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Limanu Mbaye by Nicolo Parsenziani for Esquire Italia Magazine April 2024

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Gabriel Jurkić The Passage to Eternity

laura benson

Friday Harbor, Washington. Spring 2021.

Cat and kittens - Henriette Ronner-Knip - 1903 - via Bonham's

"Evening In Blue"

Mark Grantham, Canadian

acrylic on canvas

simon deadmans australia gothic my beloved

strange light

handmade by third.born333

So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that "coolness" doesn't translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.

Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say "eso es muy cool" or "c'est très cool" if the context is not particularly formal

No no, not literally the word "cool" I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.

In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.

Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.

But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.

"Greedy Greed"

The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.

After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.

Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.

You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.

And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.

Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.

And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?

Let's try it.

"Greed the Avaricious"

Oh yeah. That's definitely, undeniably, "cool".

via Joseph Fasano's twitter

A Japanese lacquer, ivory, bone and rosewood panel, Meiji period, late 19th century

Two crows were observed perched silently atop a street light during a misty morning in coastal California. ♡