So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that “coolness” doesn’t translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.
Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say “eso es muy cool” or “c'est très cool” if the context is not particularly formal
No no, not literally the word “cool” I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.
In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, “Greed” is still Greed in the original.
Because loan words from English are often pretty “cool”, as with your Spanish and French example.
But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.
“GreedyGreed”
The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.
After all, it’s common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you’re doing is to translate the Japanese.
Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.
You can’t go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.
And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.
Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.
And in fact, while we also have the word “greed”, English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?
This is being reposted, for the advent of American Thanksgiving, on November 17th, 2023. American Thanksgiving this year is on November 23rd.
If you are seeing this after November 21st 2023 do NOT come crying to me about it being too late. That ain’t my fault. I Do Not Control The Rate At Which Turkey Thaws
I’ve noticed that people have started spreading the 1992 Good Omens script around. Please don’t. If you’ve got it up, please take it down. There’s a mess of serious and real legalities involved, and I don’t want to have to start being a dick and asking for copyright takedowns and all of that, and I don’t want to have to regret letting it out into the world. Just take it down, unshare, delete links. Thank you.
when people are like “oh yeah i never hang out with my nieces and nephews bc i hate kids. but wait until they’re older haha they’re gonna love me im gonna be the COOL aunt/uncle/whatever” like i hate to break it to you but even when they’re older you will probably just be like any other awkward out of touch relative that they dread seeing because you refuse to engage with anyone that isn’t directly inside the usual circle you socialize with. make an effort bitch
btw its not that hard to be the cool cousin/aunt/uncle/etc, kids are ecstatic to just have someone who listens to them
love that kids are emo again. i love walking into the grocery store or goodwill and seeing some teenage emo kid all decked out walking around with their mom or something
