youzicha:

Thinking about the word “coelacanth” (which is hard to spell and/or pronounce because of the gratuitously Greek roots) reminded me of a creative strategy for translating the J.A. Seazer songs in Utena.

The lyrics are typically mostly lists of nouns/verbs, with very little sentence structure. For example, the song for the duel in episode 23 begins

暗黒灼熱
誕生人形
名付けられて人動説

which the official subtitles render as

Darkness, burning
Puppets given life…
The name given is Human Movement Theory

While workable, that translation erases various features of the source text—in particular, the fact that is is written using Sino-Japanese vocabulary, which contributes to its arcane, mysterious atmosphere.

At this point, Yasuyuki Sato of the Utena Translation Project had an idea: if you think about it, English also has a form of diglossia, in that scientific vocabulary can be formed from Greek morphemes. His translation renders the same lines as

Incandescent darkness and birthed puppets
Are named, anthropoperipherism

This is is much more accurate! The only critism I could raise would be that, in 2015, English speakers don’t actually understand Greek any more.

Later in the translation of the same song, Sato uses “speleomorph” for 空洞形態 ‘hollow shape’.

(Anyway, translation is really difficult. What effect was J.A. Seazer aiming for by using Sino-Japanese? Some of his other songs use classical particles like 也, so maybe rather than “scientific” we should think “medieval poem”, and try to make the translation into a Chaucer pastiche. Or perhaps he is just interested in the phonetic quality of short bisyllabic words; in that case, translating into Greek roots goes in the wrong direction, because in English it’s the low dialect that uses monosyllabic morphemes…)