On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Caroline Seawright wrote:

A transliteration is changing something from one alphabet from another.
An example is taking two kanji or three hiragana and replacing them with
the Roman letters 'genki'.  If that was what Viz was doing, I doubt they'd
have much of an American market - their manga would still be in Japanese,
just Romanized Japanese.  Viz is doing translations, where, for instance, 
you take the kanji or hiragana mentioned above and replace them with the
word 'healthy.'  Then, once you've changed the words literally, you
rearrange and adjust them until they make sense and sound natural in the
target language.

Every time that I've heard 'transliteration' used, it has
been used to show the difference between the actual translation that is
done (the work done by Toshifumi Yoshida, I believe), and the Merkinising
(changing the translation into American) that Gerald Jones does.

You posted a definition for transliteration, and it agrees far more with
my description than yours.  From your post: '...Represent (word etc) in
corresponding characters of another alphabet or language...'  It also
mentions a root word being the same as for 'letter.'  Transliteration is
simply writing something in a different alphabet than the original while
keeping everything else the same, and that's not what Gerard is doing.
Your criticism is that he's taking something in English - Toshi's script -
and writing something related but different in English - the final script.
This is going from the Roman alphabet to the Roman alphabet, and is thus
not transliteration.  If anything, Toshi's the only one in a position to
transliterate - if he takes the hiragana, katakana, and kanji and writes
them in the Roman alphabet before translating them, he's transliterating.

Toshifumi Yoshida translates - Gerald Jones transliterates. Viz does BOTH.
But the FINAL product, the manga that everyone reads and that some people
takes as 'official' is the *transliterated* version, NOT the translation.

Please don't tell me that I'm wrong when I'm right.

I won't.  But you're wrong this time.  Viz publishes a translated version
by any definition of the word.  It's a loose translation, to be sure - an
idiomatic translation more concerned with getting the general meaning and
feel across than the exact words.  But it's still a translation.  A
transliterated version would have Japanese words in the Roman alphabet.

ObC&C: I suppose that Genom might want to invest in silver bullets before
going up against certain members of the ADPolice again... ;-)

--
Scott Johnson |
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