Japan
"Cake or Death", revisited
Another random discovery in Kinokuniya: 死神とチョコレートパフェ. Three light novels, adapted into a manga series. I have no idea what it’s about, and yet, I do.
The first light novel looks like this.
The slender way to booze
A frequent annoyance for manga and anime fans is the inevitable loss of information in translation. Little things like the use of -san, -chan, -sama, -dono, et al can be simply left in or explained once, and if you’re watching the subtitled version, you can pick them out of the original dialogue.
Often, though, cultural context means that a single line of dialogue can’t be fully understood without half a page of explanation, but sometimes it can’t, or shouldn’t, be explained. One of the dumbest things I’ve seen a fansub group do was fill the entire screen with a detailed explanation of a very small joke that added almost nothing to the story.
What we see a lot of today, though, especially with the insane pace of manga translation, is information lost because the translators didn’t have the context themselves; either they’re not native speakers who grew up in Japan (as pointed out in this Amazon review), or they’re not reading an entire story before translating a chapter (too many to list…).
So, here’s my tiny joke of the day, courtesy of a manga volume I spotted in Kinokuniya: 酒のほそ道. It’s the story of a salaryman who loves to drink; I can’t tell you any more about the story, because it’s entirely lacking in furigana, and I didn’t buy it anyway. It’s popular enough to have 22 volumes out, though.
Anyone familiar with classic Japanese literature will get the title immediately, and wonder just where the author is going to go with it. “Sake no hoso-michi” translates literally as “the narrow road of sake”, but it’s really a reference to “Oku no hoso-michi”, a very famous book written by the haiku poet Bashō.
Dear Hello!Project Costume Designers,
Yuuko’s outfit is simple, and her hair is for once a color found in nature. Okay, she’s wearing a nightie, but that’s not a bad thing. But when I look at Nacchi, I just have to ask, DEAR GOD WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!?
Pop-up furigana test
When I first decided to hack furigana for the web, I simply used HTML tooltips, with a bit of CSS to highlight the glossed word. It mostly worked, but the presentation was iffy, and by default IE didn’t use a Unicode font for tooltips. I also knocked together a script to simplify the process of marking up a lot of text; that one needs some more work, still.
My second try used the popular jquery JavaScript library, which abstracted away most of the browser dependencies, and left the HTML clean. I liked the results, but I got sidetracked before I managed to clean up the code. Also, at the time I was reluctant to add the overhead of even a relatively compact JS library to every page.
After my recent discovery that IE7 is still hosed for basic CSS, I broke down and cleaned up my JS code, and I’m going to start using it. Here’s the first test: 漢字には全てふりがなが付いています。
The big feature of this version is that if JavaScript is turned off in the browser, the pop-up furigana still display as tooltips. One known bug is that they appear in the wrong place if the window has been scrolled horizontally.
[Update: hmm, the offset function in the new version of the jquery dimensions plug-in isn’t calculating the correct bounding box for the base text in IE 6. I’ll have to look at that. However, the ifixpng plug-in does finally make my site logo work in IE6.]
[Update: I’m behind the times. offset() has been rolled into the core jquery library, and it’s fine; the problem was that IE6 doesn’t bother calculating changes to a hidden DIV. If I show it and then update its position, it works fine.]
Furigana: just another crutch
If you start studying Japanese, one of the first —and best— pieces of advice you’ll see is “avoid romanization”. The stated reason is simple: almost everything you see written in the roman alphabet is intended for non-Japanese readers, so learning to read romaji saves you some frustration up front, but cuts you off from anything that wasn’t specifically converted for Westerners.
There’s more to it than that, though, but there are plenty of anti-romaji rants out there. Today, I’m going to whine about furigana, small-print phonetic spellings of kanji commonly used in print, and almost completely unsupported on the web. They look something like this (CSS replaced with a GIF, because IE 7 is still broken):
The advantage is obvious: if you can read hiragana, you don’t necessarily have to look up unfamiliar kanji, and even if you do, you don’t have to identify radicals and count strokes. They’re also “real Japanese”; books and comics meant for children and younger teens are full of them, and even adult-oriented material needs them occasionally, to deal with unusual readings and rare kanji. They also get used to add emphasis and subtext.
Some of the disadvantages are also obvious:
- They have to be added by hand.
- They increase the required whitespace between lines of text.
- If multiple words on the same line have furigana, without careful placement they may overlap.
- If the original text is small, the furigana have to be tiny. This is particularly bad with manga, which are reduced 50% or more when reprinted.
One less-obvious disadvantage that’s been biting me recently is that someone who is accustomed to reading furigana will look at them first, even when he knows the associated kanji. I’ve studied over 1,000 kanji (and written out over 2,000), and if I retained them all, I’d be able to puzzle out the vast majority of the Japanese text I see, and quickly build my vocabulary by reading.
In reality, on a good day I recognize about 800 of them, and often don’t remember all the common readings, because I read the furigana first. I’ve gotten very, very good at reading even fairly small furigana, and can skim through a fully-glossed text quite quickly. The Ask graded readers I mentioned a while back are excellent, and I’m enjoying levels 3 and 4, but I’m reading kanji-with-furigana, not kanji.
Some textbooks try to keep you from falling into this trap by only using furigana the first time a word is used in a page or section (it’s also a lot cheaper…). Unfortunately, this only works when you’re reading the text in order, and really sucks when the teacher asks a student to read something aloud. Better books will use furigana for all new kanji, but expect you to be able to read words from previous lessons. My class didn’t use one of those; ours basically assumed that kanji would magically imprint themselves into your brain without any work on their part.
So, I need to read to master more kanji, but I need furigana to read, which keeps me from mastering more kanji. The best option I’ve found for breaking out of this little catch-22 is the Unicom JLPT Level 2 prep book for the reading section, which includes 30 essays arranged by increasing difficulty, each one printed with and without furigana. I’m also planning to resume my old habit of writing out everything I read, which is tedious, but extremely helpful.
[the other three JLPT2 books in this series are also good, but I’m less interested in them right now. I’ll probably start using them around July.]
Amazon: more fun in Japanese
Today’s discoveries:
- Sailor suits and Heavy Tanks
- Moe yo! Tank School; also volume 2.
- Moe yo! SDF School
- Exciting, filled-with-maidens Imperial Army Primer
- Moeru Battleship
- Moe moe Small Arms Encyclopedia
- Moe moe Weapons Encyclopedia
- And lest you think it's all about war, Moe moe Goddess Encyclopedia and Moe moe Fairy Encyclopedia
What’s the connection? “People who bought these items also bought the Queen’s Blade panty-fighter books”… :-)
