William Gibson sort of mentions us

Actually he was only pasting this post from Marxy’s blog. So Marxy gets called William Gibson’s “current favorite English-language blog from Japan,” I am insanely jealous, and I consider digging up a copy of the Japanese translation of Neuromancer to write up my analysis of how unique tricks of Japanese orthography were used by the translator to reflect the situation of foreigners speaking Japanese in Japan in the hopes that it will attract some attention from the man himself.

4 thoughts on “William Gibson sort of mentions us”

  1. That was an awesome translation. I loved the use of katakana in the message from Molly (which had been all caps in the original). Also the way that the cool names, like Straylight and Wintermute, were rendered in kanji with the English in furigana (which is how Harry Potter is translated too, IIRC).

  2. An awful lot of genre translation, both science fiction and fantasy, uses that technique. Lord of the Rings used it quite a lot, for example.

    Another thing that Neuromancer does that I appreciated was that the gaijin characters in the sprawl of Chiba, when uttering Japanese place or personal names had them rendered in katakana, but with the kanji on the furigana line.

  3. As far as I can tell, that’s pretty typical in fantasy manga like Dragon Quest/One Piece as well. Furigana has great potential to make a world quadruply cool for people who read both Japanese and English.

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