Live Dog/Hell

 From Terry’s notes, the idea that stood out to me was the use, or lack of use, of rhetorical and didactic questions in English. As I am exposed to more sources of Japanese writing, I am definitely seeing more questions being asked to the reader themself. On the other hand, I have had moments where I had been asked to remove similar questions from English assignments. At the time, I just took it as gospel and moved on. Thinking back on it now, questions of this sort really are rarely used, let alone in non-fiction writing. I hope we don’t come across anything like it in our next texts, because I would have absolutely no idea what to do with it while translating. Half-jokes aside, the idea of a faithful vs beautiful translation comes up once again, especially with something that's taboo in one of the languages of translation.

As for Riggs’ text, I found two pieces interesting. For one, connected to the article we just translated, the translation of article titles was a topic. As opposed to the more strict idea that goes with prose, Riggs speaks of a freedom with titles to make them catch their respective audience’s attention. The idea that some articles were written without a title was especially noteworthy, which allows the translator to make a judgment call without the influence of a Japanese title. The other idea was the lead paragraph, in which a thesis statement (or something similar) is found in the beginning in English while it tends to be more fluid in Japanese. I had once been told that the farther east you go, the scholarly articles have less structure and expect the reader to put two and two together. Funny that this idea comes up once again. 

Avi