"Bert Miller" <bertmiller@unn.unisys.com> wrote:

This brings up a problem I note every once in a while, even in otherwise
excellent
fics.  For instance (to use a *very* illustrious example), Richard Lawson's
"The Nature of Love", which contains the line:

And Kentaro began, for the first time, to doubt the personal pronouns he

used

when referring to Ranma.

Now I'm far from conversant in Nihongo myself, but I know enough so that
lines like
the above abruptly jar me out of my 'willing suspension of disbelief'.  You
can't
write in English without using sex-indicative personal pronouns (I've
tried, briefly),
but you *can* avoid making plot points or epiphanic moments around them.

You can, but why in the world would you want to? Epiphanic moments are
damn hard to come by, and I sure as hell wouldn't pass on one just
because it depended on the subtleties of the English language.

The fact is, the fanfics we write are in English, for English speakers.
At no time are our stories written in Japanese and then translated. If
you really want to, you can pretend that there was originally some
Japanese language reference in that line that had the equivalent effect,
and that it was translated non-literally.

Enough of that.  I'd like to see more fanfics making jokes with the
Japanese language.

As your example showed, such things are likely to be highly clumsy, and
not understandable to most readers. Me, I'll (mostly) stick to doing my
humor in English.

When I wrote the Ryoga/Akari chapter of my series HaM, I put in a lot of
jokes that were plays on the word "pig" and such, and a lot of readers
liked it. I did another fic before that where someone mistakenly
referred to Ms. Unryu as "Bukari" and (as far as I know) only one person
got it. A "Ranma no bake!" line in Ranma's chapter of HaM confused more
people than it amused.

Gary Kleppe
http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe/comics