A reminder that puzzles run for two weeks. (I nearly forgot myself.) Also today is 教育体育の日. Go out and get ye some 教育体育.
Here is the link for the puzzle last week.
Game Lingo – 統一
統一 (とういつ) isn’t an in-game term per se, but it is a vital concept in video game translation and really all translation in general. It literally means “uniform” or “uniformity.” I personally think of it as “consistent” or “consistency.” This is common sense, but when translating you have to make sure that the spelling, word choices and style are consistent throughout a text.
You don’t want to have a character drinking “Cutty Sark Whiskey” in one scene and then “Cutty Sark Whisky” in another (the latter is correct). You don’t want to have “Oohashi-san” on one page (or any page, really) and then Ōhashi-san (there, that’s better) on another page. Proper nouns should always be kept consistent, and video game translation is an entirely different animal when it comes to proper nouns.
One place where 統一 rears its anal retentive head in video games is with controls. Almost every video game console uses the same little rocker pad, often shaped like a +, to control movement, but the terminology is different for different systems. The Nintendo DS uses “+Control Pad,” the Xbox “D-pad,” and the PlayStation®3 system “directional button.” Should players be pressing the “A button” or the “A Button”? Do they “tilt” or “press” or “tap” or “tap repeatedly” the button or control device?
Naming of the systems themselves is another place where terminology is often set by the companies. PlayStation uses the word “system” after every instance of Playstation®3 or PSP®, and they also include the restricted mark (no spaces before or after the 3). Nintendo lets you use “Nintendo DS” and also “DS.” Xbox 360 is not “XBox 360.”
Nintendo is by far the most picky, and failure to abide by their terminology guide can cause a company to lose millions if Nintendo of America or Europe finds fault with their game during the checking process and sends it back to the company. The company has to fix whatever problems there were (re-master the game) and make another appointment with NOA and NOE to have their game checked, possibly delaying the release of the game.
Japanese does have a high tolerance for repetition, way more so than English, so you should be flexible enough to realize that not every word needs to be 統一されている. Forget 様々, ignore など, realize that が・けど don’t always mean “but,” but also know where you have to maintain consistency even when it’s painful. There are tons of examples of translation so bad it’s good, but when a term gets set, sometimes it should stay that way. Metal Gear games use “sneaking mission” for 潜入任務, a lot of the Bubble Bobble (in the Japanese “Puzzle Bobble”) remakes use the same cheesy beginning (you loves it, I can tell), and Nintendo still doesn’t ever use “the” before Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection ever.
If you’re really serious about translating video games, one of the best things you can do to prepare is to read your video game manuals very carefully. There are also some websites you can look at. Notice what terms they are using. Start to catalog phrases and wordings that could be useful. Your command and consistency of English is just as important as your Japanese comprehension.
号外 – Herta Müller wins Nobel Prize
Herta Müller wins 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.
See you guys back here next year for Murakami-palooza 2010.
A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October tomorrow (!), when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this series here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Murakami’s Complete Works is an interesting collection. It includes all of his main novels, most of his major short story collections, a few 書き下ろし “bonus tracks” type stories, and then other short works that he just happened to like. One of these is “A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heinekan Cans.” Murakami included it in Volume 8 of the collection which collects the stories from his collection The Second Bakery Attack (パン屋再襲撃). Without further ado, here is my translation:
A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
When the zoo closed, people from the town put together some money and bought the elephant. The zoo was a crappy little zoo that surprised no one by going broke, and the elephant was old and worn out. He was so old and worn out that no other zoo would take him in. He didn’t look like he would live much longer, and no zoo could be asked to take in an elephant with one foot in the grave.
The zoo’s broker had no idea what to do and even pleaded with the town to take the elephant for free. “He’s old, so he doesn’t eat all that much. And he’s really tame. He’s not going to wake up the neighbors by trumpeting loudly. All he needs is a place to go. Quite a deal, being free and all,” said the broker.
After arguing for around a month, in the end the town council decided to take in the elephant. The looked all over the world, they said, and there wasn’t a single town that had its own elephant. Of course there are probably plenty of towns like that in India and Africa, but there were at least none in the northern hemisphere.
A farmer who had some land on a forested mountain provided a place for the elephant to live, and they relocated a run-down elementary school gymnasium to use as an elephant pen. Leftover school lunches provided plenty of food. A retired employee from the town offices became the elephant keeper and looked after him. The town did have quite a bit of money, so it was relatively easy to put together the appropriate funds.
And it wasn’t like the elephant was totally useless either.
The town assigned the elephant the job of crushing empty cans. First they made a concrete pipe in the shape of the elephant’s foot and then trained the elephant to stomp there when a whistle was blown. Every week on Friday the cans were collected from all over the town and hauled to the elephant’s pen by truck. Beer cans, soup cans, nori cans – they piled up all sorts of can in front of the elephant’s pen. The elephant keeper would dump three buckets worth of cans into the concrete pipe and blow the whistle. When the whistle sounded, the elephant stomped with one foot and crushed the cans, turning them into a single flat piece of metal.
…
(65-66)
(*Update: I’ve redacted part of this story.) Here’s what Murakami has to say about the story in his notes:
From what I can remember, I wrote “A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans” on a whim while I was drinking Heineken. As I’m sure you know, Heineken cans are a beautiful green color. I finished drinking one of them and then crushed it in my hand, and as I did, I thought, man, this would be even flatter and more beautiful if an elephant stepped on it. And that’s why I wanted to write this story, from what I remember. I’m not sure how good it is. (X)
Well, he liked it enough to include it in his Complete Works, which you can’t say about “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall.” My guess is that he needed to create some value of his own for the Complete Works and this small, yet-to-be-collected short story fit in thematically; he positions it write after “The Elephant Vanishes,” and now that I look at the order, I see that he added “The Bakery Attack” as a small bonus immediately after “The Second Bakery Attack.”
One note about the translation. In the Japanese, Murakami has his narrator drink 一ダース worth of beer – a dozen cans. I tried using that in the translation, but “a case” felt so much more natural in the English that I decided to go with that instead.
This concludes Murakami-palooza 2009. You can watch the announcement online here.
Monday Puzzle – Can you handle it?
Due to popular demand, the puzzle lives again! This time on Mondays. We’ll see how long I can keep this up.
I’m currently sharing an apartment with 5-6 other people (things are in…flux). We live in a 5DK apartment above a chicken butcher, so they affectionately call the apartment 鳥ハウス. It’s a short walk from a station that is only two stops from where I work. Living with young Japanese people has been the highlight of my move to Tokyo, and I’m not quite sure what I did to deserve a place this great. (I found the room on roomshare.jp, which I highly recommend to anyone looking for a place to live.)
Shortly after I moved in, I discovered the following sign somewhere in the apartment:
When I first saw it I was extremely confused. I knew what it meant because of the placement of the sign, but what was up with that question mark? After looking at it for a while, I had that なるほど moment and finally realized what it meant.
The puzzle this week is to tell me 1) where in the apartment I found it and 2) what was actually written.
The prize if you win? One can of 100% barley malt beer – e.g. Ebisu, Suntory Malts, Asahi Premium. (New rule: you must physically track me down and demand your beer to redeem it.)
Please do not post your answer in the comments. Send it to me via email or facebook. My email address is るぱんさんせい (romanized) at-mark gmail dot com.
The Town and Its Uncertain Wall
With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this series here: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Murakami wrote Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in 1985, but he had the original idea for the “End of the World” sections five years earlier when he wrote the novella (中編小説, literally “medium-length fiction”) “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” (街と、その不確かな壁, English translation of the title borrowed from Jay Rubin’s Music of Words). It was published in the September 1980 edition of Bungakukai.
In the story, an anonymous boku goes to a walled Town (街) in search of the second person kimi (君), the “true self” of a past love. He enters the Town as “the Prophet” (予言者, which Birnbaum translated as “Dreamreader”) and kimi is working in the Library as the librarian. Just as in the novel, boku has his shadow removed by the Gatekeeper when he enters the Town, and the shadow gets weaker and weaker over time. Boku is torn between his happiness in the Town with kimi and his shadow’s desire to escape from the Town’s eerie sense of perfection. Murakami makes very different choices at the end of the story, and I have translated a small portion that may be of interest to anyone who has read Hard-boiled Wonderland (and shouldn’t spoil the book for those who haven’t read it):
The Wall disappears.
“It’s over,” I say. “Want to go?”
“Sure.”
We take off our coats and shoes in the snow and then fasten our belts together.
“Don’t get separated. No matter what,” my shadow says. “If we get separated, it’s all over.”
I nod. The two sets of black coats and black shoes are a strange sight on the snow.
“There’s a chance I’m wrong,” my shadow blurts out. “I might have wrapped you up in this for my own convenience.”
“You think?”
“I suddenly had that thought after hearing you talk with the Wall.”
“Don’t get discouraged,” I say. “Everyone makes mistakes.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. If we make it out to land, let’s get to know each other again.”
We share a firm handshake with our belts attached. Then we take a deep breath and dive together headfirst into the pool, cold as ice.
The next instant I lose consciousness.
Murakami writes the story off as a failure, and it is definitely weak; grammatically he uses the same patterns over and over (notably ばかり and だけ), and there seems to be a lack of editing (on several occasions he lapses back to 彼女 instead of 君). But if you take into consideration that he wrote “The Town” between Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase, it also looks like a young writer boldly expanding his range. Thematically it’s very different from Hard-boiled Wonderland. Murakami is more concerned here with the uncertain nature of language and how that affects human interaction, whereas in Hard-boiled Wonderland he focuses on society and the mind and how the two affect individual existence.
If you are a true Murakami nut and want something cool to read, I recommend ordering a copy from the National Diet Library.
Game Lingo – 読み込む
Like 発売, 読み込む invites misreadings, here with the 読 character. I believe it can mean “read” in certain contexts, but it is more often translated as “load” as in “load saved data.” The most frequent pattern is 読み込み中, which is generally translated as “Loading…”.
Chillin’ Out
After two straight weekends of awesome globetrotting madness, I finally had a weekend to myself and could make use of a couple of terms my host mom in Nishiaizu taught me:
骨を休め – literally “rest one’s bones,” take a physical rest
羽を伸ばす – literally “spread one’s wings,” a similar pattern but also includes a mental rest aspect, and another alternative is…
鬼の居ぬ間に洗濯をする – literally “do laundry while the oni is away,” where oni = unpleasant boss-like person/situation that oppresses you
Get the scoop on these and other idioms at this awesome ことわざ dictionary.
街・町
With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this series here: 1, 2, 3.
Last week I showed you a passage from a Birnbaum translation that had missing sentences. This week it’s Rubin’s turn to go under the magnifying glass. Here is a section of his official translation of Norwegian Wood:
Three old women were the only passengers on the Sunday morning streetcar. They all looked at me and my flowers. One of them gave me a smile. I smiled back. I sat in the last seat and watched the old houses passing close by the window. The streetcar almost touched the overhanging eaves. The laundry deck of one house had ten potted tomato plants, next to which a big black cat lay stretched out in the sun. In the yard of another house, a little kid was blowing soap bubbles. I heard an Ayumi Ishida song coming from someplace, and could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The streetcar snaked its way through this private back-alley world. A few more passengers got on at stops along the way, but the three old women went on talking intently about something, huddled together face-to-face.
I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori’s map down a broad street without much to look at. None of the shops along the way seemed to be doing very well, housed as they were in old buildings with gloomy-looking interiors and faded writing on some of the signs. Judging from the age and style of the buildings, this area had been spared the wartime air raids, leaving whole blocks intact. A few of the places had been entirely rebuilt, but just about all had been enlarged or repaired in spots, and it was those additions that tended to look far more shabby than the old buildings themselves.
The whole atmosphere of the place suggested that most of the people who used to live here had become fed up with the cars and the filthy air and the noise and high rents and moved to the suburbs, leaving only cheap apartments and company flats and hard-to-move shops and a few stubborn holdouts who clung to family properties. Everything looked blurred and grimy as if wrapped in a haze of exhaust gas.
Ten minutes’ walk down this street brought me to a corner gas station, where I turned right into a short block of shops, in the middle of which hung the sign for Kobayashi Bookstore. True, it was not a big store, but neither was it as small as Midori’s description had led me to imagine. It was just a typical neighborhood bookstore, the same kind I used to run to on the very day the boys’ magazines came out. A nostalgic mood overtook me as I stood in front of the place. (Rubin, 64-65)
The final paragraph is the only one with missing lines, but I love this section of the book (partly because I love the neighborhood and the streetcar line) and wanted to give some of the development to the missing sentence. In the passage, the protagonist Toru makes his way to Midori’s family-run bookstore. She lives near Otsuka Station, a short ride on a streetcar (in reality the Arakawa Toden line that arcs northeast from Waseda through Otsuka and then down into Arakawa Ward) from Waseda University, the college Murakami attended and used as a model for the university in the novel. As Toru rides the streetcar to visit her he is assaulted by an array of sensory input. But Rubin leaves out the final sentence of the last paragraph, which in Japanese is:
どこの町にもこういう本屋があるのだ。(全作品, 98)
Norwegian Wood is one of the few works that has been translated into English by two different people, so we have the perfect opportunity to see two different sets of translation choices (by professionals, rather than my lousy efforts). In his translation for Kodansha International, Alfred Birnbaum renders this same section like this (I have bolded the additional sentence.):
The Sunday morning streetcar was passengerless except for a group of three old ladies, who sized up me and my narcissuses. One lady smiled at me. I smiled back and took a seat at the back to watch the old houses swing past. At times the streetcar practically scraped the eaves. Here a glimpse of ten potted tomato plants on a platform for hanging laundry, where a cat lay sunning itself, there children blowing soap bubbles in a back yard. Somewhere an Ayumi Ishida tune was playing. The smell of curry drifted by as the streetcar threaded an intimate course through the backstreet neighborhoods. A few more passengers boarded at stops en route, scarcely noticed by the old ladies, who huddled together, tirelessly chatting away.
I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori’s map down a singularly unremarkable main street. None of the shops along the way seemed to enjoy much turnover. All the stores were old and dark inside. The characters on some signs were not even legible any more. I could tell from the age and style of the buildings that this area hadn’t been bombed in the war. That’s why these shops were still there. Additions and partial repairs only made the buildings more dilapidated.
Most people had left the area to escape the cars and smog and noise and high rents, leaving behind only run-down apartments and company housing and businesses that proved difficult to uproot, or else locals who stubbornly stuck to their longtime residences and refused to move. A haze hung over the place, probably from car exhaust, making everything seem vaguely dingy.
A ten-minute walk down desolation row, I came to a corner gas station, where the map had me turn right into a small shopping street, and midway down that I made out the Kobayashi Book Shop sign. Not a very big bookstore, granted, but not quite as small as I’d imagined from Midori’s description. Your ordinary everyday neighborhood bookstore. The kind of bookstore I’d run to as a boy to buy that latest, anxiously awaited kiddy-zine the day it hit the stands. Somehow, just standing in front of the Kobayashi Book Shop made me feel nostalgic. Surely every town (町) must have a bookstore like this. (Birnbaum 1, 125-126)
The sentence is a throwaway detail, but it does include the Japanese 町, which I wrote about briefly after my thesis rewrite went up on Neojaponisme. In Murakami’s early work, the 街 (まち, machi) is a central theme. Machi literally means town, and Murakami uses it in his early novels to refer to the place where the narrator, the legendary boku, grew up. All of his past is tied up with the machi and it exerts a certain level of control over him because it is where all his memories come from. From Hear the Wind Sing to A Wild Sheep Chase, boku goes through a process of growth into adulthood and a separation from his hometown. He eventually forsakes it, cutting ties with the past and looking toward the future. Nothing is ever named, but the machi strongly resembles Kobe, Murakami’s own hometown.
In Norwegian Wood, both boku and the machi have names, and perhaps this is why Murakami chose 町 rather than the 街 as in his early works. Boku is Toru Watanabe, a student in Tokyo during the turbulent late-60s. Toru is not dissimilar from the old boku. He has the same tastes in music and literature and he spends his time reading novels and watching movies instead of participating in political demonstrations or study groups with activists who are caricatured throughout the novel. The machi in this novel is Kobe, also similar to the machi from the first three novels. Toru grew up there, but when his best friend Kizuki commits suicide he starts to feel a desire to leave. Toru says “I had to get away from Kobe at any cost,” and shortly after that notes “I just need to get away from this town (machi)” (Rubin 24-25). Toru “escapes” Kobe for Tokyo in the same way that the boku from Murakami’s first three novels escapes the anonymous machi for Tokyo.
Escaping to Tokyo also gives Toru the opportunity to establish his own emotional center to the world, a new place that will have new memories associated with it. But it isn’t that easy. The machi he finds after moving to Tokyo are divided, most notably by the two female protagonists. Rubin has noted how Naoko and Midori represent a dichotomy between life and death (Rubin, Music of Words 159). This is further represented by the “machi” they inhabit. Naoko, after a break down, flees from Tokyo to a regimented, sterile sanatorium deep in the hills of Kyoto. Midori’s machi is the opposite – although old and somewhat grimy, it is filled with different smells, sounds and flavors. It’s strongly connected to Toru’s own past (as well as Japan’s collective history), which might explain why he seems confused when talking to Midori at the end of the book; Toru’s process of self-discovery has lead him from his machi hometown to Tokyo, out to the isolation of Naoko’s sanatorium, back to the chaos of late-60s Tokyo, off wandering after Naoko’s death, and then after all of this he still doesn’t know where he is. Judging from the tone of the novel, his attempts to return to Midori and her familiar (nostalgic) machi must have been futile. Otherwise why write the book? The novel’s final, hopeless line is:
僕はどこでもない場所のまん中から緑を呼びつづけていた。(全作品, 419)
号外 – 1Q84 Book 3, Summer 2010 (Update)
12 hours on a plane. What better to do than translate some Murakami? I used a bit of my time to translate part of the Mainichi Shimbun’s new three-part interview with Murakami. I stopped right around where the spoilers started, so you can read safely:
Haruki Murakami Talks 1Q84 – Exclusive Interview 1 – “Book 3 by next summer”
In May the author Haruki Murakami released the full-length novel 1Q84 (Book 1, Book 2; Shinchosha, 1890 yen each), which has since become a huge talking-point. Murakami recently responded to the Mainichi Shimbun’s interview. The story features a layered plot that depicts “the struggle between individual and the system” set in Japan in the 1980s. For the first time, Murakami makes it clear that he is in the process of writing an additional third part. Mainichi asked his for his thoughts as a writer.
First of all “1985”
Currently both volumes of 1Q84 have gone through 18 printings and achieved million-seller status, with Book 1 selling 1,230,000 copies and Book 2 1,000,000 copies. There has been an extraordinary response, including, among other things, the publication of several books of commentary.
“I think that I have about 150,000 – 200,000 established readers for my novels. When it’s around that many, I get kind of a sense of how my work is being received. When it gets up to 500,000 or 1,000,000, it’s really hard to tell who is reading it and how they feel about it.”
The mysterious title is based on George Orwell’s novel 1984 (’49), but there is a secret story behind it.
“At first I was going to title it 1985. But while I was writing it, I talked with Michael Radford, the director of the movie version of Orwell’s work, and learned that the British writer Anthony Burgess was writing a book called 1985. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to change it to 1Q84, and when I finished writing, I searched around on the Internet and realized that Akira Asada had actually released a music cassette/book set under the same title. At that point the galley revisions were already underway, so I let Asada-san know. And so that’s how it eventually ended up like it did.”
It’s been three months since the publication. Can we ask what you think of the criticism you’ve received?
“I haven’t read any at all. I don’t ever read it, but I took special care this time since I’m writing Book 3. I want to be able to focus on writing from a fresh state of mind. I thought it would be totally finished when I completed 1 and 2. And that’s what I was thinking when I structured it on Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” – that it would be complete with two volumes. But after a little while, I started to feel like I had to write 3. I wondered how the rest of the story would unfold. As far as the timeframe, I’d like to put it out as quickly as possible, so I’m thinking next summer as a goal.”
Update:
Oops over here, too. Anthony Burgess died back in 1993, and his book 1985 was written back in 1978. You can go check the Japanese yourself and figure out what I did wrong. If you want to see another translation of the interview, check out this link.