7 ms·

Just an interesting aside: whenever I see Japanese articles translated, the reported speech ascribed to older Japanese interviewees often includes such language

Just an interesting aside: whenever I see Japanese articles translated, the reported speech ascribed to older Japanese interviewees often includes such language as "I'm like, 'Hey, how are you doing?'". I wonder if that's an indicator of the translator's age. The Japanese person in question is 73, and I wouldn't expect the average 73 year old English speaker to use that sort of language. 'Like' as a substitute for 'say' seems to be more recent, generationally-speaking. I would be curious to know what the person would have said in Japanese.

asutekku 7y ago
The thing with japanese is that such translation is absolutely plausible in english. The language has nuances which are almost impossible to translate into concise english. Thus some completely mundane phrases (in japanese) might sound funny or weird in English so the closest english equivalent is used. Anyhow in this context i’m quite sure it’s more descriptive of the author’s usage of english than anything.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  Oh, I understand that it's plausible. It just seems idiomatic to the author or translator, that's all. Nothing wrong with that, no judgement here. :-)
freeopinion 7y ago
USian English speakers have lots of filler noises they make that take the shape of words. We even make fun of some of them. 'Like' is one of those. 'K, so' is another., 'Um', 'Uh', 'Errr'. In Japanese, 'Ehhhttoh' is common. But there are others. They are often just sounds. But just like in English where 'Errr' tells me something even though it's not really a word. It sets a tone for what's to follow differently than the tone set by 'K, so'. In your quote above, though, I don't think 'like' is a filler noise in the original Japanese. It may have just been the article 'to (と)' marking the quote as the words that were spoken. The speaker may have even left off the verb "said" and just left the quote tagged with an assumed verb. If so, that would be an incomplete sentence, which is common but obviously less formal. So the translator might reach for more colloquial English.
- Swizec 7y ago
  As an aside: I used to hate “So, ...” and “Ok so, ...” until I realized they’re like TCP/IP or Aloha handshakes. You announce to the channel you’re about to send a message, if the channel seems clear, you proceed. If not, you wait until the channel is clear. It’s a pretty neat solution to how distracted modern humans are. Good luck getting someone to look up from their phone without sending a string of buffer sounds to clear the channel first.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - xwdv 7y ago
    Personally I still prefer my conversations to be like UDP.
    - a_t48 7y ago
      You yell at others and don’t check to see if they heard or understand you? :)
    - butteroverflow 7y ago
      The absolute best is WireGuard-style: don't open your mouth if nobody is talking to you directly.
getoj 7y ago
I can't find this particular quote, but if you can read Japanese there's an interview with this guy here [1]. For this example in particular, the grammar for reported speech in Japanese is pretty much the same for a 70 year old and a 25 year old, so I agree that "I was like" is a weird choice for what was probably って言った. In [1] the guy has some pretty old-person vocabulary like "どうや", but basically talks like a normal person (of any age). [1] https://plus-handicap.com/2016/03/7306/ https://plus-handicap.com/2016/03/7306/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- whym 7y ago
  The Japanese transcription in that link can be misleading because it seems to redact the manner he speaks. (They do this kind of editing a lot when they transcribe dialects.) Here is a recording of how he speaks: https://youtu.be/zz3tuIbYvmY?t=60 https://youtu.be/zz3tuIbYvmY?t=60 - he has a grandpa-like way of speaking to some extent, but I don't think it's age as much as it's dialect. Many younger people with his dialect speak similarly. For example, どうや and 何や are perfectly normal for a 20 year old from the region to say.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rtpg 7y ago
This is also an editorial style of Japanese publications in general. You can see this in how some people write blogs too (titles for tech blogs will be “I tried out Rust!”). It’s an extremely conversational style that is easy to read. I think the nearest equivalent is “oral history” articles that are the rage recently
euske 7y ago
As a non-native English speaker, I'd be curious of how an old person would say that in English. "I'm like..." is such a convenient phrase that I can't think of any other replacement that sounds equally natural and spontaneous. As for the original Japanese phrase, I can imagine it's something along the line of "「おい、どうした」とか言って" or something like that, where "like" can be literally replaced with とか (alike, etc.) which has been a common phrase in Japanese for decades.
- azernik 7y ago
  Older native English speakers usually just go with "I said", at all levels of formality. You might hear "I says" in the past tense too. The increased separation of a "natural and spontaneous" register of English seems to have been mostly a function of 1970s-1990s youth culture - you can hear this in "candid microphone" radio shows before this period [1], where there's surprisingly little difference (to a young-ish native speaker like me) between the recorded colloquial usage and the formal standard English of speeches/literature/film. Lots mid-century film sounds stilted to us, but people actually spoke like that. [1] A big chunk of recordings are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znyNNn5esXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znyNNn5esXg
- monetus 7y ago
  In my experience, most older people would be more literal: I told him/her, I said, I says (pronounced sez, informal). If it wasn't speech but another action, it would be similar. "I'm like" is probably from the 70's, so it is pretty common.
azernik 7y ago
> 'Like' as a substitute for 'say' seems to be more recent, generationally-speaking. It is indeed! Earliest academic mentions seem to be around 1980, and as of 1990 it was used mostly by people under 30: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/455910.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/455910.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_... The "be like" quotative is popularly thought to have specifically originated in Southern California youth culture, but I'm not finding any good studies that address this (the one I linked mentions regional differences as a subject they didn't have the data to investigate).
metters 7y ago
A simple "Hi, how are you?" can change a lot and doesn't cost anything more than a few seconds.
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. Did you mean to respond to me or someone else?
  - metters 7y ago
    Dann want to say that asking someone who might be suicidal doesn't cost much. And if he is not suicidal he might just say that he/she is fine and move on. I stated this because you said you usually don't speak to ppl who stand on the bridge, even though you should talk to them.
    - zapzupnz 7y ago
      I didn't say any such thing. I think you might have meant to respond to a different comment.

asutekku 7y ago

The thing with japanese is that such translation is absolutely plausible in english. The language has nuances which are almost impossible to translate into concise english. Thus some completely mundane phrases (in japanese) might sound funny or weird in English so the closest english equivalent is used. Anyhow in this context i’m quite sure it’s more descriptive of the author’s usage of english than anything.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zapzupnz 7y ago
Oh, I understand that it's plausible. It just seems idiomatic to the author or translator, that's all. Nothing wrong with that, no judgement here. :-)

freeopinion 7y ago

USian English speakers have lots of filler noises they make that take the shape of words. We even make fun of some of them. 'Like' is one of those. 'K, so' is another., 'Um', 'Uh', 'Errr'. In Japanese, 'Ehhhttoh' is common. But there are others. They are often just sounds. But just like in English where 'Errr' tells me something even though it's not really a word. It sets a tone for what's to follow differently than the tone set by 'K, so'. In your quote above, though, I don't think 'like' is a filler noise in the original Japanese. It may have just been the article 'to (と)' marking the quote as the words that were spoken. The speaker may have even left off the verb "said" and just left the quote tagged with an assumed verb. If so, that would be an incomplete sentence, which is common but obviously less formal. So the translator might reach for more colloquial English.

Swizec 7y ago
As an aside: I used to hate “So, ...” and “Ok so, ...” until I realized they’re like TCP/IP or Aloha handshakes. You announce to the channel you’re about to send a message, if the channel seems clear, you proceed. If not, you wait until the channel is clear. It’s a pretty neat solution to how distracted modern humans are. Good luck getting someone to look up from their phone without sending a string of buffer sounds to clear the channel first.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xwdv 7y ago
  Personally I still prefer my conversations to be like UDP.
  - a_t48 7y ago
    You yell at others and don’t check to see if they heard or understand you? :)
  - butteroverflow 7y ago
    The absolute best is WireGuard-style: don't open your mouth if nobody is talking to you directly.

getoj 7y ago

I can't find this particular quote, but if you can read Japanese there's an interview with this guy here [1]. For this example in particular, the grammar for reported speech in Japanese is pretty much the same for a 70 year old and a 25 year old, so I agree that "I was like" is a weird choice for what was probably って言った. In [1] the guy has some pretty old-person vocabulary like "どうや", but basically talks like a normal person (of any age). [1] https://plus-handicap.com/2016/03/7306/ https://plus-handicap.com/2016/03/7306/

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
whym 7y ago
The Japanese transcription in that link can be misleading because it seems to redact the manner he speaks. (They do this kind of editing a lot when they transcribe dialects.) Here is a recording of how he speaks: https://youtu.be/zz3tuIbYvmY?t=60 https://youtu.be/zz3tuIbYvmY?t=60 - he has a grandpa-like way of speaking to some extent, but I don't think it's age as much as it's dialect. Many younger people with his dialect speak similarly. For example, どうや and 何や are perfectly normal for a 20 year old from the region to say.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rtpg 7y ago

This is also an editorial style of Japanese publications in general. You can see this in how some people write blogs too (titles for tech blogs will be “I tried out Rust!”). It’s an extremely conversational style that is easy to read. I think the nearest equivalent is “oral history” articles that are the rage recently

euske 7y ago

As a non-native English speaker, I'd be curious of how an old person would say that in English. "I'm like..." is such a convenient phrase that I can't think of any other replacement that sounds equally natural and spontaneous. As for the original Japanese phrase, I can imagine it's something along the line of "「おい、どうした」とか言って" or something like that, where "like" can be literally replaced with とか (alike, etc.) which has been a common phrase in Japanese for decades.

azernik 7y ago
Older native English speakers usually just go with "I said", at all levels of formality. You might hear "I says" in the past tense too. The increased separation of a "natural and spontaneous" register of English seems to have been mostly a function of 1970s-1990s youth culture - you can hear this in "candid microphone" radio shows before this period [1], where there's surprisingly little difference (to a young-ish native speaker like me) between the recorded colloquial usage and the formal standard English of speeches/literature/film. Lots mid-century film sounds stilted to us, but people actually spoke like that. [1] A big chunk of recordings are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znyNNn5esXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znyNNn5esXg
monetus 7y ago
In my experience, most older people would be more literal: I told him/her, I said, I says (pronounced sez, informal). If it wasn't speech but another action, it would be similar. "I'm like" is probably from the 70's, so it is pretty common.

azernik 7y ago

> 'Like' as a substitute for 'say' seems to be more recent, generationally-speaking. It is indeed! Earliest academic mentions seem to be around 1980, and as of 1990 it was used mostly by people under 30: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/455910.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/455910.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_... The "be like" quotative is popularly thought to have specifically originated in Southern California youth culture, but I'm not finding any good studies that address this (the one I linked mentions regional differences as a subject they didn't have the data to investigate).

metters 7y ago

A simple "Hi, how are you?" can change a lot and doesn't cost anything more than a few seconds.

zapzupnz 7y ago
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. Did you mean to respond to me or someone else?
- metters 7y ago
  Dann want to say that asking someone who might be suicidal doesn't cost much. And if he is not suicidal he might just say that he/she is fine and move on. I stated this because you said you usually don't speak to ppl who stand on the bridge, even though you should talk to them.
  - zapzupnz 7y ago
    I didn't say any such thing. I think you might have meant to respond to a different comment.