When fansubbers get cute

[prillalar]

Character A hands something to Character B.

Character B (speaking): Oh, sankyuu.

Character B (subtitle): Oh, domo.


This brings up a good question, though. If you're writing fanfic in English about characters who speak Japanese, do you try to render the occasional bits of English they use in some special way to show that it's English and not Japanese? There doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to do that and I usually just don't try.

Comments

[franzeska]

For me, it depends on how assimilated a word is. If I want to indicate that the character is speaking a foreign language, I might render the words in something other than English. However, 'sankyuu' is a loan word rather than a random bit of foreign language, so I would render it 'thanks' or some other cute or slangy variation of "thank you". The same goes for "lucky!", "chance!" and most of the other pseudo-English Japanese people use. If the average Japanese person understands the word, I'd just translate it as I would any other Japanese word since it probably doesn't mean the same thing to them as it does to us anyway.

[prillalar]

Yeah, I think that's pretty much how I've been handling it. I find all the language issues in anime fanfic to be pretty fascinating.