I will attempt to start with "Zero no Tsukaima", since it seems to have a lot of interest in it. (I'm included in that, obviously.)
Hopefully, people will still be interested in discussing the Japanese text, even after the translation starts, but if not, I'm open to suggestions about other texts to use. I'm a little worried myself that I'll slack off once I no longer have to learn Japanese in order to understand the story. On the plus side of course, you have a reference done by someone who actually knows the language.
In any case,
since I started on this already, I thought I'd go through with it. I made no special attempts to make it flow in English, because that would hide my misunderstandings of the Japanese under another layer of processing. The main thing I'm interested in is where I screwed up the meaning. I'm hoping that this will spark some decent discussions on the Japanese language. I'm not sure if I'm going about this the right way though. Well, without any further ado:
raw text:
"translation" -- I tried to break lines and paragraphs at approximately the same places as the Japanese text.魔法の国
第一章 俺は使い魔
「あんた誰?」
抜けるような青空をバックに、才人の顔をまじまじと覗き込んでいる女の子が言った。
才人と年はあまり変わらない。黒いマントの下に、白いブラウス、グレーのプリーツスカ
ートを着た体をかがめ、呆れたように覗き込んでいる。
顔は……。可愛い。桃色がかったブロンドの髪と透き通るような白い肌を舞台に、くり
くりと鳶色の目が踊っている。ガイジンみたいだ。というかガイジンである。人形のよう
に可愛いガイジンの娘さんである。いや、ハーフだろうか?
しかし、彼女が着ているのはどこの学校の制服だろう。見たことない。
才人はどうやら仰向けに地面に寝転んでいるらしい。顔を上げて辺りを見回す。
黒いマントをつけて、自分を物珍しそうに見ている人間がたくさんいた。豊かな草原が
広がっている。遠くにヨーロッパの旅行写真で見たような、右造りの大きな城が見えた。
まるでフアンタジーだ。
Here is some detail onLand (Country) of magic.
Chapter 1: I am a familiar.
- "Who are you?"
- With a sky one seems to have fallen from in the background, the girl who is closely examining Saito's face, said that.
Saito's age is not very different from hers. Wearing under a black mantle, a white blouse and a gray pleated skirt,
the bent over figure is looking upon him in amazement
- This face is ... cute. (Peach-) Pink-blonde hair, almost-transparent white skin, form a backdrop in which quick
reddish brown eyes are dancing. She looks kind of like a foreigner. Ok, maybe she IS a foreigner. A doll-like
cute foreign (precious/important/respected daughter) princess. No, maybe a happa?
- But what she's wearing is some place's school uniform, probably. I haven't seen anything like this before.
- It seems Saito, in the act of looking upward, is laying himself down on the ground. He raises his face to survey his surroundings.
- Attached to the black cloak is someone who is looking very curiously at me. Lush grasslands
spreading out. The distance looked like a travel picture of Europe, and built on the right, a large castle could be seen.
- It's like something from a fantasy.
how I broke down some of the sentences.
Because this is all kind of new to me, I may go in depth on obvious things, so please bear with me.
paragraph 2, sentence 1
- "抜けるような青空をバツクに、..."
"(fallen-from) (kind of) (blue sky) wo 'back' ni"
I assume this is supposed to be a subordinate clause of some sort? But what's the verb that the "wo" indicates the direct object for? Or is this some kind of set phrase?
- "才人はどうやら仰向けに地面に寝転んでいるらしい。"
"Saito wa (apparently) (looking up) ni (ground) ni (lying down) iru (it seems)"
We have this "verb1 NI noun1 NI verb2-te_form iru" structure that I parsed as "verb1 NI (noun1 NI verb2-te_form iru)" -- in other words, "(noun1 NI verb2)" is happening towards the act of "verb1"
- "右造りの大きな城が見えた。"
"built on the right, a large castle could be seen."
(Mixed jp+en transliteration is too much trouble, so I'll probably avoid it from now, if possible.)
Is that meaning of "右造りの" correct? I believe it's literally "right-hand structure's" -- using "right hand structure" as some sort of essence of "right hand structure"dness -- or less literally "right-hand structured"? I'm still trying to get my head around all the uses of "の"
but it really is laborious to spell it all out literally. I think it's easier on both me and other people to just point out my mistakes. The whole point was to avoid that eye-glazing feeling, after all.
Let me know if I typed any of the Japanese wrong. I know next to nothing about Japanese usage, as in what word is most likely to be where, idioms, etc, but I am pretty meticulous, so I believe all the squiggles are the same. My most common error is small vs large versions of hiragana and katakana.
Any other suggestions
for interesting Japanese novels with reasonably simple language?
Or for better ways to organize a study group?
posting Japanese text
Since this is a pretty short passage, I don't see any particular problem with posting the Japanese. If it really is a problem, please edit out that section. Anyone who's interested can PM me for the Japanese text in case it's no longer available in this post.
Of course, a lot more text might get posted later, so it'd be nice to get something definitive on this.