On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Gary Kleppe wrote:

Vincent Seifert <seifertv@ccshp1.ccs.csus.edu> wrote:

AKANE: Another of the many hazards of gratuitous Japanese, I guess.

GERTRUDE: Funny how he doesn't object to the gratuitous German, though.

She was just teasing, really!  :)
 

Well, there is a relevant difference. Gert is speaking German to
characters who understand Japanese, in a scene where the point-of-view
language is Japlish (Japanese rendered into English for the benefit of
the readers). In short, she's using a language other than the one that's
default for the scene. It'd be analogous to a scene where Ranma and
company are in the US, speaking (mostly) English to Americans.

Right.  This also comes up with Shampoo and Chinese (with Nabiki there to
provide more-or-less-superfluous interpretation) and, in a very tricky
case, with Principal Kuno.  Kuno is throwing words and phrases in English
into a Japanese-language situation, so we're left with a predicament when
we want to use Kuno in an English-language fanfic.  Fortunately,
translating Kuno's English into Hawaiian pidgin works pretty well.  :) 

GJ, on the other hand, is where Japanese characters are speaking
Japanese with other Japanese characters, and the Japanese in the scene
is rendered into English, but the writer leaves some words untranslated
just because he or she thinks those words are really neato-keen.

Well, they're "neato-keen" because they add cultural flavoring, I think; 
it's part of "anime-style"  as applied to the written medium.  It's pretty
hard to do "big eyes, small mouth" in words...

The
analogous thing would be a scene where Gert speaks with other German
characters, in German. In such a scene, IMO, either all of the German
dialog should be rendered into English (with reasonable exceptions being
proper names, words with no good translation, bilingual wordplay, etc.),

"Ranma no bake", for example?  :)

or none of it should.

Well put, and a distinction I'll try to keep in mind even though I
disagree somewhat on the appropriate amount of gratuitous Japanese.

Gary Kleppe ("Make a pun, go to heaven!")

You better hope.  :)

http://www.akane.org/gary/comics.html

 - Vince, working on trilingual puns  :)


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