I honestly don't see a problem with the analogy.
Eh. I think I'm getting hung up over a small thing.
Anyone happen to know of any good SFX dictionaries or lists? I mean, not Japanese-English. Just plain, English-English.
Hmm. That's most often associated with comic books so that's probably what you'll find if you look.
I personally like Written Sound but I'm sure there are others.
I don't really know if this is an appropriate question but...
ちくしょう: I've come to realize it's a curse word, but just how bad of one are we talking about here? Like, really bad, or pretty mild or something in between?
Well, the thing about Japanese curse words is that the taboo isn't quite as strong as it is in English. It's still there to the point that it isn't socially acceptable in a public/stranger setting, but many words don't get censored out of shounen manga/anime, for example, which are targeted towards boys and young teenagers. So that should tell you a bit about it. ちくしょう itself (like "damn it", "crap", etc.) is pretty mild. Of course, there are still things you would never say in any kind of polite context.
It's part of the reason you might see Japanese people obliviously using FUCK in all kinds of slogans and shirts or whatever.
Ah thanks. Actually, I had always heard it was the opposite, that cursing in Japanese was way more serious business than in English.
In retrospect though, I guess that might have been my parents way of telling me "Don't curse, and especially not in Japanese."
It seems to me that most of what would be accomplished by cursing in English can be done by adjusting the way you talk to people in Japanese, so breaking out the rare actual curse words would indicate srs business. But that might be totally backwards, I don't know.
Well, think of it this way. By the time you are actually swearing in Japanese, your manner of speech has probably already ceased to be polite.
edit: as for cursing being more srs business than in English, it's probably true to the extent that cursing in places that you shouldn't be cursing is more taboo than in English. However, the bar for when it is and isn't appropriate seems to be set at a different place than in English, is what I originally meant.
Last edited by mewarmo990; June 22nd, 2011 at 12:13 AM.
Updated OP with some more useful links.
Not really a translation help thing
So anyway, at work. Looking at some translated materials related to a spark plug.
See center electrode, yep, ground electrode, yep, ribs, yep, insulator, yep, and (noble) metal chip, wait what?
Look again at Japanese, see チップ, go, that's a tip you idiot (to the translator).
Do some googling to look into this a little bit more, and I come across a bunch of patents from Japanese applicants, 50% of the time it's "noble metal chips" and 50% of the time, "noble metal tips" (and they're talking about the same damn thing!).
Last edited by deadfish; June 22nd, 2011 at 10:43 AM.
Ze Japanese, zey be sprechen ze Engrish so well, da?
For the Siegfried entry in Apocrypha, in the last sentence of the biography, is it "he can't talk" or is it "he won't talk"? Anybody can have a look?
I'm inclined to say can't. Won't would have been a 喋らない.
Great, thanks.
On Semiramis's bio...what do these Kanji (賢沢) stand for? The best thing I found were names (like Jianze), which doesn't fit all that in the place it goes in.
It means luxury, as in Semiramis adores the luxurious and decadent.
The Kanji doesn't look right, I think you copied it wrong.
EDIT:
It is "贅沢". Lol, them Kanji all look the same, eh?
To be fair, there's a good number of typos apparently. This just isn't one of them.
Really? I lost my translation partway and had to restart, but I remember that the first time I found a good candidate for that Kanji, I got luxurious. The second time I got confussled. Silly Kanji search by radicals, how you fail me by not being easier.
The Japanese did radical lookup wrong in their dictionaries. Normally you would pick the major radical and then look up by stroke order or pronunciation, which is relatively simple. Instead they went and broke up every single part of the character into radicals, which is often impractical but (in hindsight) understandable considering you lose the semantic-phonetic aspect of characters in the Japanese language. /rant