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Old 05-23-2006, 11:27 PM   #4
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Re: Article: A Re-transliteration of Osensei's "Kannagara no Jutsu" by "The Grindstone"

Hi Chhi'med,

You are right, I was playing with the word "transliteration," but I was purposefully rejecting the word "translation." The reason: I was not working with the original Japanese text. It is not at my disposal. So I could not call what I did a translation (even though much of the English translation left key Japanese terms in romanized versions of Japanese). Additionally, the text I was working from was already an English text. I chose the word "re-transliteration" because I was simply trying to take it from an English text to a more readable English text. I was simply re-writing it. In the history of spiritual discourse, this is something that has been done throughout time - re-transcribing things. I saw no reason why not to do it here, while I saw good reason to do it.

Additionally, I wanted to add some context to the piece so that the reader could see how "readability" is always going to go hand in hand with (any) translation. Meaning, even the original translator who brought the text from Japanese to English had to do some "re-transliteration" - he had to filter things through several times, through two languages, several times, to determine what is "literal" and what is not, etc. (e.g. the way he translates Osensei's understanding of certain phrases to be in line with certain fascist thinking of the times, etc.)

Hope you'll excuse my word games.

Thanks for the post,
dmv

David M. Valadez
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