Hibbett

 Hibbett notes how the dialogue between the husband and wife in The Key could be distinguished because of the feminine vs masculine style of speech and styles of kana. I was wondering how this could be distinguished in English because English doesn’t have feminine or masculine speech patterns and there is only one written form. I googled Gender-specific dialogue and read that there is a difference in the content and focus of dialogues of men vs women. For example, women tend to be more passive aggressive while men tend to be more direct, so the dialogue should reflect these details. Maybe punctuation could also help with this – maybe using more periods as opposed to commas could seem more masculine?

Titles are always a headache to translate and Hibbett, like the authors of the other articles we’ve read, talk about taking liberties with the titles. I notice that titles tend to be translated into names/nouns about a person. For example, Hibbett mentions Tattoo was translated to Tattoer,  The Blue Flower to Aguri, a name, The Love of a Fool later translated as Naomi. This reminds of the Wakabayashi presentation in which it was mentioned that English is very noun focused. I wonder if we should stick to this focus/convention when translating titles.

It’s interesting that when western literature is translated into Japanese, Japanese readers assume that the Japanese version should sound strange, because its foreign literature. I feel like I kind of do agree a bit with this. When reading translated Chinese webnovels, there are certain phrases that may sound weird in English (eg “he was injected with chicken blood”) whereas the naturalized translation (“he was excited”) may be easier to understand for English readers but feels like its missing something to me because I know I am reading a translation of a Chinese webnovel and am used to it, even expecting it.  

 Tiffany