Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. So close. A warm and tender, loving embrace. God i miss him
using this as an excuse to post my favourite Hark, a Vagrant! strip/miniseries: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=327
can we teach a machine to mix the e-pistulae with dracula daily i think it would add spice to cicero’s letters
the crossover event of the millenium
Quo usque tandem abutere, Dracula, patientia nostra?
quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? Nihilne te nocturnum praesidium Palati, nihil urbis vigiliae, nihil timor populi, nihil concursus bonorum omnium, nihil hic munitissimus habendi senatus locus, nihil horum ora voltusque moverunt? Patere tua consilia non sentis?
Quid proxima, quid superiore nocte egeris, ubi fueris, quos biberis, quid consilii inferni ceperis?
O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. Consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? Non vivit, inmortuus est!
immo vero etiam in senatum venit, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.
Nos autem fortes viri satis facere rei publicae videmur, si istius furorem ac tela vitemus. Ad secundum mortem te, Dracula, duci iussu consulis iam pridem oportebat, in te conferri pestem, quam tu in nos [omnes iam diu] machinaris.
and because i hate it when people don’t post translations for the non-latinists:
When, O Dracula, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Do not the nightly guards placed on the Palatine Hill—do not the watches posted throughout the city—does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men—does not the precaution taken of assembling the senate in this most defensible place—do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect upon you? Do you not feel that your plans are detected?
What is there that you did last night, what the night before— where is it that you were—who was there that you drank—what infernal design was there which was adopted by you?
Shame on the age and on its principles! The senate is aware of these things; the consul sees them; and yet this man lives. Lives! Nay, he is undead!
And he comes even into the senate. He is watching and marking down and checking off for slaughter every individual among us. And we, gallant men that we are, think that we are doing our duty to the republic if we keep out of the way of his frenzied attacks.
You ought, O Dracula, long ago to have been led to your second execution by command of the consul. That destruction which you have been long plotting against us ought to have already fallen on your own head.
(In Catilinam Draculam trans. C.D. Yonge, adapted by me. Note the differences!)
i decided to sketch my queen Isabella!! i imagine someone is flirting with her and miwako is like, get it girl!!
Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It’s so interesting. I’d wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of “yeah, that’s what it literally translates to, but that’s not what it means” or has answered a question like “how do you say _____ in (language)?” with “you don’t, it’s just … not a thing, we don’t say that.”
I’ve had my fair share of “[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it’s text!” “[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it’s text!” and every time. Every time I’m just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.
Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn’t. To lots of people, it doesn’t. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It’s great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn’t available through my local library very much wasn’t available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show.
When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.
Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn’t led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.
And that’s … idk if it’s fine, but it’s what happens! A lot of the time, concepts – expressed in language – don’t translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn’t very idiomatic because there’s a register mismatch or worse.
And that’s even before cultural assumptions come in.
It’s normal to have those. It’s also important to remember that things like “thanks I hate it” as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn’t easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.
Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don’t have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator’s discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it’s the listener’s responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it’s lacking).
Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of “Go?” - “Go.” does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as “is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?” - “yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are” in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It’s arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying “Are you going?” - “I am (going)” might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.
This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking “are you going” or “is she going”? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it’s important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like “are we all going?” - “yes” or “they going, too?” might work. Context!
As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it’s because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it’s because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn’t. However, because in most cases translators don’t have access to the original authors, or even the original authors’ agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn’t get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it’s more of a “fuck it, I’ve got to put something and hope it doesn’t get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down” (especially fun when you’re working on a series that’s in progress).
For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there’ll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what “effectively” even means …
ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I’d love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don’t speak the material’s original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we’re basically working from a secondary source, and if we’re doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there’s nothing substantial being (literally) lost – or added! – in translation?
Sound designing a vampire being hit in the face with a shovel is... challenging. Who would've guessed.
[Audio transcript: Ben Galpin voicing Jonathan Harker from Dracula by Bram Stoker. He says, "There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face," followed by a cartoon "bonk" and the Wilhelm scream. End transcript]
ALL I WANNA DO IS *musket shot* *minutes-long period of silence interspersed with the sounds of a lead ball rolling down the barrel, fiddling with a cartridge, pouring powder, and locking the mechanism in place* *musket shot* *minutes-long period of silence interspersed with the sounds of a lead ball rolling down the barrel, fiddling with a cartridge, pouring powder, and locking the mechanism in place* *musket shot* *minutes-long period of silence interspersed with the sounds of a lead ball rolling down the barrel, fiddling with a cartridge, pouring powder, and locking the mechanism in place* AND *sound of a small coin purse being bluntly dropped onto a wooden countertop* AND TAKE YOUR MONEY
you sons of bitches. you no good sons of bitches. I went into utena three days ago without so much of a Wikipedia entry for some lite gundam research and now Nanami is laying eggs
ok you know the show is good when my vegan ass is like “give her another cat, let’s just see if she’s grown”
