RatCreature (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ratcreature) wrote2014-01-25 01:26 am
ratcreature) wrote2014-01-25 01:26 am
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talking meme: fandom and language
lilacsigil prompted: "Fandom and language for you: what fandoms did you experience dubbed into German, are you in any German-language fandoms, how does English-speaking fandom feel to you, things like that."Well, as far as dubbed tv shows go, pretty much all my fandoms before I had fast internet I first watched in German. So all the series I felt fannish about before finding online fandom, and the things I watched in the late 90s when I first found online fandom too. Some of those I have never actually bothered to rewatch in the original (I don't rewatch things very often in general), like most of original Star Trek episodes I only watched on tv here, same for TNG. But for example the X-Files I first watched haphazardly in German, but later on I got the episodes in the original and rewatched.
With Buffy the video tapes came out with not too much delay (about a season iirc), so that was the same as watching them here, so I bought those from the UK soon. With The Sentinel I first watched dubbed German episodes, but after I found the fandom I managed to get tape copies from another fan, and the later third and fourth season I only watched in the original.
The dubbing for Sentinel made some odd choices, in particular that Jim and Blair stuck with "Sie", presumably because they called each other Ellison and Sandburg in the original, but who would address a close work colleague who is also a roommate with the formal you? But it is a tricky issue, because obviously if they spoke German, they would start out with "Sie" and then at some point a "Du" would need to be offered, which is a significant marker for a relationship. And obviously that doesn't happen on screen, so they would have had to switch suddenly and that would also be odd.
With Due South I watched the RayV seasons in German first, but managed to get the RayK seasons through tape trade.
Tolkien I first read translated, but then later reread in English. Actually, iirc, LOTR was the first English book I read in English outside of English class assignments (which at that point were still mostly short stories). It was a tad ambitious as a choice for someone who at the time was not fluent. I think I was fourteen or fifteen or so, so I had only four or five years of English classes, because when I went to school they didn't yet start foreign languages in elementary school, but only in fifth grade. So that was quite slow going, even as I knew what was happening. Eventually I had the German edition open concurrently as I worked my way through LOTR in English the first time.
It turned out though that deciphering Tolkien was still a better choice for first reading material than reading French comics in the original, which I couldn't really manage after four years of French later on (even before I forgot most of it again). Being able to read French comics was my major aspirational motivation to drop Latin eventually (which my parents had wanted me to take as second language) and pick up French instead, because so many great comics aren't translated. But with so little text as context for guessing words you don't know, and the text not explaining the images but conveying separate things, and being spoken language with jokes and slang, comics are quite far from easy literature.
Speaking of comics, with Carl Barks' Donald Duck comics the classic German translation by Erika Fuchs is really good and sometimes funnier than the original. I have an English language edition of Carl Barks' complete works, but I really like the German translation as much, and many German fans prefer it. Because Erika Fuchs translated so many Disney comics with inventive language she had quite an impact on contemporary German language use, btw.
Actually Donaldism is the closest I come to having a German-language fandom, with German fanzines I have and such. And general comic fandom too to some extent, though that is more a multi-lingual thing. And mostly offline fandom engagement.
I don't watch a lot of German tv. These days I mostly watch tv shows on the computer, and I'm not in any online German fandom. Generally my online fandom engagement happens in English.
I find it even somewhat awkward to talk about fanfic fandom in German, because so many of the terms are English, so that when you talk with another German fan about something, you end up talking Denglisch with every second word (at best, sometimes seven out of ten) or so being a direct loan. Which okay, on the one hand, I won't start saying Schmerz/Trösten or whatever it would be instead of h/c, but otoh at some point it just gets ridiculous.
If you take a fairly normal fannish sentence you might to say to someone while talking about fanfic, like "XY wrote a great gen h/c ficlet for a Mundane AU prompt on the kink meme." you end up with very few German words, and maybe one of them a noun. I mean, even those that have translations are difficult, like say "prompt": Would I pick "Stichwort" or "Aufforderung" for "prompt" in a kink meme? Both sound odd. Maybe just stick with prompt, even though only the adjective meaning is the same in German (I don't think prompt as noun got loaned yet). And sure, you can translate "mundane" as "alltäglich" but "Mundane AUs" are a thing, saying "alltägliche alternative Universen" might as well mean "common AUs". Similarly you could say Geschichtenschnipsel for ficlet, or half-translate it as Fic-Schnipsel (though honestly, saying "fic" in German is, well, it sounds like you say fuck only in German that word is more obscene, because normal German swearwords all are more fecal-based than sexual, as I explained at length in my intro to that topic), but you'd probably end up saying sentences like "XY hat ein tolles gen ficlet für einen Mundane AU prompt im kink meme geschrieben." Awkward.
On the flip side, when fandom first shifted to the blogging/journaling format from mailing list, I hestitated starting one, because doing anything journal like in a foreign language felt weird to me, because I had kept paper diaries before, and those had obviously always been in German. And while thinking about fandom stuff in English was quite natural by then (after years of practicing with maililng list posts), for most other things it was not. The very first post in my blog in 2002 (reposted on DW here) which I started before getting an LJ was about that issue, and the odd feeling. Obviously more generalized nattering in English has started to feel more natural with years of practice.
Though in a way it is still weird, because I've gotten out of the habit of keeping a paper diary, and I post more often about non-fandom stuff, but still in English, so by now it feels more natural to narrate my own life in a foreign language. But that is not really fandom-related.
Otherwise English-speaking fandom doesn't feel like anything particular to me, that I could trace to the language. Sure, you can ponder the pervasiveness of English on the internet and the relative dominance of English language pop culture, and what it means for language diversity and power in international fandom, but in the end having a lingua franca is a practical thing, even if it is not a neutral thing. I like German, and I don't think English sounds cooler or some nonsense, but I'm pragmatic about reaching fannish audiences, English is more common than German, and I speak it well enough to make communicating in it not a hardship. So English it is.
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Funnily enough, because I had a German girlfriend, I first saw Buffy on German tv. I remember how weird it was to see the original and realize that Spike had a working class British accent. As I recall, he sounded more posh than anything in German, I guess in an attempt to signal the Britishness. Dubbing is so rich in difficult issues to navigate.
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It doesn't help that if you only talk fandom offline rarely compared to the English online conversations, it just doesn't become common. I mean, at least for German it is fairly normal that it sucks up a large amount of vocabulary from other languages for certain topics if something gets introduced from there, like a lot of the train-related vocabulary is French in origin (and more so in the beginning before German made up some new words, like for a train ticket we used to say "Billet, and only later it was replaced by "Fahrkarte" and these days the English "ticket" is common, probably because that works for planes too, while Fahrkarte doesn't). But for the words to start sounding natural there needs to be a lot of usage and they need to get squished a bit to fit into the grammar right. German is good at making things fit, like it's common to just conjugate English verbs as if they were German, but there needs to be a critical mass of usage.
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Thanks for talking about my prompt!
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I mean, as in many languages in German loanwords go through a process to become incorporated, and while is really close to German so the words fit quite well, there is for example the matter of what their plural is supposed to be. German plural forms are somewhat complex and irregular (with about five different endings and stem changes and they don't correspond neatly to the gender or anything, and there are variants, that sometimes change meaning but sometimes are just regional or preference). Just adding an -s is a possibility too, so initially words from languages that do that, keep that plural. But it is not necessarily a favored plural ending for words which structure seems to call for a different plural ending if they native, so often a process happens where once the word feels more normal, people use that s-plural and a competing plural ending they decided (through mysterious linguistic processes) sounds better, and sometimes people assign competing genders to the word.
Like a while back (around 1900) we adopted the English word "cake" (strangely enough for cookies/biscuits, but well) and it had the plural "cakes", and soon it was written "Kek" with "Keks" as plural, but over time that became the singular and the plural became Kekse (incidentally most people say "der Keks" but in some regions it's "das Keks"). Or take Pizza, that has competing plurals right now. Initially we took it as Italian loanword and the singular was Pizza completely with the foreign plural Pizze, but that does not work naturally in German so soon the plural was made to be Pizzas, because the -s is sort of a fallback thing for German plurals, but now after some decades of being familiar with pizza many say Pizzen too. It may seem weird that it didn't go right to the -en from the -e, but the -s form is more transparent so you can see what the singular was, and the other pattern only happens once the word feels native. Similarly when we took the word "Thema" it kept the Greek plural "Themata" (and some still use that) then it became "Thema/Themas" but now most people say "Thema/Themen" because it feels natural.
And then there is the thing where sometimes initially all the words are loaned from another language, but then only some are kept, and some are then translated in their parts to replace the foreign one or new ones are invented. Like that happens with hardware components. Like you say "die Hardware" in German, but for hard disk you now sometimes say that but more often it is "Festplatte", and of course computer as word got adopted, but many now also say "der Rechner" etc.
But you need a certain momentum in usage to make these things happen.
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but you'd probably end up saying sentences like "XY hat ein tolles gen ficlet für einen Mundane AU prompt im kink meme geschrieben." Awkward.
Haha, yeah, I've had conversations like that. And 'fic' really is a singularly unfortunate word when you switch to German. /o\ I make extra sure now to use 'fan fiction' when talking German. 'Anal' (as in, 'that dude is totally anal about his appearance') also doesn't translate well. ;)
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I think here you have to say "analfixiert" for that meaning to be clear, and that really doesn't have the same ring to it, and is not in common use.
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I don't talk fandom things with in RL all that much, but I do have a German friend who is also in fandom and when we meet, we tend to end up speaking in English for fandom things and then switching to German when we're talking about RL things and back and forth it goes.
Also, words that sound natural in English to me, sound very obscene and/or wrong when I translate them to German, which makes me wonder if they would feel like that, too, to English native speakers who aren't into fandom, and the fact that they feel natural to me is because most of my English conversations revolve around fandom and slash.
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And there probably is less baggage with all the sex vocabulary when primarily learn them in a context you like, and don't have to associate all the insults or even just those horribly awkward grade sex-ed lessons where you had to look at arousal charts of male vs. female orgasms and horrible films and your teacher overshared his pot-fuelled first time sex escapades. (Seriously sex ed was so useless. We never even did the condom demonstration thing, despite all the urging to use them because of AIDS.)
Also sometimes German words are plain weird. I still remember when I found out what the German terms for grower vs. shower in penises is, which apparently is Blutpenis and Fleischpenis. It is descriptive enough, if rather blunt compared to the more delicate indirect English description, but makes me think of butcher shops selling parts more than anything.
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I really admire your ability to navigate so comfortably in a second language. My second language is French but I am nowhere near as comfortable in French as you clearly are in English! And my third language is even worse. :-)
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Compared to when I was little they now they push languages more in school, start earlier, and I think you can't graduate with just two anymore (and drop one like I did with Latin) either. I mean, my school offered a lot more languages even back then (in addition to the usual English, Latin, French, you could take Spanish, Italian and Arabic) , but it was voluntary. Now my old school has switched to offering a fully bilingual track where students can take all sorts of classes in Spanish, and they also started offering Chinese too. There are big efforts to push bilingualism.
Like recently the German state Saarland decided that it wants to become fully bilingual to be more attractive for French, and just passed a law to make French the second language starting to make all schools bilingual with the goal to reach full dual language competence by 2040, and eventually to demand all state employees to speak French in addition to German. Obviously with the back-and-forth history of that area it makes some sense, after all after WWII they only decided in 1955 that they wanted to belong to West Germany rather than France, though frankly it also is a tactical ploy to stress their state independence, because as one of the former coal industry areas hit by deindustrialization, they are running a big deficit and need federal funds, so there are budget hawkish calls to merge them into neighboring states for efficiency, but despite such pragmatic calls for mergers they don't tend to be popular with most people and their local identities, and happened only once in 1952 with Baden-Württemberg. There is the recurring floating of the idea to merge the city states like Hamburg, Berlin, and Bremen into their surroundings too, but for example I don't want my city Hamburg, who has been an independent entity for centuries to be merged with surrounding states, even if it would be fiscally sound. Similarly the Saarland is not thrilled to be told that it's not viable for being too small... (it has less than a million inhabitants so population wise it is only about half the size of Hamburg for example) Anyway, that is another reason why the Saarland is pushing French, in addition to their hope that it'll help the economy directly. (Sorry for the tangent, but since you mentioned speaking French....)
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