Quote:ClassicDrogn wrote:Oh, yeah, definitely. There's tons of examples - I cracked up laughing uncontrollably watching anime, once, when I realised that a particular segment was supposed to be in Chinese.
I don't think it's so much a "Westerner" thing, as that adding a touch of a foreign language makes it sound cool - anime (I've noticed examples in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean works, though don't ask me to name what they were) is riddled with bits of English and German, often used just as badly by a creator who looked it up in a dictionary, and there's a relatively famous quote about how you can say "Yes, that is a large amount of corn" in Latin and still sound profound. (You'd probably also still sound like you were making a challenge to a duel if you said "It's nice to meet you" in Klingon, but that probably has as much to do with Klingon customs as the language)
In this case, though, I was referring specifically to the phenomenon where the assumption seems to be that Chinese place names... or special technique names, or the names of anything, really, are incredibly long and grandiose. So you have the situation where the author's clearly come up with this long string in English, like... I dunno, 'God Beneath Heaven Victory Hand of Fire' and then back-translated it into Chinese.
Which results in an equally long Chinese phrase with a bunch of words chained together - hmm, say, 'Tiansiashenkaihuoso'. Except that isn't how it really works, because the long fanciful 'Chinese' names in English are just translation artifacts. Actual Chinese names for stuff tend to be fairly short, they just get really long when translated into English.
That's specifically what I mean. So even if you do the translation work really well, it still results in a name that doesn't actually work in the Chinese language and aesthetics. Even if it's scrupulously done and completely grammatically accurate, it's still going to be weird. Almost certainly way, way, way too long.
This doesn't happen when Japanese stuff uses Chinese - I mean, granted, that's rare, Japanese creators are more likely to use English, Latin or Russian or German whatever for 'rule of cool'... but it happens on occasion. And it's usually properly translated, really, just pronounced wrong. Because the Japanese do, naturally, get the Chinese language and its aesthetics. It's more a specific thing with English speakers trying to get a Chinese equivalent for something Eastern they've named.
I'm not griping about it or anything, or even particularly criticising. It's just a thing I notice, and find interesting.
-- Acyl