Bert Miller wrote:

This brings up a problem I note every once in a while, even in otherwise
excellent
fics.  For instance (to use a *very* illustrious example), Richard Lawson's
"The Nature of Love", which contains the line:

And Kentaro began, for the first time, to doubt the personal pronouns he

used

when referring to Ranma.

Now I'm far from conversant in Nihongo myself, but I know enough so that
lines like
the above abruptly jar me out of my 'willing suspension of disbelief'.  You
 can't
write in English without using sex-indicative personal pronouns (I've
tried, briefly),
but you *can* avoid making plot points or epiphanic moments around them.

This isn't *absolutely* so.  There *do* exist sex-indicating personal
pronouns ("kare" & "kanojo" to name the two most popular), but their
usage is not terribly common and they carry connotations (e.g. "kanojo"
often means "girlfriend" in addition to "she").  Thus the embarrassing
situation in which a learner begins a statement with "kanojo wa", meaning
"as for her", but being understood as "as for your/my girlfriend" ... lots of
scope for confusion. :-)

However, by and large you're correct and I, too, found the passage
above to be a particularly jarring note in an otherwise stellar 'fic.
(I suspect that this kind of thing is one reason why English fanfics
don't have particularly wide readership in Japanese circles, even
allowing for the language barrier.)

This illustrates a particular problem of writing Ranma fanfic:  How do you
refer to him when he's in his female form?  Change to "she"?  You can't
*not* use personal pronounds in English; the language doesn't allow for
it, so the Japanese practice of simply using people's names for every
third-person reference can't be used.  And if you use the "point of view"
practice, it gets *very* confusing to the non-careful reader.

Enough of that.  I'd like to see more fanfics making jokes with the
Japanese language.
Here's an example, an idea I thought of, but rejected, for "A Comedy of
Errors":

[snip screamingly-funny example]

Yes!  Yes!  More like that.

(Trouble is, of course, that most readers would be left scratching
their heads... and that the English-based measures evolved by Viz
to convey the brokenness of Shampoo's speech really have no analog
in her Nihongo speech; that's broken in a very different (and utterly
untranslateable, so don't ask) way.  FWIW, excessive/exclusive
self-reference in the third person is one of the indicators of
"cuteness"... note Asuza's speech, and in Marmalade Boy, Suzu
is a particularly good example of the cult of cuteness.)

I also like Gary Kleppe's approach, which is to use funny names so
careful and/or nihongo-aware readers are rewarded without making
the 'fic inaccessible to those who aren't either.  For example, in a
recent 'fic he named a range of hills the "ookinachichi" mountains...
which, in the informal form, translates as "BIG tits".  That,
counterpointed with a description of Shampoo, had me holding my ribs
in laughter.  A more staid translation would render it as "(my) big father".
Another example was "Tsumaranai Insurance"... the word means
"boring"... :-)

--
David Eddy - Senior Consultant, Progress Software Melbourne
dje@progress.com

Screening Coordinator and Subbing Bunny, Melbourne Anime Society
My fanfics are archived at http://nabiki.newberry.edu/DEddy