Talk:AniDB Definition:Romanisation: Difference between revisions

Talk:AniDB Definition:Romanisation (view source)

Revision as of 13:43, 4 December 2005

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Why romanisation should not be a partial translation

Jfs

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 Reverted a minor edit by coo, which was well intentioned but mostly incorrect... I *know* anidb calls them 'kanji titles' internally, but there's no need to propogate wrongness, very few japanese titles are kanji only. --[[User:Rar|Rar]] 05:52, 13 November 2005 (CET)
+== Why romanisation should not be a partial translation ==
+According to the current romanisation standard on AniDB, 和製英語 (''wasei eigo'') and similar should be inversely-tramnscribed to their original words. This is a '''bad idea'''.
+Let's go back and look at the purposes you list for romanisation:
+# Recognisation
+# Pronouncation
+I do not see "translation" anywhere in there.
+A fact: 和製英語 words are ''not'' pronounced like the legacy words by native Japanese speakers. Any proper Japanese teacher will tell you that native Japanese speakers simply ''might not understand you at all'' if you pronounce ラジオ (''rajio'') as ''radio'', コーヒー (''kōhī'') as ''coffee'' etc. Likewise, a native English speaker can not be expected to be able to decipher the derived Japanese words just listening to it. So why try to build an illusion that Japanese speakers understand English and the other way around, when it's obviously not true?
+Another thing to take into consideration are words that have changed meaning after they were imported into Japanese. I cannot think of any really good examples right now, ecept for one: ゲイ (''gei''), original English word being ''gay''. The word was/is used for men acting somewhat like stereotypical homosexual men, though they might not actually be homosexuals. Rather, it was 芸 (''gei''), performance. (Think of the original English meaning of the word, rather than the modern English meaning.) So should it still be "romanised" into "gay"? Couldn't that give the wrong impression among some people? Actually, it's not even a translation into modern English, even though it does give a good idea of how to pronounce the Japanese word.
+So, returning to the two purposes of romanisation. In my opinion, those two purposes are different ways of expressing the same thing, since recognisation generally can boil down to pronouncation. Remember that 和製英語 is not pronounced like English? Then, why should an English speaker be able to recognise a 和製英語 word, when it's not pronounced like he/she would expect, given the "romanised" title? Isn't it then better to make a true romanisation, where you romanise the pronouncation, instead of translating certain words, depending on their etymological origin?
+It's a widely accepted fact that ローマ字 (''rōmaji'') doesn't lend a non-Japanese speaker a good chance of pronouncing the romanised text correctly, you actually need some knowledge of Japanese phonetics to do that. It doesn't help the pronouncation if you purposefully fill in even-further-from-Japanese words into the romanisation.
+Finally, let me give an example of a word that just can't fit properly into those current "romanisation" rules: ダブる (''daburu''). A verb, derived from english ''double'', meaning "to double, to repeat". Like any Japanese verb, it can be inflected, ダブります (''daburimasu''), ダブった (''dabutta''), ダブらない (''daburanai'') etc. Would you "romanise" those as "''doublimasu''", "''doubtta''", "''doublanai''", or perhaps translate then, "double" (?!? same thing, different pronouncation?), "doubled", "not double"? Neither of those two are a good solution, so you suddenly have to break your rule.
+Conclusion: Romanise Japanese words as Japanese. It lends an English speaker a better chance of recognising a word in a title after hearing the title pronounced (the reader of the ローマ字 should be assumed to not know 漢字 (''kanji''), as I've been told before, and thus can't check against any 漢字 title written). It also lends the reader a better chance of pronouncing the title close to the actual Japanese pronouncation. A third point I didn't touch yet, because it (according to the current guidelines) isn't a requirement for the romanisation, is that it actually allows one to distinguish between 和製英語 and English words in a title, looking at the ローマ字.
+'''A little note on Hepburn:''' I don't like pretending to be using Hepburn romanisation when not. No official Hepburn standard (neither the traditional nor any of the officially accepted modifications to it) allows you to mimic Japanese ortography by writing long vowels using direct romanisations of the ''kana'' used to produce them. That is, no Hepburn standard allows you to romanise 王 as ''ou'', only ''ō'' (traditional Hepburn), ''oo'' and ''o' are accepted. ''ou'' is a ワプロローマ字 (''wapuro rōmaji'') spelling. Yes, real Hepburn is not filename-friendly, and not widely used inside the anime fansubbing community, so instead of pretending to be using Hepburn, rather use a better term for it: Hepburn/wapuro romanisation.
+-- [[User:Jfs|Jfs]] 14:43, 4 December 2005 (CET)