Editing Talk:Kaze no Stigma:Volume2 Chapter 3

@Zyzzyva165 (in response to the his/her comment on their edit after my last edit)

I think that a lot of the text in this page flows oddly and sometimes has a poor choice of words. The meaning gets across but it doesn't flow like it would if it were actually written by a native English speaker. A lot just isn't worded how it would normally be worded in English. I expect that it's a result of it being a fairly direct translation. I attempted to fix it up a bit so that it flowed better. If you think that I went too far, feel free to undo what I did. I don't think that I changed the meaning of anything. I just made it flow better. If the comment on my edit was not clear enough, what would you have preferred that I said?

--[[User:Kalessin|Kalessin]] 4:36, June 7, 2009 (UTC)

Yikes. Looking back at the diffs, it looks like I really screwed up. I don't know if the edit got munched in transit or if I accidentally deleted it before submitting, but it looks like I removed a large section of text at the end of the page. I don't know how that happened and I didn't mean to do that. Is that what you mean by explaining myself? It looks like you fixed it though, so that's good. *Sigh*. I really don't know how I did that, but I obviously need to be more careful in the future. Sorry about that.

--[[User:Kalessin|Kalessin]] 6:52, June 7, 2009 (UTC)

Yeah...that's what I meant. But it's all right. Accidents happen sometimes. No worries about it. =)

--[[User:Zyzzyva165|Zyzzyva165]] 08:21, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


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"Who could say when they were there? Two shadows suddenly appeared in the abnormal space that trapped Shuuji."

The "Who could say when they were there?" part isn't particularly clear. Is it asking when they showed up or how long they had been there? It seems to me that it would be better as either "Who could say how long they had been there?" or "Who could say when they appeared?" But asking when they appeared and then saying that they suddenly appeared would be a bit odd. I suppose that you could say "Who could say when they arrived?" instead, but it's not much better. Of course, asking how long they'd been there and then saying that they suddenly appeared is a bit odd to (though at least it takes into account the possibility that they were there but invisible). In any case, I'd ''like'' to change it to "Who could say how long they had been there?" but I'm not sure that that's technically what the original said. The current phrasing is too ambiguous.

--[[User:Kalessin|Kalessin]] 15:03, June 15, 2009 (UTC)

"The girl's height exceeded that of the boy by about thirty centimeters - but, as for the position of the head, the boy's head was slightly higher."

Maybe there's not an easy way to make this clearer, but it's a bit weird as is. So, is this saying that the girl is physically taller than the boy but that he's positioned such that his head is above hers? That is, is he floating or standing on something to get his head higher than hers? If not, I don't see how his head could be higher than hers if she's taller. There's no indication here as to why his head would be higher, so maybe it's just not possible to say this in a better way - i.e. the author wasn't clear enough rather than there being any issue with the translation - but it comes off as a bit odd to me. Maybe it's supposed to have something to do with them being shadows. In any case, if there's a way to clarify this sentence, it would be great, but I'm guessing that the author just wasn't clear enough. Light novels tend to be fairly light on the descriptions, after all. But then again, that's part of why they're "light."

--[[User:Kalessin|Kalessin]] 00:30, June 17, 2009 (UTC)

Ah. It says later in the chapter that he's floating in the air. I'm tempted to change the phrase about his head being higher to say something about that, but that would almost certainly be adding content beyond what was in the original. It looks like the author wanted to put off informing us that the boy was floating. But then why tell us that his head was higher? It's just weird. Still, if it's the author that screwed up, there's not much we can do about it. That's a content issue, not a translation issue.

--[[User:Kalessin|Kalessin]] 03:55, June 17, 2009 (UTC)