"}Thinking about the word \u201ccoelacanth\u201d (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.
\n\nThe lyrics are typically mostly lists of nouns/verbs, with very little sentence structure. For example, the song for the duel in episode 23 begins
\n\n\n\n\n\u6697\u9ed2\u707c\u71b1
\n\u8a95\u751f\u4eba\u5f62
\n\u540d\u4ed8\u3051\u3089\u308c\u3066\u4eba\u52d5\u8aac\nwhich the official subtitles render as
\n\n\n\n\nDarkness, burning
\nPuppets given life\u2026
\nThe name given is Human Movement Theory\nWhile workable, that translation erases various features of the source text\u2014in particular, the fact that is is written using Sino-Japanese vocabulary, which contributes to its arcane, mysterious atmosphere.
\n\nAt 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
\n\n\n\n\nIncandescent darkness and birthed puppets
\nAre named, anthropoperipherism\nThis is is much more accurate! The only critism I could raise would be that, in 2015, English speakers don\u2019t actually understand Greek any more.
\n\nLater in the translation of the same song, Sato uses \u201cspeleomorph\u201d for \u7a7a\u6d1e\u5f62\u614b \u2018hollow shape\u2019.
\n\n(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 \u4e5f, so maybe rather than \u201cscientific\u201d we should think \u201cmedieval poem\u201d, 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\u2019s the low dialect that uses monosyllabic morphemes\u2026)