flemmings | (no subject)

This is clearly going to be a weekend without the net. A long weekend without the net. Connection was faster and stabler with my dial-up modem. (spits) But to our other demons.

1. Ritsu's grandmother makes a great French grandmother but she's not exactly Ritsu's grandmother any more. In Japanese- and as we see more in later books- she's a sunao uhh straightforward transparent WYSIWYG character who hasn't a clue about the odd stuff that happens all over her house. That it was she who taught Ritsu to drive is, in Japanese, a bit blinkety-blink-ohhhkayyyy moment, because ordinarily grandmothers don't drive themselves let alone teach their underage kids. One just assumes that cheerful grandmum cheerfully thinks her 13 year old grandson should learn to drive what fun for him and the underage part is just hahaha a joke on the authorities. In French it came across as sophisticated grand'mère thinks of course her adolescent grandson is old enough to drive: the next sentence- 'and my grandfather taught me about youkai from the age of three'- reads as a nonsequitur until I realized that Japanesely they both mean 'I come from a weird family.'

2. The French keeps the diminutive -chan for names, go them. Also words like kekkai and kigo, that get glossaried in the back. Go them again. OTOH Ritsu refers to the enclosed grove in the garden as 'un domain cabalistique.' The Japanese is reijou (spirit + place), which is more or less 'sacred ground'- but AFAI can see sacred because people believe it to be so rather than because someone said it was: 'an area that contains the belief and worship of people' says the J-J. I see not going with any translation that would reference Catholic notions of the holy ground, but cabalistique seems to be reaching a bit.

3. Ritsu doesn't seem quite as complexé in French as in Japanese, but in French at least there's a word for it.

ETA- and if anyone knows how to change default encoding in IE6, please tell. It's not in Internet options and it keeps defaulting to unicode. Is this because I have Japanese and Chinese enabled?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From the top "File" bar, go right two places to "View". "Encoding" should hopefully be eight options down under "Font Size". You can also add an encoding button to the toolbar so you don't have to go into the drop-down menus to change encoding (View-->Toolbars-->Customize, and then look for the Encoding button in the left-hand window).

This link (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/explorer.html#ie5) has some screencaps (scroll down a bit to "Encodings").

I know. I've been doing this all morning. I go to encoding. It tells me it's using Unicode-8. I tell it to change to Western European windows. It does. Next time I open the browser it's unicode again. How does one change the default, would seem to be the question?

On the off chance that this might work:

Under Tools-->Internet Options-->Languages, is "English (Canada) [en-ca]" the first language listed? You can have other languages set here, but if English (Canada) is not there or if Chinese or Japanese is the first language listed, I have the feeling that IE6 will default to UTF-8 as that's the most frequently used character encoding for those two languages, regardless of whether Western European is set as your default encoding (no check besides "Auto-Select").

Also, do you have any of the service packs for IE 6 installed?

Yes, En-ca is my first language listed, Japanese the second. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much about the unicode default since it means Chinese and Japanese pages usually display properly: time was I always had to reset the encoding to read them. Maybe what I need to do is enable French...

I have the usual CJK service packs installed, though only Japanese has the whole shebang. Is that what you mean?

Poo, I was hoping that was it. You are not the only one (http://groups.google.com/groups/search?ie=UTF-8&q=Default+character+encoding+IE6+) with this problem (http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie5.gen.discussion/browse_frm/thread/3cf08d08350881fe/7eeb7127ea4a3a13?lnk=st&q=&rnum=7#7eeb7127ea4a3a13), but nobody seems to have a solution for it (I think the MVP's suggestion that you should reinstall the OS (are you running XP or 98?) is insane).

The service packs I was referring to are the bug fix packages for Internet Explorer, SP1 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1e1550cb-5e5d-48f5-b02b-20b602228de6&DisplayLang=en) being the big one. Depending on your operating system, you may have it installed already, though. But really, it's just a wild guess as to whether installing SP1 will fix your problem. I'm not experiencing it myself, so it's hard for me to troubleshoot (running IE6 on Windows XP(SP2 installed)).

I'm fine with it except for niggling, production-related things that make them look mildly amateurish.

Hyphenation in French isn't all that different (rule-wise) from English. But the way they're hyphenating the Japanese terms at line breaks makes zero sense. It's obvious that whoever is proofing these knows nothing about the source language.

Also, "penji" that's too close to the page cut gets chopped as well -- several words are missing the first letters on some pages.

One of the glossary notes in the back encourages readers to attend an exhibition in Paris that ended a fair while ago. (Grandly excluding Canadian or other readers in one swell foop . . .) It's odd to see publishers "date" their books that way. E.g., one of those unwritten copyediting understandings is to consider deleting terms like "recently" or "currently" whenever they're used in works that are meant to sell beyond a year or so.

(I dun noes nuffin' 'bout IE.)

Yes. The hyphenation is weird. Some editor got his or her unschooled paws on the MS and wrought disaster, as the editors of translated manga are wont to do.

With my eyes I don't even try reading the penji...

Otherwise . . . um, I think they're book-sexy. I mean, they look exactly like Japanese manga, complete with jackets. This is a radical contrast to the U.S. versions of manga that look so cheap and cost far too much.

True that, even if there's a *little* loss of detail and shading in the pictures.

And to be fair about the glossary, what they recommend you to is the exhibition's catalogue, such as are often available in libraries if authoritative enough. A number of my seeming art books are actually catalogues from influential exhibitions like The Shogun Years or The Great Japanese Exhibition.