Translating’s hard, guys! >:( December 13, 2010

One of the reasons I will never be a great on the fly translator, a skill so often and consistently required here to merely survive seminar, is that I don’t process Japanese into English well. I easily grasp the meaning and can explain around the plot, but the literal translation always eludes me, leading to terrible classes where I sound like an idiot. For example, just this morning, we were reading a text where one word in the Chinese meant 台所, but all that came to mind in the English was “probably rectangular room with cooking” which, in my talking out loud to the class somehow came out as “hallway” and lead to the professor saying for about the millionth time that seminar, “No, it’s not a hallway. It’s a…?” which, naturally, makes me panic for the millionth time and I just sit there thinking to myself, “FOOD FOOD FOOD?” until C. is like, “Uh, kitchen?”

I’m embarrassed for myself that I can’t speak English, but I don’t really understand why I can’t seem to grasp the transition between languages. I know that it’s really not a good idea to think in one language when speaking another, and so I’ve always tried to avoid it, but in a program so heavily geared toward off the cuff translation, it’s ended up working against me. I’m not saying it’s impossible. People are obviously good at simultaneous language translation! But translation has never really been my talent, a secondary interest at most that’s only flagged as I continue to suck at it every week for the last year and a half.

Nothing really to comment about, but I wish I could just get better at it. I’ve gotten better at reading, better at understanding, but translation just continues to lag on behind. End of the semester blahs!

Texts. December 5, 2010

One of the things that I kind of already knew, but didn’t really focus on until this semester, is the reason that electronic sources are simply not good enough. Perhaps in English sources it’s difference, but the way uploading information a la pre-modern Japanese has gone can be seen pretty much in the UVA e-text initiative, or the online list of Noh plays you get if you’re ever doing Noh research and type “noh translation” into google. What you get on the former is something that, while it continues to be updated, is already out of date, code-wise, and a bombardment of sources, of which it’s unclear how, exactly, they went from paper to electronic form. What you get on the latter is a mess of links to other databases that stopped updating in 2001 or 2002. Putting aside the question of what software or by-hand typing might have been used to get a book source inputted online without formal permission from the current publishers on texts out of copyright, and what errors might have been committed there making the texts mostly unusable without side by side comparison with the original sources, what is mostly common to both of these is the assumption that once a text has been put up into electronic format, one if enough.

All this is to say that I get into a lot of angry face discussions with my boyfriend (who is a die hard digital is the best, I want to live in virtual reality and never speak to any of you again mwahahaha fanatic) about the nature of text and why I like paper better than electronic. I’m not some kind of anti-electronics crazed person. I don’t think technology is where I want it to be right now – if I was going to use a Kindle or iPad full time for my reading, I would need it to be able to take notes on the pages I’m reading, be able to highlight, and what not – adding bookmarks to come back to later just aren’t good enough either. It gets complicated fast when dealing with the amount of information I do. I like to mark up what I’m reading, and I don’t feel comfortable when I can’t.

But it goes deeper than that – I look at the e-text initiative of my alma mater, and what I see is a database that has taken a bunch of “authoritative” collections online and said, “This is great, now everyone can read these! Yay!” when the real problem is that we’re dealing with manuscripts that changed over time. Without the bibliography, the footnotes, the introductions, of the original text, I can’t tell where this manuscript came from, who compiled it, what makes their version accurate. Even in modern Japanese literature, it’s a well known fact that most authors syndicated their writings in newspapers, which, if they hit it off, were later collected, but even those collections are sometimes wildly inaccurate in their assumptions because their own texts are full of transcription errors. What if someone picks this version and puts it up online and it’s the only one to survive???

One version is just not good enough, and right now, it feels like that’s all the e-text community really has on its mind. It’s understandable – there’s a lot of shit out there that needs to be digitized, but I get very prickly when I’m told that digital is best!!!1 because at this point in time, it simply isn’t true. Digital formatting makes a lot of assumptions that I’m simply, as a scholar, not comfortable with – it assumes it’s the truth, when in fact, it’s just a pale shade of reality that, when compared to the real thing, is just sad.

Really? December 4, 2010

It’s that time of year – the end of the semester. I get it. We’re all busy and we have too much to do, and reading 浅草紅団 is hard even for native speakers who find the style, slang, shifting character names, etc, irritating and difficult to keep up with. Heck, the book is so hard that most readers misread one of the characters as being two separate people! So. I’m saying that I understand. We all fall apart.

That said, I can’t believe that someone in my department would try to pass off something I wrote as their own opinion during discussion. We do weekly blackboard-esque postings to get a feel for our opinions on the piece before class. We all read each other’s postings so we can know what’s going on in class, and because, you know, we’re graduate students, it’s rare that one of us just doesn’t do the work.

When I’ve been unable to complete my own work, I typically just shut down entirely and hide in bed for the week until all the scary things have gone away. Which is never. However, this has got to be better than getting called on during discussion on a book you haven’t read and then suddenly stating my opinion in the place of the one you haven’t been able to formulate because you haven’t done the work.

But how do you know they just decided to steal your work, N? How do you KNOW?

First, I sat next to this person during the seminar this week, where on his laptop, he surfed the internets and read our postings during the seminar, and spent a good part of it looking up terms from our various postings, including my own.

Second, my posting was rather unique this week, in that I had no f-ing idea what to say about the work because it was so damn hard to read, so a lot of the things I said in the posting were completely out there. In particular, I linked 浅草紅団 to 黄表紙, which is ridiculous! Ridiculous! I’m not saying off the wall insane, but at the same time, not something you could ever write a paper about, really. My point is that on his laptop, during class, he researched the terms I used in talking about 黄表紙 including looking up the particular one I was talking about.

All I’m saying is that the dots seem pretty clearly connected here. I’m not … overworked or going to call the intellectual theft police. It’s that time of year and it can’t be easy for a student still taking language classes to read the book in question, but dang, it’s really something I hadn’t expected here. I just don’t get it. It was just painfully obvious that we all knew it was something I’d said, not him, and it was just a shocking moment for me. Even the professor grilled him on exactly where he would have read the 黄表紙 I was talking about. It was incredibly awkward. I can’t believe someone in such a good program, no matter how panicked the moment in question, would try to jack my own absolutely ridiculous opinions as his own, as if what I was saying made any sense at all. Gah.