I am too relax in here

In spite of my best efforts, I watch quite a bit of fansubbed stuff. While
I certainly am not going to pretend this will make me fluent in
conversational Japanese, I can make some observations about the language:

1. Most of the time, it seems to be wordier than English to say the same
thing, though I would have to see the actual written Japanese to be certain
how to break it up into words. For example is gokygenyo (good day) 1 word,
2 words (goky genyo), 3 words (go ky genyo), 4 words (go ky gen yo), and how
exactly are those words split up. The online dictionary InterTran
translated it as 2 kanji, and I don't know if that means if it is 2 "words"
or not.

2. Japanese seems to use pronouns less than English. Much of the time, the
translation will use a sub, but the actual dialog will use the name of the
person that they are talking about, or at least it seems that way to me.

3. Japanese seems to take English phrases (and perhaps other languages as
well) and simply drop them into Japanese. For example, many times when a
character says "Thank You," they will use those actual words rather than
"arigato".

Also, when Yumi and the Girls are talking to Shizuma in front of the leaning
tower of Pisa, and they talk about Shizuma and Shimako being penpals, the
actual word used word used is "pen-friendo." That might be the actual
Japanese word for that concept (I can't believe there isn't one), but to me
it sounds like some sort of weird combination of Spanish and English that
has just been plopped into Japanese to describe the concept of two people
who write letters to each other.

I think there are too many examples like this to be the mere coincidence
that the Japanese word sounds like, or in fact sometimes is the same as the
English word.

The title of this post "I am too relax in here" was inspired by the fact
that I have seen 2 fansubs of the 4th OVA of MSGM (the one with the
athletics festival). One has not been edited, but is clearly not written by
a native English speaker. The other is a better translatation, but the
translator (or whoever loaded it to youtube, because that is where I saw it)
took it upon himself to edit parts of it out.

When Sachiko's father is talking to Yumi after the borrowing game, the first
subber translates a phrase he says as "I am too relax in here," the second
translates it as "I have stayed here too long." Now I know a few words and
phrases from watching fansubbed stuff and my martial arts, but I don't speak
Japanese, so I really don't know if either translation is "accurate," but
the first phrase is more likely to be used by a native english speaker.

Brian Christiansen


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