“

Ok, not that bad. The second and the third sentence would be fine, even though the second one is a bit weird, because it’s more like a sentence fragment. Normally people would rather say: Ihr/Sein richtiger Name (ist) unbekannt. (His/Her real name is unknown.)
And Nezumi is normally very eloquent, so he shouldn’t use sentence fragments and tell Shion that his linguistic ability is worse than a Chimpanzee’s. ^^°
But the big problem is the first sentence, because “den Besitzer”/”der Besitzer” is the male form of owner… He could say: “Lass mich dir den Besitzer (male)/die Besitzerin (female) vorstellen.“
I mean, I also sometimes use the male form when I speak about myself. ^^° Something like. “Hey, I’m the owner of a new laptop.” (“Hey, ich bin der Besitzer eines neuen Laptops!” even though the grammatically correct form would be: “Hey, ich bin die Besitzerin eines neuen Laptops.”)
And yet…the sentence still implies that Inukashi is a guy, or that Nezumi is pretty rude because he doesn’t use the female form when he’s talking about her.
(I mean he IS rude when it comes to Inukashi… XD But on the other side you witnessed just a couple of pages ago that he’s quite the charmer when he kisses that prostitute.  Hmmm…but he’s also teasing Inukashi. I’m not sure… does he know Inukashi is probably a girl? He doesn’t seem to care at all when it comes to them.)
Okay, it just implies that Inukashi is a guy, because the reader doesn’t know that much about Nezumi, it’s just the second volume. So it’s too early to analyze Nezumi’s behavior concerning Inukashi. X’D

Ah, but I think they could have used something like: “Inukashi gehört das Hotel. Richtiger Name (ist) unbekannt.  Alle haben sich daher auf diesen Namen festgelegt.” (Inukashi owns the hotel. Real name unknown. So everyone settled on this name.)

The second sentence is still not very nice, and it’s probably not very close to the original, but well… it’s still better than using words which imply a male gender. XD It’s so complicated.
« Last Edit: December 17, 2014, 06:38:21 pm by Ahiku »