On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Caroline Seawright wrote:

EXCUSE ME for appreciating Gerald Jones!

Appreciating transliteration is one thing ... but calling it 'official'???
Appreciate all you want, but it just is not 'official' no matter HOW much
you like transliterations...

As S. Morgenstern put it, "You keep on using that word... I do not think
it means what you think it means."

A transliteration is changing something from one alphabet from another.
An example is taking two kanji or three hiragana and replacing them with
the Roman letters 'genki'.  If that was what Viz was doing, I doubt they'd
have much of an American market - their manga would still be in Japanese,
just Romanized Japanese.  Viz is doing translations, where, for instance, 
you take the kanji or hiragana mentioned above and replace them with the
word 'healthy.'  Then, once you've changed the words literally, you
rearrange and adjust them until they make sense and sound natural in the
target language.

Whether you're a fan of Viz's translations or not - they've had their good
points, but also their groaners, I'll admit - doesn't change the fact that
they're translations, not transliterations.  And, in addition, they're
official - the Japanese companies with the rights to them have granted Viz
their sanction and license to translate them.  That's all 'official' means
- 'with permission from the copyright and license holder.'

On another topic: this post is off-topic.  I realize that.  In order to
try and move some sense of topicality back to the list, I'd like to
introduce a convention from a lot of other mailing lists and newsgroups:
ObWhatever.  'Ob' stands for Obligatory, and it's used when someone
realizes their post is off-topic and wants to make up for it.  On the
Legion of Super-Heroes mailing list, for instance, if I was sending the
above message, I might add 'ObLSH: Interlac is just a transliteration of
modern English into a really weird character set.'  On the Sailor Moon
list, I might add 'ObSailorMoon: A lot of the summaries on Hitoshi Doi's
page have only transliterations of the episode titles, not translations.'
Here on the FFML, I suggest 'ObC&C'.  Whenever you realize you've posted a
post that's pure spam, think about whether there's a brief comment you'd
like to make on a recent fanfic post.  Then add it to the bottom of your
post, possibly tying it into your above message if you think it fits.
It's a simple way to try and redeem some of the less interesting spam, and
raise the more interesting ones into interesting *and* relevant posts.
Anyone care to try it out?

ObC&C: Every time the noise level makes me think I'm about to leave the
list, a great fanfic comes along and reels me back in - 'Proposal,' for
instance.  I loved the 'Skuld blurts it all out' scene.

--
Scott Johnson |
zagyg@io.com  |           This space intentionally left blank.