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   Shiina (yowatshiinaesq@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Nov-2022 14:41:47 JST Shiina

   Some stories are easier to tell in one language than another. I wouldn't have been able to tell my story about Toni McConnell & her story, along with my history with Absolute Theater & our Urban Fairy Tale Festival, in Japanese (even though JP is my mother language). This is because of this invisible layer of shared culture. EN-speaking ppl have more contextual padding to understand. It's just...like that. Context matters.

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     Rachel Thorn (rachel_thorn@queer.party)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Nov-2022 15:14:47 JST Rachel Thorn

     in reply to

     @YoWatShiinaEsq Yes! The first time I had to teach my マンガ文化論 course in English, I thought, "How hard can it be?" But it turned out to be quite hard, and I ended up leaving out some things and adding some other things. My first lectures definitely sounded "translated."

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     Shiina (yowatshiinaesq@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Nov-2022 15:52:54 JST Shiina

     in reply to

     • Rachel Thorn

     @Rachel_Thorn I totally understand…EN & JP are not like EN & SP. The whole linguistic structures are soooo different!! In my mind EN is more grammatically structured so it’s easier to write analysis in EN. JP I think is more…vague/ambiguous & dependent on context. (If I were a politician I’d prefer to speak JP b/c I can get away w/ things I say more easily ? but I like using EN when I want to analyze.

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     Rachel Thorn (rachel_thorn@queer.party)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Nov-2022 18:52:41 JST Rachel Thorn

     in reply to

     @YoWatShiinaEsq The other day I read a horrible “scholarly” paper on manga in which the author made this stunning statement without evidence: 「人を殺したくなった」ということの裏には、漫画・動画の影響が多大であると思われる」. I presented this to my students as an example of ずるい Japanese that they should never use in scholarly writing. 主語がない！?