Carpenter Reading Comments - Maya

 There are a few points that I want to address that really captured my attention with Carpenter’s interview and text. The first one would be the difficulty of translating onomatopoeia. I think it is rather easier to translate it from English to Japanese but the vice versa has always been very difficult for me as I need to find the exact feeling that I feel in English when I’m reading in Japanese, which is quite funny considering how Japanese is a rather indirect language when onomatopoeia imitates a very specific feeling or sound that is rather hard to convey in another language. The other thing that I want to touch upon would be her first time using the f-word. This reminds me of the times when Turkish people would come up to me and ask whether there were vulgar words in Japanese. I would ponder for a bit to translate the words that they would want me to translate, but it would never come up as “heavy” as the other language would intend to be. Which is why I understand why Carpenter is usually avoidant in using vulgar language as it packs more punch than what the Japanese word is supposed to mean. 

It was also very interesting to see how the text was being translated into English and how different translators would be focusing on different parts of the sentence. What I realized while reading the examples in the interview was that translations usually focus on translating the general meaning, or rather, if the general idea was conveyed or not. It is quite hard to catch the exact essence and part of the sentence to focus on. The translator needs to be able to understand where to author (or the culture) is pointing at through the subtleties of the sentence, and needs to convey that subtlety with a similar feeling to a person who may not be familiar with the culture. Translation is not only the act of putting one word to another but rather a means of conveying the culture and the language to someone who doesn’t know about it, which also amazes me to think about even if people across the world have different ways to interpret things, there are still some similarities between cultures and language that is enough to convey a general feeling of a literary me