Paging Dr. Ruber, paging Dr. Ruber…
Okay, sorry.
So you may recall that I had initially started translating Ruber’s story, but then life happened and amidst everything his story ended up being too difficult for me to get through. But following along with poll results, he came to the top of the list and I got back to it!
It look me until I was nearly done with his translation to realize why I found it so difficult, and the reason is that Ruber is very straight-forward. We’ve had other characters described as blunt or straight-forward, but those are usually characters who don’t mind saying what they want, or utilizing their fists. But that’s not Ruber.
Japanese is a very passive language, in that almost nothing is ever said in a straight-forward way. Grammatical structure and vocabulary are roundabout, requiring you to read between the lines to get the real meaning behind what someone is saying. Even a lot of the vocabulary can be translated in different ways and mean multiple things. But Ruber even admits in his story that he doesn’t like going at things in a roundabout way, so this interpretation of how he talks tracks with his character. However, as someone who has studied the standard Japanese language and translated a whole bunch of these princes who basically use Japanese in that typical roundabout way, Ruber really threw me for a ride.
It’s hard to pick out an exact example to illustrate this, because it really does have a lot to do with his grammatical and vocab choices. But one I can point out is in the end of the Sun Route where he’s discussing ‘partners’. If you’re referring to a boyfriend or girlfriend, most often in Japanese you’re going to see 恋人 (koibito, lovers) or even 好きな人 (sukinahito, person I like) if it isn’t the more specific 彼 (kare, boyfriend, also used as a general male pronoun) or 彼女 (kanojo, girlfriend, also used as a general female pronoun). We can already see the issues with 彼 and 彼女 having different meanings. But Ruber doesn’t use any of these terms. He uses 伴侶 (hanryou) which is a kanji I’ve never even seen before. It’s not even the word most commonly used to specifically refer to a marriage partner. The more common words are 配偶者 (haiguusha) or 結婚相手 (kekkonaite), but Ruber has to be difficult and throw a whole new word at me. That’s how a lot of his translation went really, where he was using words that I knew other ways of saying, but I didn’t specifically know the meaning of the word HE was using because he didn’t often use terms that I was already familiar with. So things took longer!