Unforseen consequences

[branchandroot]

After years of watching anime in subtitles, I’m not really surprised when it takes me a few eps to get back into the swing of watching animation in my native language. I did not, however, expect what years of reading manga in translation has done to my ability to read comics in my native language!

When I read translated manga, I generally have a back-translation track running in the back of my head–a sub-routine, as it were, speculating on what the Japanese dialogue was. This is assisted, of course, by the frequency of repeating phrases and exclamations, and the way the translation community has developed some common English equivalent phrases. Under certain circumstances it’s a pretty good bet that “that person” started out as “ano kata“, and so forth.

The kicker is that this mental sub-routine keeps running when the comic in question was written in English. So I read Agatha Clay exclaiming “What?!” and, about half a second behind, there’s this mental echo of “Nani?!”.

*rueful* Like the title says: unforseen consequences.

Incidentally, everyone should go read the webcomic Girl Genius. It is delightful.