post of stuff
Sep. 27th, 2011 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit1) Tintin is the first fandom I've written in where I didn't consume the source text in English. It makes a difference, because one of the things we do as fanfic writers is try to reproduce characters' speech patterns. That's much tricker across languages. Some of it's purely a matter of translation: what do I do about Haddock's swearing, for example? His most common oaths are "tonnerre de Brest" (i.e., more or less, "thunderclap off Brest") and "mille sabords" ("sabords" according to the online Larousse means the openings in a ship that one fires cannon through; if there's a word for that in English I certainly don't know it). [ETA: tree_and_leaf notes that the word I'm looking for is "gunports." Damn, I've read all the Aubrey and Maturin novels twice; you'd think more of the terminology would have stuck.] I've tentatively decided that "tonnerre de Brest" can be "thunder and lightning," but "mille sabords" still defeats me. Apparently in the English translations Haddock says "blistering barnacles," but I really don't care for that. To my ears it sounds too cartoonish, a bit like something Popeye would say. Besides which, one of the nice things about "mille sabords" is that the number can change depending on how angry Haddock is, e.g. "mille millions de mille sabords" = a thousand million thousand sabords.
Hmmmm. Maybe "cannonballs" would work?
Then there's the matter of register. To me, Tintin's speech in particular feels slightly formal. His grammar's always correct and he rarely uses slang or oaths apart from a couple of old-fashioned swear words, sapristi and saperlipopette, which seem to have something of the same weight in French that "by Jove" would have in English. But I'm not sure if Tintin's speech is really quite as formal as it seems to me, or if that's just my reaction as a native English speaker to the relative grammatical fixity of French. (On the other hand, Haddock's speech doesn't feel nearly as formal, so maybe it really is Tintin.)
Finally, there's Tintin and Haddock's continued use of formal vous to one another rather than informal tu, which I would love to write about. But I can't see a workable way to do so in English (because the distinction simply isn't there in English, which lost "thou" in non-religious contexts so long ago that most people think "thou" is actually the formal form). And my French is definitely not good enough to be writing fanfic in.
2) Delicious's new overlords just took command, and have fucked everything up but good. Everyone's tag bundles have been eliminated (you can apparently remake them as "stacks," but I have almost 500 tags, most of which were neatly organized, and I don't want to redo all that work), tags with forward slashes in them (e.g. all my pairing tags, and probably all of almost everyone's pairing tags) are no longer valid, and apparently only ten tags will display? Or only ten per page, or something. I am not happy. I stayed on Delicious because I foolishly thought the new owners wouldn't mess up what already existed; now I think I may switch to Diigo, which seems to work the way Delicious used to.
3) Speaking of delicious, in the literal and not the "currently buggered up bookmarking site" sense: Lightly-battered fried okra with chili fish sauce.
tree_and_leaf notes that the word I'm looking for is "gunports." Damn, I've read all the Aubrey and Maturin novels twice; you'd think more of the terminology would have stuck.] I've tentatively decided that "tonnerre de Brest" can be "thunder and lightning," but "mille sabords" still defeats me. Apparently in the English translations Haddock says "blistering barnacles," but I really don't care for that. To my ears it sounds too cartoonish, a bit like something Popeye would say. Besides which, one of the nice things about "mille sabords" is that the number can change depending on how angry Haddock is, e.g. "mille millions de mille sabords" = a thousand million thousand sabords.Hmmmm. Maybe "cannonballs" would work?
Then there's the matter of register. To me, Tintin's speech in particular feels slightly formal. His grammar's always correct and he rarely uses slang or oaths apart from a couple of old-fashioned swear words, sapristi and saperlipopette, which seem to have something of the same weight in French that "by Jove" would have in English. But I'm not sure if Tintin's speech is really quite as formal as it seems to me, or if that's just my reaction as a native English speaker to the relative grammatical fixity of French. (On the other hand, Haddock's speech doesn't feel nearly as formal, so maybe it really is Tintin.)
Finally, there's Tintin and Haddock's continued use of formal vous to one another rather than informal tu, which I would love to write about. But I can't see a workable way to do so in English (because the distinction simply isn't there in English, which lost "thou" in non-religious contexts so long ago that most people think "thou" is actually the formal form). And my French is definitely not good enough to be writing fanfic in.
2) Delicious's new overlords just took command, and have fucked everything up but good. Everyone's tag bundles have been eliminated (you can apparently remake them as "stacks," but I have almost 500 tags, most of which were neatly organized, and I don't want to redo all that work), tags with forward slashes in them (e.g. all my pairing tags, and probably all of almost everyone's pairing tags) are no longer valid, and apparently only ten tags will display? Or only ten per page, or something. I am not happy. I stayed on Delicious because I foolishly thought the new owners wouldn't mess up what already existed; now I think I may switch to Diigo, which seems to work the way Delicious used to.
3) Speaking of delicious, in the literal and not the "currently buggered up bookmarking site" sense: Lightly-battered fried okra with chili fish sauce.
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Date: 2011-09-27 05:38 pm (UTC)Gunports, I think.
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Date: 2011-09-27 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 07:51 pm (UTC)I have various strategies that I use and abandon as I feel like--one of them is trying to compose the dialogue in my head in the source language, another is reverse-translating the dialogue into the source language after I've got it down. I try to be hyper-vigilant about diction and levels of speech, to try to approximate characters' speech styles, but it's so freaking hard, and there's so much richness that's lost.
The formal/informal you thing is the devil. I try to compensate by messing with diction a bit--make a line that contains a formal you more formal in general--but that's not very satisfactory a lot of the time. Another thing that can bring out the nuances is contrast with another character, but again, not always workable.
"Barrages"?