Translation and cultural context
Sometimes my daughter allows me to watch anime programs with her. She is very careful with what she’ll share because I often “ruin it” for her. I don’t blame her– sometimes (often) I’m insufferable in my deconstruction, especially if the material is sexist, racist or homophobic. Yesterday she asked an interesting question: Why do the voice actors in English sound so terrible, but they don’t in Japanese? I hadn’t thought about this directly before, tho had noticed that it’s rather unbearable to watch anime that’s dubbed into English. We always watch it is Japanese. Maybe, I said, it’s because it’s more than just the words. There’s cultural context. There’s body language. There’s historical context. Even if you translate one word from that language to another, you can’t translate everything else. You just have the word. And often the word doesn’t mean exactly the same thing anyway. So, because we understand the words in Japanese, and then hear them in English, we can see that there’s a enormous gap between them. And it sounds wrong. Also, what one culture finds important might not have the same impact in another culture. If something is considered beautiful in Japanese, it might not be of note in English. These things can’t be translated. There’s also the language of emotions….
Thinking about our conversation has brought me back to my own writing. I suspect that there are aspects of the culturally translative at work in my texts, even if I’m not writing from one language to another. Curiouser and curiouser…. For instance, I know that I have a particular writing (for lack of better word) ’style’. I am prone to dropping subject pronouns, for instance, and also very fond of sentence fragments. I’ve come to this ’style’ as a natural extension of spoken Japanese. In Japanese, it’s not necessary to include a subject reference all the time, because after it’s used once, it is inferred that it’s still there. To bring up the subject repeatedly just sounds crazy. When I first began submitting my work for publication I had to fight to keep my sentence fragments and dropped pronoun references. Even now, if I come to a new editor, I have to argue for it all over again.
Culturally, this is very important to me. Because it’s not only about proper grammar– what might be at work are different forms of culturally constructed/situated units of thought. These differences casts the worldview through an alternate facet. And that’s a wonderful thing.
I’m not saying it’s a free-for-all. Ditch grammar, do anything you want. Clearly that would result in a lot of unshapely fiction. But if you find you’re repeatedly being critiqued about an identifiable aspect of your writing, that crops up across a range of stories, etc. maybe it has a specific cultural source. Don’t purge it right away. Pick it up. Hold it in your palms. Raise it to the light and see if it shines.
I came to your blog from an interview about Half World that you did on Writer’s Block. I was so moved by your perspective, by the open style of your interview and how you summed up the terrible things Disney has done from the absence of mother’s in their movies to the passive waiting for a Prince to come to the rescue. Being an American, born and raised, I was steeped in this myth that also comes from Western Europe perhaps? Certainly it’s been raised to an iconic level here, and I’ve often felt like a square peg. My country is also becoming less and less a place I recognize, and after working on Obama’s campaign, but seeing how he’s had to govern, I’ve lost hope and fantasize about emigrating somewhere that my values would be tolerated, if not embraced. I hope to read your writing now, and long for Canada despite the fun they poked at it on The Daily Show last night. Thank you for writing and giving voice to your thoughts, for allowing the true expression of your creativity to bloom. It is one of the last brave acts available to us in the modern world. From the land of Disney, the romance novel, and reality T.V., I send you best wishes for a life blessed with the rewards of an imagination explored with courage, and imbued with truth – whether or not it is the accepted or the expected truth. Peace and blessings to you and your family.
1Janet Landis, Harleysville, PA.
Thank you, Janet….
2Writing, and reading, has always been an act of hope and faith for me. Before we can change ourselves and our world, we need to be able to imagine it. Stories are a way we can share our ideas with someone we might never meet. Writing and reading allows us to share a kind of relationship with strangers, who go on to touch others’ lives in ways that might not be measurable. It’s a kind of magic. Thank you for sharing your response and thoughts with me. ^__^. Blessings to you and the people in your life. Canada is fraught with its own legacy of colonialism and systemic racism. Sexism. I don’t think it’s fundamentally so different from the US; maybe the articulation of its oppressions takes on a more subdued form. But the issues remain the same.
There are pockets of activists, dreamers, writers, teachers, librarians, artists, cyclists, farmers, children, feminists, men, in every community who strive to make even small changes in an often unlovely world. Let’s continue growing and dreaming…. And if you decide to emigrate to Canada, there are people waiting to welcome you.
from Janet Landis, “It is one of the last brave acts available to us in the modern world. ”
I second that, it is one of the reason why I love your stories. They’re not just stories of courage, they also embody it. I’m glad you didn’t let editors change your connection to the Japanese language. It’s wonderful to read and feel in english, a sense of poetry that has been lost. Pop culture (Disney*cough) would deny that poetry exists in a smelly fat girl but you gave it back to her. <3
3Beauty found in the unexpected of places, strength after a lifetime of weakness, being compassionate when every cell in your body tells you to inflict pain– these moments are a burst of transcendance. These moments make us human.
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