I am aware, and that’s fine. The Japanese author is writing for a Japanese audience. From my understanding, naming who is talking is not as necessary in Japanese, since you can figure it out by the terminology they use and the way they speak.
However, it’s not nearly as obvious once translated into English. In my experience, I can sort of figure it out by reading it over a couple of times and comparing what’s being said to what characters have previously said and done, but I’ll still have issues. It becomes especially difficult when a large group of people are all talking out of order; often in those cases, all I can do is guess.
This is what I mean by “without consideration as to how English readers will read the translation.” The translator, who can read and understand the Japanese text, will know who is talking. The English reader, who cannot read and understand the Japanese text, may struggle to comprehend. The issue is not with the author, but with the translator, because they have translated the Japanese text into English text, but they have not translated the Japanese prose style into an English prose style (or at least, provided some accommodation).
For example, I’ve read some translations where if the translator believed that it may be unclear as to who is talking, they put the name of the character in parenthesis after the line of dialog, like so:
「Some dialog that could have plausibly come from Character A or Character B.」 (Character A)
Being able to read stuff, honestly. There are so many things that aren’t translated, or translated poorly, that it’s just more efficient to learn to read it on my own
But doesnt the same thing happen in English? I rarely see the “‘[statement]’ said [character].” type of prose, I really only remember it being common in children/‘young adult’ novels. It being in Japanese doesn’t really help the issue tbh, at least not in my experience. Just being more exposed to that format in any language is what has helped me in more easily deciphering who is speaking in what conversation. Of course I don’t have any empircal data in front of me so I can’t give precise statistics on the most common style of writing dialogue, but I do think I read enough to find that the most common style is something like this:
[some description of speaker #1]
“[speaker #1 statement]”
“[response from speaker #2]”
“[speaker #1]”
“[response from someone, not necessarily speaker #2]”
etc.
To pass JLPT N2 the next time I try it and get back to being able to converse in more than just monosyllabic responses. Since moving up in my job in April my speaking and grammar have gone way down, and despite being able to read and understand most of what is said to me, I still can’t respond a coherent way beyond はい or ああ、そうなんですか. For my job it’s helpful to have Japanese skills for the sake of helping students who have questions or if I need to explain something beyond the scope of the class to them, but I don’t necessarily need it for teaching the English in class (in fact, in some ways, it’s better to downplay it completely so students don’t see you as a free translator). Nonetheless, anytime I can knee-jerk respond with a vocabulary translation it feels good, but I’ve been living in Japan off and on for five years now and I really want to just communicate better. Talk gooder
What has made me most excited through WK is my improvement in recognizing kanji faster and reading faster. I can read furigana-less manga now relatively well, I’ve read a novel, I’ve read elementary textbooks, and I can follow the news okay (thanks to the copious amount of text on news here). I like that I can get the gist of things more and more. Signs I’ve passed for years and glazed over I can now read effortlessly. That’s been awesome. I only wish my speaking and grammar skills would catch up
No matter how long it will take me, I plan to speak/read fluently in Japanese. It will probably take me more than 10 years, but that’s fine. My wife is Japanese, my kids will speak japanese and I’ll be living in Tokyo soon, so there is no way around it.
My top 1 motivation is being able to understand monogatari light novels. I know they use really weird vocabulary but I’d really like to read them. And maybe being able to live in Japan but that’s more difficult
I’m excited for the point where I’m having a conversation and can say something I actually really want to say, rather than just saying something because it’s all I can say. The person I am in this country is only half me
Usually in your example, though, you can at least decipher from context who is speaking. If you can’t, it may be a fault more with the author than with the reader.
I believe you are correct that the same happens in writing of any language. Japanese does have more tools available to identify people through dialog, though, such as the way a character elects to end their sentences. In cases where the Japanese author uses these tools that are unavailable in English, it falls to the translator to ensure that any missing context is provided.
I want to know if the subtitles are lying, or if something important got lost in the translation. Some localization teams are pretty heavy-handed, there are a lot of stylistic decisions to make, and sometimes there are just plain old mistakes, especially with amateur groups. I know that it’s never going to translate perfectly, so decisions have to be made, but I look forward to those “aha!” moments when I can catch something.
I have a hunch that they aren’t really jelly donuts.
This is true. I haven’t read any translation so bad that I can’t decipher who’s speaking from context in the same way I would in English though, so I think you’re right in pointing out that it really is dependent on the author rather than language.
I believe there is a lot of reasons to learn Japanese for most people. I think personally though, I love that one day hopefully I’ll be able to watch or play games without subtitles (Danganronpa, y’all), as well as learning an understanding of the literary things… Like poems and writing, because I LOVE writing. Also, languages are so cool
Honestly, there’s English books where I can’t decipher who’s speaking either - I have to go back to the start of the dialogue and count which lines are even and which are odd. There’s good and bad authors in any language.
