2014年5月20日 星期二

This is what we fight about

There will be no 放屁 jokes here.

The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ) is a Japanese film based on the Japanese short story The Wind has Risen (風立ちぬ) (no, that is not a typo), both of which take their title from the french poem, Le Cimetière marin (The Graveyard by the Sea) which contains the following words at the beginning of the line at the beginning of the final stanza, "Le vent se lève!" (The wind is rising). 

Note: I'm sure there's a good reason why cimetière is not translated cemetery in any translation I can find, but I'm not a french translator, so I can't be sure. And I don't actually think there's a good reason. And mer is sea, so wtf, I mean, really. Can we not just have The cemetery by the sea? Please let there be some colloquial subtlety I don't know about here, or one that mattered in some earlier time.


So, because of this, we get six, yes, count them SIX, translations into the Chinese. Four french words, three/four english words, four japanese characters, and six chinese translations.


Via wikipedia, (go find it yourself you lazy bum, links are silly):


Two official translations:


台灣:風起
香港:風起了


And you thought 瞭 didn't matter. Shouldn't have slept through that day/year of class, I guess.


Unofficialisms:


中新:起風了
澳門:風起了
其它:風雲黃昏,風起之時,風起時

Sayre's Law.


--

And since Hideaki Anno is the lead, I must include his theory on translation, which I've long wanted to post here, but resisted, but which I basically subscribe to whole-heartedly. whole-hog and think about every day.

Twelve-dimensional functionalism:

The meaning of the final scene is obscure,[13][14] and has been controversial.[15][16] According to an episode of the Japanese anime show Anime Yawa aired March 31, 2005 on NHK's satellite TV, Asuka's final line was initially written as "I'd never want to be killed by you of all men, absolutely not!" or "I'll never let you kill me." ("Anta nankani korosareru nowa mappira yo!") but Anno was dissatisfied with Miyamura's renditions of this line.[17] Eventually Anno asked her a question which described what he was going for with this scene:
"Concerning the final line we adopted, I'm not sure whether I should say about it in fact. At last Anno asked me 'Miyamura, just imagine you are sleeping in your bed and a stranger sneaks into your room. He can rape you anytime as you are asleep but he doesn't. Instead, he masturbates looking at you, when you wake up and know what he did to you. What do you think you would say?' I had been thinking he was a strange man, but at that moment I felt disgusting. So I told him that I thought 'Disgusting.' And then he sighed and said, 'I thought as much.'"[18]
Tiffany Grant, Asuka's English dub voice actress, made the following statement:
"The most widely circulated translation of the last line of EoE [End of Evangelion] is "I feel sick," but Amanda Winn Lee (Rei Ayanami's English voice actor and director of End of Evangelion) said she asked several translators, and she felt "disgusting" was the most accurate adaptation.[19]  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Evangelion

I thought as much.