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May. 24th, 2004 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickそんな子と、うちのダドリーが関わり合になるなんて。。。それもポッター一家を遠ざけている理由の一つだった。
One reason for staying far away from the Potters was that they couldn't see how that boy could possibly be suitable company for Dudley. I may have overstepped slightly by making this all one sentence, but in my book, sentences do not end with three dots unless it's informal blog writing or I'm doing it. Expositionish writing in books should be complete thoughts. I'm pleased well enough with the translation and I'm even pretty thrilled with the diagram, which (IMNSHO) shows the nested structure of the language with these clauses that keep getting built up to provide a sufficiently complex structure with layers of meaning. I... er... might be doing this entirely incorrectly, but I don't think that is very likely. I think pretty much the literal looks like: "And of THAT boy, suitable company for Dudley, how could be?!? Of that, Potter-famiiy (direct object) keeping far away from (the -ている verb ending, in my book is usually equivalent to the English "-ing" for ongoing action stuff) reason of one was." Interestingly, the Dursley household is not mentioned as the subject or the agent for this and I am not feeling particularly upset about that. (This was one feature of Japanese that used to irritate me a lot, that they didn't include things like subjects if you could reasonably be expected to know about whom the sentence was.) (And yes, I know that's horribly written... but it's not *wrong*. If I'd typed "... could reasonably be expected to know whom the sentence was about", that'd be wrong for values of "never end a sentence with a preposition" wrong. English: More fun than you might think.)
One reason for staying far away from the Potters was that they couldn't see how that boy could possibly be suitable company for Dudley. I may have overstepped slightly by making this all one sentence, but in my book, sentences do not end with three dots unless it's informal blog writing or I'm doing it. Expositionish writing in books should be complete thoughts. I'm pleased well enough with the translation and I'm even pretty thrilled with the diagram, which (IMNSHO) shows the nested structure of the language with these clauses that keep getting built up to provide a sufficiently complex structure with layers of meaning. I... er... might be doing this entirely incorrectly, but I don't think that is very likely. I think pretty much the literal looks like: "And of THAT boy, suitable company for Dudley, how could be?!? Of that, Potter-famiiy (direct object) keeping far away from (the -ている verb ending, in my book is usually equivalent to the English "-ing" for ongoing action stuff) reason of one was." Interestingly, the Dursley household is not mentioned as the subject or the agent for this and I am not feeling particularly upset about that. (This was one feature of Japanese that used to irritate me a lot, that they didn't include things like subjects if you could reasonably be expected to know about whom the sentence was.) (And yes, I know that's horribly written... but it's not *wrong*. If I'd typed "... could reasonably be expected to know whom the sentence was about", that'd be wrong for values of "never end a sentence with a preposition" wrong. English: More fun than you might think.)
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-24 10:26 am (UTC)Do you speak Japanese too?
no subject
Date: 2004-05-24 04:42 pm (UTC)If I work at it a lot and have a dictionary handy for the kanji, I can usually generate a reasonable amount of meaning from an unknown manga. I was actually surprised at how well I did with volume 2 of Saiyuki (just out now in English so that I can check my work...) but it is so damn much work to do this that it has to be something I desperately want to read, something that has no hope of seeing a U.S. release. The item currently occupying the "I will read it despite the work involved" slot is Tori Maia's yaoi bondage porn series 星の館. Given that it's porn, there's more dialogue than you might expect. *sigh*
no subject
Date: 2004-05-24 07:22 pm (UTC)