Leave me out of this

[Anville Azote]

On 7/27/06, richard baillie <richbaillie at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Murakami translator Jay Rubin commented in "HK and the music of Words"
> the difficulty in translating japanese to english (and vice versa)
>
> problems with nuance, tense structure etc
>
> i admit the playboy article suggests a bit of a nothing interview in any
> case but the translation maybe didn't help TRP's (if it were he) cause
>

We could still have a lot of fun translating it from Japanese to
English using the Altavista Babelfish or Google's language tools.
Since the only Japanese I know is what I picked up during a weeklong
stay three years ago and watching anime since, the only way I know to
check the bona fides of these translators is to run their output back
into the machine and see how the Japanese-to-English result compares.
This is about as dubious as Kinbote's scholarship in **Pale Fire**,
but let what must be done then be done.

Beginning with the passage, "A screaming comes across the sky. It has
happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now," running
through Google's translator there and back again, I get (wait for it),
"As for shouting it comes across to the sky. That happened before, but
now comparing that there is no at all."

"Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49" becomes "Oedipa
which is solved in order to wait for the fact that lot 49 you shout."

"Oedipa, which is solved."  I like that.  It has echoes of "Funes, His
Memory".  (-;

-anv.