Sunday, October 20, 2024

Reading Reflection 10/21 -Jaxon

The topic of faithful and beautiful is discussed again in the text. From the reading we have read so far, I think almost every passage has this topic of sacrificing some of the content in order to make a better translation. Charles Terry's article discusses the omission of unnecessary texts like supportive expressions, extra repetitions, and frequent rhetorical questions that sound unnatural in English contexts. I was surprised by the rhetorical question part in Japanese. I don't really see didactic questions very often from what I have read in Japanese so far, and the frequent didactic or rhetorical questions remind my primary school writing techniques. We were told to use those kinds of techniques in writing when we were little to "make the passage read more interactive," but I think they sounded childish, too, when I grew up.  Not being too definitive is part of the Japanese culture, but I thought that would only appear in presentations or daily conversations. 

Two passages mention "experiences" a lot in terms of expressions and knowledge. I agree with the idea that translating English into Japanese might be done by Japanese native speakers better. Being truly bilingual is hard since a person has to immerse himself deeply into two cultures that are sometimes totally different, like Japanese and English. I also encountered many situations as a Chinese when I tried to use Kanji words that write exactly the same while having slightly different meanings, like the example of ham and ハム. Learning a language itself is not enough to understand the context that contains culture-related stuff, and just like Lynne Riggs mentioned in the article, making a text smooth to read is more important to translate the texts that keep all the information. A reader will give up reading the translation if the topic requires some extra knowledge to be understood. Making reasonable deletions to improve the reading experience is worth in my opinion. 

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