Hey,

The foreign slang is "purikura," which is an abbreviation for "purinto 
kurabo." (Right? It's not like I really KNOW what I'm saying in regards to 
Japanese. I don't. But I will claim so as far as English goes.) Do they 
commonly refer to them as "purinto kurabo" or as "purikura"? If
they are overwhelmingly referred to as "purikura," then "print clubs" 
wouldn't be the "best" way to translate the term into English
either..."priclu" would be a much more faithful rendering.

Well... not really, in my opinion.  English doesn't allow the abbreviation 
of words in the way that Japanese does.  For some reason, it's consider 
'cool', in a slangy way, to cut words down like that.  So 'purinto kurabo' 
becomes 'purikura'; my favourite bar, the Seadragon (Sheduragon) is often 
called 'Shedura'... but you wouldn't translate that back into English as 
'Seadra', because it'd be meaningless.

Really, I don't mean to make a stink about the vocabulary choice for one 
simple lexical item. In the story, it's a very unimportant reference.  But 
the philosophy behind my argument is, I think, worth taking into
consideration, as I mentioned in the long paragraph at the end of my
previous reply.

I agree.  The use of Japanese in writing fanfiction has always been a bit 
sticky, and nobody seems to agree on how to do it.  I don't really care with 
spot usages like above... if somebody uses 'purikua' (and hopefully slips in 
a brief explanation for the uninitiated), it's fine by me.  It's the 
gratuitous usage that really bugs me... like 'minna', as you mentioned 
earlier, and other pointless usages that seem to exist only to show that the 
writer has taken Japanese 101 or watched lots of subtitled anime.  ('Oh, 
Kuno, I never though I'd see you again, suki da yo!')

Peter

-Mike

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