Is this normal?

[tsubasahome]

Can I not read Japanese to English translated anything anymore?

When I was in Japanese 301 in college, I had to read a chapter of Banana Yoshimoto's Tsugumi for a class assignment. I got a copy of the book in English today, and I leafed through it to find the chapter I had read in class...and it seems really jarring and awkward in English. A lot of unexpected curse words, and colloquialisms that just seem weird to me. I hope it doesn't ruin my enjoyment of the book. Can I just not take Japanese translated into English anymore? Now, whenever I read something in English that I had previously read in Japanese, it never seems right, not matter how "close" the translation is. I wonder if this is normal for people learning a foreign language. I didn't really have the feeling when I was studying Spanish, possibly because of the similar sentence structure and the fact that I never had the opportunity to read translations of the stuff I was studying... ^^;;;

Comments

[twotone]

I think Japanese is especially tough because there are so many different contextual cues that can give people totally different impressions of what's being said. And it can be a bit jarring when what's in your mind clashes with what the translator has done. :/

This is anime rather than fiction, but with one series I'm constantly having to go back and change dialogue... Person X is a well-mannered high-born young lady, so she shouldn't be saying "I'm gonna" "Do I hafta?" etc. Person Y is a bit rough around the edges, but that doesn't mean she should be swearing indiscriminately... etc.

In terms of translated fiction, I'm currently working my way through a childhood favorite, "Le Petite Prince". This is a "new and improved translation", and again it's very jarring for me because it's different from the old translation I remember, and the Japanese translation that I ran across this one time. Fiction relies so heavily on how something is expressed, changing just a word or two can result in a totally different "feel".

[kraftpistole.livejournal.com]

I think it's perfectly normal. I can't stomach English translations of things that were originally in Spanish [One Hundred Years of Solitude comes to mind; the English version just loses a lot of the surrealism, IMHO], and vice-versa [the Argentine Harry Potter translations crack me up, they have Lupin speaking in the Spanish equivalent of thee and thou]. And, hey, if you no longer really need the English translations, skip 'em all together.