book whinge
Mar. 10th, 2010 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138The latest TokyoPop 12K translation (The Twelve Kingdoms:Skies of Dawn) is *really* annoying-- sometimes because of minor but pervasive format issues, sometimes because of one-shot slips that noticeably affect the story.
Format peeve #1: The text keeps hyphenating certain types of number/unit phrases regardless of context. IIRC normal English usage allows hyphenation when such phrases are folded into compound adjectives-- "our army has five hundred men" vs. "our five-hundred-man army"; "the man was six feet tall" vs. "a six-foot-tall man"-- but this book keeps splashing hyphens around left and right: "the voyage takes one or two-weeks", "a good harvest produces sixty-bushels of grain per acre" etc.
Format peeve #2: perhaps because they were sold to buy the extra hyphens, there are almost no definite articles preceding official titles being used *as* names, as opposed to *with* names: "she didn't trust High Mandarin Seikyou", fine, but "she thought High Mandarin was always complaining about Palace Administrator"? Blech.
As for examples of the one-shot slips--- argh. The first one I noticed[*] was the sentence "The kirin Hourin was with them; he was at present lying down, complaining of ill health", which shows two fundamental failures to grasp basic kirin concepts in this world: Hourin's gender is wrong (though this is conceivably a typo, since Hourin is never referred to again by a gender-based pronoun); her illness isn't just incidental, but rather a divine manifestation of the failing regime of the king of Hou. And near the end, when Yoko explains her pseudonym alternate reading of the kanji in her name, which she writes out in demonstration, the actual text just shows the miscoded characters "ÐÐ".
I'm going to have to re-read Eugene Woodbury's fan translation as an antidote. Gah.
[*: though now that I've returned to Woodbury's version, I've immediately noticed an even earlier textual slip by TokyoPop-- he goes to the trouble of fully translating the description of Suzu's age (14 by the traditional Asian new-year count, but chronologically 12). TP glosses that over and just says that she's 14, but this creates an inconsistency much later in the book when she meets Shoukei and Suzu still calculates her own present age as 16, based on arriving from Japan when she was 12 and then spent 4 years on the road before signing up with Riyou.]
Format peeve #1: The text keeps hyphenating certain types of number/unit phrases regardless of context. IIRC normal English usage allows hyphenation when such phrases are folded into compound adjectives-- "our army has five hundred men" vs. "our five-hundred-man army"; "the man was six feet tall" vs. "a six-foot-tall man"-- but this book keeps splashing hyphens around left and right: "the voyage takes one or two-weeks", "a good harvest produces sixty-bushels of grain per acre" etc.
Format peeve #2: perhaps because they were sold to buy the extra hyphens, there are almost no definite articles preceding official titles being used *as* names, as opposed to *with* names: "she didn't trust High Mandarin Seikyou", fine, but "she thought High Mandarin was always complaining about Palace Administrator"? Blech.
As for examples of the one-shot slips--- argh. The first one I noticed[*] was the sentence "The kirin Hourin was with them; he was at present lying down, complaining of ill health", which shows two fundamental failures to grasp basic kirin concepts in this world: Hourin's gender is wrong (though this is conceivably a typo, since Hourin is never referred to again by a gender-based pronoun); her illness isn't just incidental, but rather a divine manifestation of the failing regime of the king of Hou. And near the end, when Yoko explains her pseudonym alternate reading of the kanji in her name, which she writes out in demonstration, the actual text just shows the miscoded characters "ÐÐ".
I'm going to have to re-read Eugene Woodbury's fan translation as an antidote. Gah.
[*: though now that I've returned to Woodbury's version, I've immediately noticed an even earlier textual slip by TokyoPop-- he goes to the trouble of fully translating the description of Suzu's age (14 by the traditional Asian new-year count, but chronologically 12). TP glosses that over and just says that she's 14, but this creates an inconsistency much later in the book when she meets Shoukei and Suzu still calculates her own present age as 16, based on arriving from Japan when she was 12 and then spent 4 years on the road before signing up with Riyou.]