#sorta out of context

[hrhmiat]

"Have you ever been in one of these?" he asked. But Michael looked so sweet standing there with his hand out all expectantly, and his eyes so kind, like, come on. It's just a cheesy carriage ride. What could happen? And it turned out I was wrong. The bench was not that big.

And I'm not that jaded of a New Yorker. Michael and I were sitting calmly beside each other on that bench, Not Kissing, and the next... we were in each other's arms. Kissing. Like two people who had never kissed before. Or, rather like two people who used to kiss a lot, and really liked it, and then had been deprived of kissing each other for a very long time. And then, suddenly, they were reintroduced to kissing and remembered they liked it. Quite a bit. YES. WE KISSED FOR TWENTY BLOCKS. IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. IN AN OLD-TIMEY HORSE CARRIAGE!

[journey-to-the-attic]

the rest of the cast got their new song covers, so i wanted to try putting the others in a band :>

i did want to make it look a bit like an album cover but i have no idea how those are designed so eh?? i also couldn't think of any band or album/song names so. if anyone has any ideas...

[lurkingteapot]

Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It's so interesting. I'd wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of "yeah, that's what it literally translates to, but that's not what it means" or has answered a question like "how do you say _____ in (language)?" with "you don't, it's just … not a thing, we don't say that."

I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.

Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.

Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.

And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse. And that's even before cultural assumptions come in. It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.

Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).

Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.

This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!

As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).

For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …

ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I'd love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don't speak the material's original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we're basically working from a secondary source, and if we're doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there's nothing substantial being (literally) lost -- or added! -- in translation?

[ohnomysoul]

Something is Rotting.

[izuizzy]

Izyy. I've just got a question I have to ask.

What would sonic and Shadow's reaction be seeing Vanitas?

(You make me freak over Vanitas by the way lol.)

oh…. well…. it’d probably end up like this… hehe

[yugiohmangaoutofcontext]

jonouchi is literally being killed via shadow game mind tricks and all kaiba can think about is how cool marik's ra card is

[saintbleeding]

[id: a digital sketch of jonathan sims from tma, portraying him in an alternate timeline. his skin is noticeably devoid of major scarring and he looks altogether more well-rested and well-adjusted compared to canon. he is a thin man with chin length slightly receding curly hair and aquiline features. he wears rectangular glasses, a shirt and tie, a cardigan with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and an ace ring. he is looking off to one side with an intrigued expression, a question mark in the air next to him. end id.]

tbh ep 8 had me considering sam’n’celia’s wacky investigative tour of tma characters who are maybe doing better and maybe they meet a curmudgeonly but highly passionate schoolteacher (who incidentally maybe still has an arachnid themed childhood trauma story) and maybe after their discussion over coffee the schoolteacher goes to leave and makes eye contact with a beautiful but disgruntled executive assistant approaching from up the street. im just saying.

[toastandjamie]

Mat is the type of person to see a red flag, acknowledge that it’s a red flag, continue forward and then gets surprised when the red flag is red

[astranauticus]

Kim Dokja + my theatre studies lecture notes, lmfao (source: EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Qustions to Ask a Play)

[arsenicflame]

Hornigold's Izzy was the worst, of course. A version of himself that never escaped that terrible place, who lived his life as little more than an object. He still has nightmares about all the things Baz told them, about all the things he didn't.

It doesn't really surprise him, after the first ones, not at its root. To be Izzy Hands is to be someone's after all, though seeing his own face on someone so fundamentally different to him never gets less weird. The people who these other Izzys attached themselves too often left him with more questions than answers. Jack's Izzy, he can understand, from a certain view, though the man himself felt like a fever dream. The less said about Stede's Izzy the better, he's never going to forgive him for the ideas he put in his Stede's head.

Then there was Sam's Izzy.

The first thing anyone noticed about him was that he was happy. He smiled and laughed without thought, and went through life with an ease Izzy didn't think he had ever felt. The crew took to him immediately, accepting him in a way they never did the other Izzys, and certainly not their own. They prodded him and asked him endless questions, and he took every touch without a flinch and answered every question without a hint of a grumble. This Izzy was free. He was open, unburdened, trusting. He was happy.

Sam's Izzy was the one that hurt the most to see. He could accept the worst that Hornigold could've offered, that he would have suffered and been broken. It was infinitely harder to see that he had a chance to be this happy. That it slipped through his fingers.

He's never looked back before, but now? Seeing what might've been? He can't stop himself from considering the possibility that maybe he made the wrong choice back then, going with Ed.

[druidonity2]

2021 Shadowlands fanart.

[as-kind-as-summer]

All I can think of every time I see the palantir is the first time I saw it in Return of the King and couldn’t figure out why that bowling ball was fucking up Pippin

[rabiesofficial]

[legless-fish-on-rollerskates]

Um. Brett?

I was under the impression that the Phil/Brett stuff was a running joke, but there comes a point where you've gone beyond committing to the bit into just straight-up dating. like, this lowkey reads like a relationship announcement, is that on purpose?? Hello???

[neonnoir-ao3]

…would you guys think of me as cringey if I started talking about romancing, fucking, and/or general content regarding the Allied Mastercomputer from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream? pls be honest

[borealopelta]

wip whatever

i'm gonna go ahead and consider myself tagged in @arokel's tagless tag game because i want to talk about My Wips :-) if anyone feels like joining in, please do!!

after posting my latest fic i was kinda like. hmm. i don't have anything to show. which is not true!! i have not one but two geologist!don fics in the wip folder. (now you could ask. hey finch why do you keep writing geologyfic. well a) i have this mental illness called degree in geology and b) it's basically just me trying to conceptualise what being a geologist (or studying geology) must have been like for someone who was doing it before the theory of plate tectonics was even proposed (not to mention accepted). the amount of stuff that was fully unknown to geology in the times these fics are set is limiting as fuck and that's what makes them endlessly fun to tinker with. i've done sooooo much niche research. this is what constitutes fun for me. apologies)

i've already talked about the first one in an ask game, don's horrible geology exam, which i've been slowly piecing together from semi coherent notes app scribblings from the height of my mystery illness, BUT the other is newww so. also i don't have titles picked out because i'm bad at that so the titles are. the file names. yay! snippets under readmore:

geologydonfic is the aforementioned don's exam misery fic

Bobby takes in Don – the line of his bracelet a red imprint on his cheek, bruise-black circles under his red-rimmed eyes, paler than ever, frown lines like deep etchings on his handsome face. It’s clear that he’s not dealing on his own. “Fine,” he says after barely any deliberation, “I can help you study.” He picks up Don’s textbook and flips to a random page. Most of it is taken up by a big, colourful chart, sort of like a repeating rainbow getting more and more washed out, with ray-like lines coming out of one corner. It’s utterly incomprehensible. Bobby puts the book back down on the table. “I can’t help you study.” The corner of Don’s mouth twists into an almost-smile.

argentina is the newer one, set in argentina in 1967. don is there for work, bobby is there for don, it's hot, it's dirty (so far only in the "the drill site is a filthy place in general" way but who knows)

The Jeep that had picked him up at the airport slowly rolled away to join the fleet of identical vehicles, all decorated with the letters YPF – the name of the company in charge of the work, Bob assumed. He barely had time to feel (or look) lost when he noticed Don coming his way. Or at least he guessed it was Don, from the familiar walk and the fact that the man was a good four inches taller than everyone around him. Dressed in grubby work clothes and wearing a hard-hat that cast enough shadow to hide his entire face however, he could have been anyone. Then the smile gave him away. Bob had not been twenty-two and a fool in love in a good while, but that toothpaste-commercial-runaway, all-teeth, bright-as-the-sun smile Don could smile when he really put his mind to it still made him go weak in the knees.