I love English and was once good enough to become an English teacher at a Japanese junior high school. However, that was in the past and since then my knowledge of English has been declining rapidly. So, as part of my language learning, I decided to submit some simple questions and comments about English language that are not easy for me (and that I should ask on HiNative or Quora) to Newgrounds. I am not an expert in English and may be making elementary mistakes, but thank you for your patience.
Let's relish the world of William Gibson | English Is Not So Easy 13
I have wanted to write a novel in English for a long time, and to some extent I am training to do so. But I think the ability to write a novel is totally different from what I learned as a subject in school. So what should I do? The answer is simple: just climb the mountain in front of you!
Today, please let me introduce my favorite sci-fi novel "Burning Chrome". This is a work by a pioneer of cyberpunk, William Gibson. Now that I have both the English and Japanese versions (Japanese name is "クローム襲撃"), so I can enjoy the work in two different ways. In this article, I would like to share with you the very beginning of the very first story in this collection of the short stories. This should not be against the law....
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"Jonny Mnemonic" by William Gibson
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for:
僕は散弾銃をアディダス・バッグに収め、詰め物としてテニス靴下を四足入れた。全然僕のスタイルじゃないけれど、これこそが狙いだ。
If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude.
粗雑と思われているなら繊細にやり、繊細と思われているなら粗雑にやる。
I'm a very technical boy.
僕はとても繊細な青少年。
So I decided to get as crude as possible.
そこで、目いっぱい粗雑にいってみることにしたわけだ。
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Thank you for your patience with the difficult-to-read text. I would also like to study the translation here and break down each part into sentences.
The novelist William Gibson uses many unique words, and translating them can be sometimes very difficult. In this example, the translator must have first asked the following question: is "technical" the antonym of "crude"? We must use my imagination. In this part, the protagonist hide a "technical" shotgun by putting four pairs of tennis socks "crudely". He has to act like a "crude" boy for some reason.
As these two words are paired, so the Japanese translator must translate them as a pair. In this sentence, he used "粗雑" and "繊細". Indeed, "粗雑" is a literal translation of "crude," but I am sure that this is one of the few examples in which "technical" is translated as "繊細 (delicate, slender)". This is exactly the part in which we can enjoy the "technique" of the translator.
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These days, thought, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.
とはいえ、この頃ではよほど繊細でなくては粗雑さを目指すことすらできない。
I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load then myself;
この十二番径薬莢二発だって、旋盤で真鍮材から削り出さねばならず、自分で火薬を詰めなくてはならなかった。
I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand- loading cartidges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers -all very tricky.
古いマイクロフィッシュを見つけ出してきて、手籠め式薬包のやり方を知らなくてはならなかった。梃子式のプレス機を作って、雷管をつけなくてはならなかった——どれもみんな、おおいにヤバい。
But I knew they'd work.
けど、これでうまくいくことはわかっていた。
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OK, the protagonist seems to have enough skill to make his own shotgun, which for some reason has recently become unavailable in stores. This boy is certainly overly "technical" but he needs to act like a "rough boy". But why? He is a hit man?
I would like to read the next part, but I have to see the skill of the Japanese translator. In this part, many technical terms appear, but translators can use the words in dictionaries, so translation is relatively easy. For example "microfiche" is a sheet in which many tiny pictures or documents are printed, and we can read them through a microscope. This was the storage medium before cloud computing, USB flash drives, and many older types of disks.
The most difficult part is the last part: "-all very tricky." First, this phrase looks grammatically incorrect to me. So this expression may be a "crude" one used by "a very technical boy". I think this part of the story expresses the frustration of having to go through such a tedious procedure when there should be an easier way to get a shotgun. We must translate this feeling, and I personally think the original Japanese translation "——どれもみんな、おおいにヤバい。" is a little too old-fashioned expression. Hmm... How about "——全てがとにかくトリッキー。"? The Japanese language has many words borrowed from English, and this is becoming more and more the case. I think we can use the word "トリッキー (trikki-)", which is just a transliteration of "tricky".
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The meet was set for the Drome at 2300, but I rode the tube three stops past the closest platform and walked back.
接触は二三〇〇に《ドローム》で、と設定されていたけれど、僕は地下鉄で、もよりのプラットフォームの三つ先まで行き過ぎておいて、歩いて戻った。
Immaculate procedure.
非の打ちどころのない手続きだ。
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What is "tube?" It means "subway"!? The word "subway" is widely used in the U.S., and the dictionary says "the tube" means "The London Underground". Since William Gibson is an American novelist, I thought this novel was set in the US, but actually the story may be set in London. However, I heard that if you are an American, when you hear the word "tube" you think of "CRT TV," which is the origin of the word YouTube.
Also, the word "immaculate" is another difficult word for me. The word "immaculate" is the antonym of "macculate," which means a stain or spot on a piece of cloth. This word shows the tense situation in which even a drop of ink on his clothing would kill him.
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I checked myself out in the chrome siding of a coffee kiosk, your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair.
コーヒー・キオスクのクローム張りの外壁で自分自身を点検してみる。かたい黒髪を逆立てた、基本通りに鋭い顔立ちのコーカソイド。
The girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds.
《アンダー・ザ・ナイフ》の娘たちはソニー・マオに夢中だから、シックな内眼角贅皮らしきものをつけ加えられないようにするのが、次第に大変になってきている。
It probably wouldn't fool Ralfi Face, but it might get me next to his table.
これでラルフィ・フェイスの目をごまかせるとは思えないけれど、奴のテーブルの脇までは行きつけるだろう。
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I think the second sentence, "The girls at ..." is the first translator-killer. I could not understand what he was saying... First, "Under the Knife" is just a name of a place, but implies plastic surgery, and "epicanthis folds" is skin fold of the upper eyelid that covers the inner corner (medial canthus) of the eye (from Wikipedia - "Epicanthic fold"). So this sentence implies that the protagonist is sick and tired of the girls at his cosmetic surgeon's office recommending that he get Asian-looking eyes. Wait, he had cosmetic surgery? Wow, this is a technique of a high-level writer. In this way, without directly explaining "what was going on," we can find clues to his past and intentions by reading his daily complaints.
My complaint about the Japanese translation is that I lost the opportunity to notice that he had cosmetic surgery just by transliterating "under the knife (《アンダー・ザ・ナイフ》)". But I don't know of any good solution to this problem either.
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The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down one side and tables along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and a arcame array of dealers.
《ドローム》は細長い店で、片側にはバー・カウンターが伸び、もう一方にはテーブルが並んで、女衒や故買屋や正体不明のディーラー連中がたむろしている。
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There seem to be a lot of underground people there. It is starting to look like cyberpunk!
But, did you know the word "pimps"?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/handler#English
pimp (plural pimps)
Someone who solicits customers for prostitution and acts as manager for a group of prostitutes; a pander.
(African-American Vernacular, slang) A man who can easily attract women.
Incidentally, "pipms" is translated into "女衒屋", but I did not even know how to pronounce these Chinese characters!
https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%A5%B3%E8%A1%92-547611
女衒屋
〘名〙 江戸時代、女を遊女屋、旅籠屋などに売ることを業としたもの。遊女奉公で、遊女屋と女の親元との仲介に当たるが、女を誘拐し売りとばすことなどもあり、悪徳の商売...
OK, surely this word is equivalent to "pimps". What do you do when faced with an unfamiliar word? I will skip the word.
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The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn't relish trying to get out past them if things didn't work out.
その晩は《磁気犬姉妹》がドアに張り付いていたので、ことがうまく運ばなかった場合、この二人をすり抜けるとなるとぞっとしなかった。
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With "magnetic" and "dog" in their name, they must be good at pursuit.
The word "relish" means "to taste or eat with pleasure" or "to take great pleasure in" (relish - Wiktionary). In the Japanese translation, I felt uncomfortable with the translation "ぞっとしなかった". The verb "ぞっとする" means "to shudder from fear" and this expression literally means "didn't shudder from fear". Is this an appropriate translation?
If I were the translator, how about this? "すり抜けるとなるとそそられなかった". The word "そそられる" means "appealed", so I think this word better expresses his melancholic feelings.
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They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds.
二人とも身長が二メートルもあって、グレイハウンドのように細い。
One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them.
ひとりは白人、ひとりは黒人だけれども、その点さえ別にすれば、美容外科に能う限り瓜二つ。
They'd been lovers for years and were bad news in the tussle.
もう何年も愛人関係にあって、喧嘩になったら厄介だ。
I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.
もともと男だったのがどっちのほうか、僕にはついにはわからない。
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This part explains the appearance of "The Magnetic Dog Sisters". This part was very poetic in its Japanese translation. So I suppose the original text is also poetic, but I do not have sufficient ability to "relish" it. It's a shame. Frankly, the original text is astonishing and the translation picks up the feeling well. I am not even a professional Japanese writer, so I am not confident that I can produce the same literary quality.
This is the end of this article. What an attractive story! This novel is a very old novel, but it is so interesting even if I, who live in the modern age, read it. I used to think that literary ability was not very important in writing a novel, especially a science fiction novel, because in technical writing, "readability" is the primary requirement. However, this may not always be the case.
[For Japanese language learners]
For those who want to test their translation skills, please let me introduce some Japanese science fiction novels. This is the first part of a Japanese Sci-fi novel "Harmony" by Project Itoh (伊藤計劃). The novel won the Japan Science Fiction Grand Prize and was made into an animated film.
If you are interested in translating and want to know the professional answer, you can read the English version by Googling.
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どこまでも親切で、どこまでも他者を思いやって、挙句の果てにこの私にすら思いやりを持て親切であれと急き立てるこのセカイ。そんな時代と空間に参加させられるのはまっぴらだった。
「知ってる、トァン……」
とミァハが眼を輝かせながら言った。ミァハは物知りなのだ。クラスで一番成績のいい問題児。ミァハは私と零下堂キアン以外の誰にも必要以外で話しかけようとはしなかった。
私とキアンのどこが、ミァハの気に入ったのか今になってもわからない。成績だって特に良くはなかったし、容姿だってまあ悪かないけど取り立てて目立ったところもなかった。それはキアンも似たようなもの。けれどミァハに、どうして私とつきあうの、とはついに一度も訊いたことがない。
「昔はね、体を買ってくれる大人がいたらしいんだ。多少のお金で私たちみたいな子供とのセックスを求めてた大人たち。貧乏でもないのに、何の罪悪感もなく自分のほうから体をセックスの道具に売っていた女の子たちがいっぱいいたんだって。買うほうも買うほうで、そんな風に堕落した大人が結構な数いて、実際に街中のホテルでお金を渡してたんだって」
「からだ、売りたいの……」
私はくすくすと笑って訊いた。