On Wed, 21 Aug 1996, Caroline Seawright wrote:

Transliterate - v.t. Represent (word etc) in corresponding characters of
another alphabet or language; transliteration - n.; transliterator - n.
[L littera letter]

Maybe, but that's still not what Gerard is doing; that's nuts and bolts
stuff. Gerard is adapting R1/2 to the English world.

Yep, and what Gerard is doing is NOT translation. Toshifumi does that.
If you want to call it 'adapting' while I call it 'transliteration',
go ahead, but Gerard does NOT translate.

You can call 'dancing' 'antibiotics' if you like, but you'd be utterly
rejecting the real meaning of the word or the activity.  Similarly, it's
simply incorrect to call what Gerard Jones does 'transliteration.'  From
what I've gathered, he takes a literal translation from the original
Japanese and turns it into an idiomatic translation that'll actually look
natural.  Believe it or not, this is about half of what any translator
would do - as a lot of people who have actually tried it will tell you,
the real difficulty isn't generally in figuring out what the original's
saying, it's figuring out how to say it in English without being stilted
or wordy.  Furthermore, there's a lot of opinions out there about whether
you should be more faithful to your original language or your target
language - it's not as clear-cut a decision as it might seem at first.

If Gerard Jones were transliterating, he'd be taking a script given him in
one alphabet and reproducing it exactly in another alphabet.  That doesn't
seem to be the case - instead, he's taking a script given him in English
and making a more natural-sounding script also in English.  Call it
rewriting, call it adapting, just don't call it transliterating.

For that matter, I think this whole thing started when you laughed at
someone calling Viz an 'official' translation.  Tell me, just how does
Gerard Jones's role spoil all this, when if they only had a single
translator, he'd be doing both Toshifumi Yoshida's role and Gerard
Jones's?

ObC&C: Bug Bash: Nice setup.  The characters seemed nicely on-target, and
a AMS bug would fit in just right with the usual Tenchi chaos.  I can see
plenty of ways it could go from there: Skuld showing up, or the bug
disrupting Washuu's experiments nastily, or...

--
Scott Johnson |
zagyg@io.com  |            This space intentionally left blank.