(CR) Ascendance of a Bookworm Season 3

[magnuskn]

Originally Posted by Tenzen12

-That said you are right on this one. It's german not english, thus offical spelling should be Mein or Meino not Main as I originaly said.

Those are also not German female (or male) names.

[Tenzen12]

https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=mein

60 thousand records of Germans and Dutch people disagree

[zeross87]

can we drop the name discussion already ? ^^"

[magnuskn]

Originally Posted by Tenzen12

https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=mein

60 thousand records of Germans and Dutch people disagree

Surname, but thanks for playing. Unless you want to argue that people have always been referring to Myne by her surname and everybody else (including her family members) by their first name.

Also, in the Netherlands they speak Dutch, not German, so mentioning them is completely irrelevant.

[Tenzen12]

So we go from "not being German name" to "not first name." that's progress. Either way it's obviously name that author gave her even if he doesn't know how to romanize it. If it can't be used as first then it just means it's blunder.

Either way what is more likely that Mein gets accidentally name that is supposed be surname or that she is only one across multiple seasons that gets completely made up name? Heck, her parents aren't even extravagant Hollywood superstars.

Edit:it can be apparently used as first name so in the end you are wrong on that too.

[magnuskn]

Originally Posted by Tenzen12

So we go from "not being German name" to "not first name." that's progress. Either way it's obviously name that author gave her even if he doesn't know how to romanize it. If it can't be used as first then it just means it's blunder.

Either way what is more likely that Mein gets accidentally name that is supposed be surname or that she is only one across multiple seasons that gets completely made up name?

Surname's can be basically anything which sounds vaguely German, so those did not even enter into consideration for me. First names are by what basically everyone is referred to in the series (except nobles, like Lord Karstedt), so that was the obvious topic of discussion here. Since the author had no problems with German names like "Lutz", it's pretty obvious s/he made a mistake with Main/Myne/whatever.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by magnuskn

Surname's can be basically anything which sounds vaguely German, so those did not even enter into consideration for me. First names are by what basically everyone is referred to in the series (except nobles, like Lord Karstedt), so that was the obvious topic of discussion here. Since the author had no problems with German names like "Lutz", it's pretty obvious s/he made a mistake with Main/Myne/whatever.

Damuel was a mistake. (Typo for Samuel.)
Myne was a pun, like Shikikoza. Or, for that matter, Motosu Urano.

Here is a reddit post about the author and the translator's reasonings re: names. (by the translator)
It is slightly spoilerish as it contains names of characters who haven't appeared yet.

Spoiler for P4V1:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HonzukiNoGekokujou/comments/rzwjy3/accidental_germany_an_untranslatable_conundrum/

Spoiler:

(Spoilers are just some names).

As I read community posts and discuss various aspects of Bookworm, I've become increasingly aware of a fundamental schism in perspective between Japanese readers and many Western readers that makes it feel sometimes like the two groups are in different worlds. There was something about Bookworm that I was taking for granted as being universally understood and extremely apparent, but over time I've come to realize that it really isn't. I thought that perhaps writing a post on this perceived schism would potentially be fun and interesting, so here I am. But what schism is this, you ask? Well, what I'm referring to is the shocking revelation that...

The Bookverse is not, in fact, Germany. It is a fantasy world.

...Okay, that's pretty glib, but let me explain. What I mean to say is that due to untranslatable language differences, what was intended to come off as fantastical and alien to Japanese readers is in fact coming off instead as familiar German to western readers, which in turn leads to very different aesthetic impressions of the work. The German names in Japanese give Japanese readers three very distinct feelings: one, they are very long, two, they are very hard to pronounce, and three, they are very alien/fantastical. As a basic example, we can take エルヴィーラ / Elvira. In Japanese, it is long, hard to pronounce, and seems fantastical. In English, meanwhile, the name is not particularly long, not particularly hard to pronounce, and certainly not fantastical in the least. You can see this in the manga of Fanbook 2, where the voice actors struggle with names that are very easy and familiar to us. The experience, then, is dramatically different: to Japanese readers, it is a fantasy name in a fantasy world. To English readers, it is a German-ish name in a German-coded world.

(As aside note, it is of course impossible to speak unilaterally of how every single Japanese reader will interpret the names; many Japanese people study German, for example. and will be more familiar with the names. I've spoken to various Japanese readers and googled around to ensure that what I describe is largely the case, but your mileage may vary.)

An amusing thing in particular is that many of these German names are so obscure in Japanese that googling them gets you only Bookworm results. In Japan they are more Bookworm names than they are German names. The author acquired many of the spellings she uses from an online compendium of European names translated to Japanese, and some quirky spellings in this compendium aren't really used anywhere but Bookworm, making them feel even more fantastical. Naturally, in contrast, googling the bulk of these names in English will give you results of the "actual" name. The immediate familiarity with the names is on a completely different level, which is completely untranslatable - you can't just make Western readers forget their familiarity with names.

Then there's the length. Japanese names tend to be short and reflected in only 1 or 2 kanji- compare エグランティーヌ・クラッセンブルク to 香月 美夜 for example. The names in Bookworm are so long and confusing to Japanese readers that the author elected to almost universally cut last names for simplicity. And yet, they certainly are neither long nor confusing in English. Due in part to the above described familiarity, it is generally pretty easy for Westerners to read and pronounce all of the names in Bookworm. It's a plot point in Bookworm that nobles have distinctly longer names than commoners, but rendered in English they're a lot more similar - Eckhart and Lutz hardly feel different in English, but エックハルト and ルッツ are pretty distinctly different, for example. I tried to preserve this to some degree in my translation during more gratuitous examples, but in general this is something that can't be translated. The languages are far too different.

In short, the point of the Japanese was to be fantastical and alien, but this intention is lost entirely in the transition. As described in Fanbook 1, the author elected to base names and such off Germany and other European countries because she was bad at creating things from 0. Her goal, however, was the creation of a unique fantasy world. Her intention with using these names was to create this new world with assistance; it was NOT to make it feel like Germany 2: Fantasy Edition. This is something I've asked the author about in 3 separate occasions just to be entirely sure about, but the German aesthetic in English is entirely incidental and is not at all what she was attempting to accomplish. Her goal was a fantasy aesthetic, not a German aesthetic. A fantasy author in Japan with this goal would hardly use English names, since Japanese readers are much more familiar with English and English names, so German words are often used in this way due to sounding more foreign and fantasy-esque. This is why European words were also used for spells, magic tools, etc; it's all in service of giving a fantastical vibe.

This in part explains why there's so many Japanese pun names, so many slightly misspelled names, why the author was fine going with Damuel after simply mistyping Samuel, etc: the goal is not to create Germany 2, with highly consistent German, but rather to create a new world while using German as a springboard.

We can compare this with how English fantasy tends to create fantastical-sounding names. A common trend is to create entirely new languages and base names in that, since English is a melting pot of cultures and thus names taken directly from existing languages would sound more familiar than fantastic. The authors need to forge out and create something entirely new in order to escape this if they want to sound like fantasy, often facing a disadvantage in the fact that they're stuck to the alphabet, while Japanese authors can use katakana to represent foreign/fantasy words (which exist in stark contrast to the surrounding kanji/hiragana). Amusingly, since Asian languages are so distinct from English, we have our own reverse trend of what the Bookverse does with German: all our bastardized use of Japanese. To us, it sounds cool and foreign. To the Japanese, it sounds entirely familiar. The experience in English here is the one that can't be replicated in Japanese.

Anyway, I think perhaps the most controversial translation I've ever done is Yurgenschmidt instead of Jurgenschmidt for ユルゲンシュミット, and it was only recently I realized that some might not even realize why I even felt the need to ask about which translation to use in the first place. ユルゲンシュミット, the name of the country in Japanese, is the absolute peak of fantasy. It gives off a highly fantastical impression, and not so much a German impression. A key to this is how Japanese "accurately" reflects the German J with a Y, and every Japanese reader will thus read the name as Yurgenschmidt, with the Y providing the kind of inherently high-fantasy atmosphere it does (just think of Yggdrasil and how heavily it features in Japanese fantasy). The reason I asked about the name in the first place is because I was sweating between the highly fantastical nature of the name, and the fact it did not at all give off a Jurgenschmidt-esque impression. There really was no easy choice for me at the time.

Of course, at the time I did not realize there was this divide in perspective between the aesthetics of the work. You could say I've just been slowly realizing that the Western community views it through a different lens than I do over time. Despite translating it into English myself, my head is always in the Japanese. It's what I read myself, and it's what I'm trying to get into English. Thus, when translating Yurgenschmidt, I was not entirely conscious of how attached the community was to the German aesthetic that is (mostly) unique to the English, and I was still stuck in trying to represent the Japanese experience as accurately as possible.

In reality, as the title implies, I think the Japanese experience is probably untranslatable. First of all, to even hope to reflect it, a translator would need to start doubling the length of every name and making them look more bizarre - Philine to Phi'llynne, for example, which surely would do more harm than good. But even then the German origin of the names might be apparent in ways they might not to the average Japanese reader reading casually, so perhaps every name would instead need to be changed more fundamentally instead. Philine to Pilintame, or Pirucendie perhaps. Long and noble-like, fantastical instead of German, it fits all the bills. But I don't think that would be too well-received either -- call it a hunch. And so, this is probably one aspect about Bookworm which will perpetually distinguish the English and Japanese versions of the work, regardless of which translation you use. At the end of the day, some things are just so intrinsically tied to culture and language that it can be hard to even understand it from an outside perspective, much less accurately convey it with a different language.

Thus was born Yurgenschmidt, the country that accidentally became Germany.

And that's that. Just wanted to share my perspective on this, since I feel like many times I have said things based in this perspective which was not entirely clear or even sensical from an outside perspective. Yurgenschmidt, I have concluded, certainly seems nonsensical to many, which is my fault for not properly building up to it, or perhaps more accurately for not having given up emotionally by the point the name came up. Hopefully this has been interesting to read!

Relevant to this discussion is that, while German was an obvious inspiration, the author didn't mean to create fantasy Germany and doesn't consider herself bound to use purely German names.

[Tenzen12]

That's super insightful. Thanks for linking it.

Originally Posted by magnuskn

Surname's can be basically anything which sounds vaguely German, so those did not even enter into consideration for me. First names are by what basically everyone is referred to in the series (except nobles, like Lord Karstedt), so that was the obvious topic of discussion here. Since the author had no problems with German names like "Lutz", it's pretty obvious s/he made a mistake with Main/Myne/whatever.

As I corrected myself in edid Mein/Meinoi actually is actually (male) first name.

And wait! are you agreeing that author made mistakes if so why are we even arguing? That's what I said.

[magnuskn]

Yeah, very insightful posting. Thanks, Anh. Kinda reminds me of the mistakes Jim Butcher made in the Dresden Files. "Das Erlkönig", yeah sure.

Anyway, it's correct we shouldn't be argueing.

[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

My main takeaway from this episode is: Karstedt needs to learn how to apprehend enemies without blowing the shit outta them . I mean, he blew up two enemies into dust in a row, losing leads to the suspect who gave the order. Isn't he supposed to be some kinda commander of the knights? But he doesn't know a good way to apprehend an individual?

[Endscape]

Originally Posted by Obelisk ze Tormentor

My main takeaway from this episode is: Karstedt needs to learn how to apprehend enemies without blowing the shit outta them . I mean, he blew up two enemies into dust in a row, losing leads to the suspect who gave the order. Isn't he supposed to be some kinda commander of the knights? But he doesn't know a good way to apprehend an individual?

When all you have is a hammer...

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Obelisk ze Tormentor

My main takeaway from this episode is: Karstedt needs to learn how to apprehend enemies without blowing the shit outta them . I mean, he blew up two enemies into dust in a row, losing leads to the suspect who gave the order. Isn't he supposed to be some kinda commander of the knights? But he doesn't know a good way to apprehend an individual?

The first one self-destructed. The other was due to a surprise buff.

[zeross87]

"the priest duo magic power is omnipotent ! "

[Kanon]

They reserved it for the comedic chibi skit at the end of the episode, but Myne's father telling us about all the children he had who died was pretty dark. And it's not often isekai actually touches on the high death rates of newborns in medieval times.

[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

Kamil? Myne's lil bro's name is Kamil??!!



Well, Kamil is certainly a man's name . Let's hope that this Kamil won't be as short tempered as the OG one from Zeta Gundam .

Originally Posted by Kanon

They reserved it for the comedic chibi skit at the end of the episode, but Myne's father telling us about all the children he had who died was pretty dark. And it's not often isekai actually touches on the high death rates of newborns in medieval times.

Indeed. That's good stuff narrative-wise, but very sad for the family....

[Master_Yoma]

Myne really got a lot of things done in such a short amount of time good thing Ferdinand stepped in

Father like daughter both pacing back and forth

[Wandering Soul]

Originally Posted by Kanon

They reserved it for the comedic chibi skit at the end of the episode, but Myne's father telling us about all the children he had who died was pretty dark. And it's not often isekai actually touches on the high death rates of newborns in medieval times.

Yeah, that was oddly realistic and dark for an end of episode skit

[magnuskn]

So, why am I getting strong LGTBQ vibes from the head priest, Sylvester and Benno? ^^

[BBOvenGuy]

Originally Posted by Wandering Soul

Yeah, that was oddly realistic and dark for an end of episode skit

While we're on the subject of "dark," I got a pretty ominous vibe off that gray shrine maiden telling Delia that the incoming visitor "likes children."

[Tenzen12]

Originally Posted by Obelisk ze Tormentor

Kamil? Myne's lil bro's name is Kamil??!!



Well, Kamil is certainly a man's name . Let's hope that this Kamil won't be as short tempered as the OG one from Zeta Gundam .

Indeed. That's good stuff narrative-wise, but very sad for the family....

Unlike Kamille, Kamil IS man's name though. It's two different names.