Hibbet Response - Elliot

 I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with Tanizaki's work, so the first section of the reading was a bit hard for me to get much out of. Still, I thought reading completely unrelated English works in order to find a more ideal voice for the translation was an interesting approach. I feel like I wouldn't even know how to begin approaching a problem that abstract. The use of the term "voice" also tangentially reminded me of something I've considered before in my translation: namely, that a lot of the things I read in Japanese (namely anime and visual novels) are voice acted in Japanese. I've had moments where I neglected to fully realize difficult-to-translate tone indicators in English, because I knew the voice acting could retain the tone. I'm not entirely sure this is good practice, and was mostly just an excuse for me to avoid translate a weird expression and bloating the sentence. Anyway, I digress. Later, Hibbett shows a bit of derision towards translation theory, which I find interesting. I think it comes from feeling like while theory is helpful, it doesn't solve issues on its own. He also mentioned translating dialect, which I'm not totally sure how I feel about. Whenever I see a character speaking in a Southern American accent or what have you it feels very jarring. I wonder if it's more common to render a Kansai dialect in written Japanese than a Southern accent in written English. I think the ones that feel most off-putting to me are translations that attempt to force a Southern expression in any sentence that contains a や (which is to say, the vast majority of them.) A Southern accent simply isn't that far from a Northern one, at least in terms of what you can render in text. That brings me back to the voice acting thing: this sort of effect is achieved much more easily when the Japanese dub is left in and you can hear the Kansai dialect, or by dubbing it with accented English voice acting.