Schooling and Being Schooled

Ok, let's begin with a quick poll, seeing as the vast majority of you reading this blog can pretty much instinctively tell what does and does not sound funny in English. Which of the following would you choose:

3D C.G. is now a necessary part of visual productions such as movies, games, and animation.
3D C.G. is now a necessary part of visual productions, such as movies, video games, and animations.

Post 254 is basically me being a dick to someone who had poorly translated the above phrase. Post 256 is another person "correcting" me. The BBS in question is 2ch (pronounced two-chan), a sort of tribute to old school internet protocols that refuse to die here. This thread is one of many in which people request a phrase in Japanese to be translated into English. I'm particularly fond of trolling these threads in the ENGLISH [sic] section of 2ch, because the Engrish you can encounter there is often of mind-boggling proportions. Back on topic: I tried to reason with 256, pointing out that 1) a comma is in fact not necessary 2) "video games" can be inferred from "games" and 3) animation is not a countable noun and thus cannot have a plural under normal grammatical conditions. Reason didn't win out, so I dropped the I'm-a-native-speaker-you're-not card and things quickly settled down.

Of course, peculiar English stemming from literal translations is not specific to the Japanese. Off the top of my head I can think of a poorly versed Frenchy spouting something along the lines of "for to do" or the slightly less awkward "I call myself." After typing it, I realize the latter of those two is more obviously hypothetical.

I took particular umbrage at 256's last retort. He basically said that he looked through an online dictionary thoroughly and determined that "animations" is the best translation, as if Virginia Woolf's "nothing has happened until it has been recorded" is transformed into "all that has been recorded is all the truth there is." (something of a riposte to a specter of JD, who, I'm certain, is looming over me at the moment) We all know books are never wrong.

I made one of my semi-regular visits to Nagoya University to return some books and check out more. It turns out one was a wee bit late, so the library staff decided to punish me. I thought, "it's just a book; what can they do?" Well, they can suspend my borrowing privileges for 2 weeks. I guess I'll be working on those materials for the Shizuoka Translation Competition for the next couple of weeks.

I made my way back to Sakae after returning all the books to the shelves myself, bought a cup of coffee and a scone, and popped a squat in Central Park to wait for Colleen. A homeless man was yelling at a pair of black cats whom I don't know whether they were fighting or gettin' it on in a frisky catty sort of way.

Another homeless man, zombie-like, collapses in front of me as I look on the scene before me. He rolls over, looks up at me and my cup of coffee, and says "gimme" (ちょうだい). After a little resistance and the realization that I'm not a complete asshole (or maybe the realization that the coffee was now lukewarm), I handed it over to him. I fully expected him to teeter off and drink my cooling coffee somewhere out of sight. Instead, he tells me this elaborate story how his mother left the country suddenly to marry an American and live with him in the states. He stayed in Japan and without a family to support him had a rough time in his teens finding direction or even a simple job. He then launched into how he doesn't blame the gaijin-san (which, I suppose, was for my benefit), because the real problem is that Japanese people don't give a shit about anyone but themselves (this is, of course, not a literal translation, but I want to convey how harsh his language was). Only then did he teeter off as expected.

Earlier, on the train from Nagoya U., I had been reading a weekly news magazine that had an obscene number of advertisements for foreign aid NGOs. As I walked from Sakae to Fushimi, I thought about how I had casually passed them over at the time. I tried to recall just how many there were.