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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/07/16 in Blog Comments

  1. I'm saying that the tilde ~ is an english term that's used in pretty similiar ways as the japanese 'wave-dash' ~. And the tilde isn't the only context-sensitive lexical unit in the English language by far. The reader can tell something like this: AFAIK, the tilde can be used in all of those situations. I can understand if you don't think it should be used in story text because it's a colloquial slang punctuation, but it is an actually used in English, for some time now. Random Source: https://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=165572.0 The OP doesn't know what's going on, but the other members seem to be aware of the term. I've also used it as far back as high school in msg'ing (don't know how I picked it up though...), before I even started learning Japanese. Yes, fight me.
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  2. If we take our idea of what's acceptable in professional English writing from Internet usage, we'll be falling down a deep, deep hole for a very long time. To Rooke's point, that tilde is a linguistic cheat, shorthand for emotion in situations where brevity and typing speed matter more than precision. Think of it as a one-character emoticon. And if we say this particular emoticon cheat is fair game, why not all the other emoticons? Rather than make thoughtful use of language to convey whether a person's dialogue is happy or sad or teasing, we could just stick :-) or :-( or :-P at the end of every other line. So much easier, right? I'll be blunt: it makes for lazy writing. And worse yet, it makes for uninteresting writing. Besides, you're kind of making my case for me. Your example shows the tilde (which looks a lot like the wave dash, but isn't) being used to indicate casual sarcasm. Then we have the wave dash (which looks a lot like the tilde, but isn't) being used to indicate bubbly joy. Oh, and also sometimes sarcasm. Oh, and also sometimes singing. So when a reader sees something squiggly at the end of a line, how are they supposed to interpret it? Is it uplift or put-down? Or pop hit? You might say the reader should figure it out from context, but in a translated VN, cultural context is an ocean away and linguistic context sits at the end of a long game of TL telephone. It's an iffy proposition at best. I'll be blunt again: to leave squiggles at the end of a line is to leave a work partially untranslated. And in this case, the burden gets shifted onto the shoulders of an unprepared reader.
    1 point
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