Take me to the sea

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
mylordshesacactus
aokozaki

So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that "coolness" doesn't translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.

beforeliteracytherewasdeez

Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say "eso es muy cool" or "c'est très cool" if the context is not particularly formal

aokozaki

No no, not literally the word "cool" I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.

In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.

Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.

But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.

"Greedy Greed"

The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.

After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.

Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.

You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.

And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.

Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.

And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?

Let's try it.

"Greed the Avaricious"

Oh yeah. That's definitely, undeniably, "cool".

eighthdoctor
yosukeseta

im still pissed off about シ and ツ

tectuu

I don’t シ whaツ bad about this?

yosukeseta

im going to stab you in the face

amielleon

ソン of a—

brumalbreeze

There’s really ノ need to get ソ worked up over something as miンor as this!

pampliemousse

ワt the フck is going on

inakamouse

this is my worst nightmare.

thatpreciousthing

Oケ guys let’s chill out, it クld be a lot worse.

accessibleaesthetics

I can’t speak for every screen reader, but if you listen to this post on VoiceOver it reads almost perfectly.

For those without a screen reader that transitions between English and Japanese so easily (or sight readers who can’t read Japanese): the symbols are Japanese Katakana. Each symbol represents a phonetic syllable. The entire post is just making puns with that, except for the first post, which is just OP being upset that [shi] and [tsu] look so similar.

This isn’t really a plain language transcription, but more of…a sort of translation?

  • im still pissed off about [shi] and [tsu].
  • I don’t [shi] wha[tsu] bad about this?
  • im going to stab you in the face
  • [so][n] of a—
  • There’s really [no] need to get [so] worked up over something as mi[n]or as this!
  • [wa]t the [fu]ck is going on
  • this is my worst nightmare.
  • O[ke] guys let’s chill out, it [ku]ld be a lot worse.
kayakingintheeyeofthestorm

Thank you for the translations. I knew the characters were forming jokes, but I didn’t have the energy to look up every single character.