Blood Hound (the Betsu Hana vampire story)

[Risu-chan]

@_@ Turns out that some unpleasant variety of intestinal bug and fever ended up winning the night. No I haven't actually been asleep, despite the fact that it's 3 a.m. in this time zone; I finally gave up and decided to download some sizable PDFs to study while horizontal tomorrow and at least get some kind of work-work done...

note to self: fever may help with translating Yuki Kaori works in the future; it certainly seems to have helped with working on Blood Hound anyway. @_@ I don't normally come up with blood-drenched poetry-laden prose very naturally...

anyway, original point of post was going to be:

Usually I can take a reasonable guess at what a foreign name rendered in Japanese katakana is supposed to be. For a couple of these, though, I feel like begging for some sanity checks.

Keep in mind that Japanese can't write an L sound so it uses R for both R and L, and that it also can't write a vowel followed by an R without another vowel, so words that end in -ar and -er and so on tend to be ended as -aa or -ee or whatever (they double a vowel both to represent a long vowel and to represent vowel plus R, which is more than a little ambiguous.)

So anyway, here are the syllables in two characters' names that I'm taking wild guesses at:

E - ru - o - o - ne
My top three guesses at that are Ellone, Ellorne, and Eluone. I think I'm going with Ellone unless anybody's got a brainstorm. (It's for a fairly significant female character.)

This is the one that completely cracks me up, for the dog:
Re - gu - ho - o - n
The ONLY thing I've been able to get out of that is Leghorn, a la Foghorn Leghorn from Looney Tunes. @_@;;

Given that she named Riff after Riff Raff in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I would not put ANYTHING past this woman in terms of character names, but I thought I'd ask and see if anyone else had guesses...

[tenjou_sama]

Ahhh, the story is that good?? I can't wait to read it [img]biggrin.gif[/img] [img]biggrin.gif[/img]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#ffffff"><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Ellone, Ellorne, and Eluone</font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>

That makes me think of the name Ellen XD

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#ffffff"><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Leghorn </font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>

O_o What an interesting name...the 'leg' part makes me think of Legato from Trigun XD

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#ffffff"><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Yayyy, more Blood Hound in 10 years... </font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hehe...you're so cruel Crisis T_T

I wish I knew what Kaori's address is, so I could write her a big long letter about how much I love her works. ^_____^ I'll have to go see if I can find it.

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ June 12, 2003 11:01 AM: Message edited by: Carole Ann ]</font>

[Risu-chan]

Paid my bills, been doing online research for detail points... ^^;;;;

The male lead's name, Suou, is an incredibly detail-rich word. It's the name of a color (and dye) and of a tree and of a very old Heian-era concept of color-layering when matching kimono layers in the juu-ni hitoe style. And the color is dark dark red with a brownish tinge, which looks exactly like dried blood. And the tree is called the Judas tree in English (Cercis siliquastrum in Latin) presumably because of its associations with that dried-blood color. The kanji for Suou mean "resurrection's fragrance." Normally when used as a name it's given a different pronunciation, but I'm sure Kaori Yuki did it this way in order to call in the blood and death and life-after-death connotations associated with the color and the history... and it seems like an insanely appropriate vampire name to me. ^^;;;

Can I write up a big ol' translator's note section to go in front of it? Because the word gets used extensively both to refer to the character by name and to refer to the shade of the color in association with both blood and roses, and while in English you'd have to make the distinction between (say) "sanguine" (describing the shade of the color) and "Suou's color" (color belonging to the person given that name), in Japanese it's one and the same and any instance of it calls up both images and I just cannot do that in English without renaming the character in the translation, which I refuse to do. ^^;;;

I really ought to go sleep. I really ought to. I'm still getting over jet lag and a really nasty cold and I have to go to work. Why am I dismally certain I'm not going to have the sense to shut down the computer and am instead going to go translate some more? WHY do I have this suicidal tendency to do things that I know are stupid just because I also really want to have them done and be able to show them to people and stuff?

oh well... off to see whether common sense or mad otaku-girl passion wins the night... ^^;;;;

God it's pathetic that I'm almost 30 years old and writing that phrase about a night of sitting alone in my apartment with a book instead of sitting with a sexy significant other... ;_; anyhow...

[Lady Elanor]

I think the first name is "Alone". I'm sure that the first letter has to be an english A because the japanese E is spoken like an english A. Kaori Yuki often chooses strange names to her Chars, for exempel Kaine, Die, Sin and so on...

@R?su-chan: You shouldn't work so much when you are ill. [img]wink.gif[/img]

@Carole: If you find it, please tell me! I wanna write her a letter too!

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ June 12, 2003 01:56 PM: Message edited by: Lady Elanor ]</font>

[Shia]

uhm.. I'm not a specialist when it comes to this japanese english.. but the first one also sounds like "Ellen" in my ears.
(though I think "alone" also has to be written something like e-ru-o-o-n... so elanor's thought isn't a bad one..)

reguhoon leaves me puzzled.. I guess Leghorn could be it then.. (but wouldn't that rather be something like re-gu-ho-ru-n? sorry, might be mistaken on that one... [img]frown.gif[/img] )

guess that wasn't much of help ^^;;

[rev.tsukiyama]

As for leghorn - perhaps a very mangled 'Reagan'? I bet Yuki K's an Exorcist fan.

:shrugs:

[Risu-chan]

^^;; Thanks for the guesses, guys -- I think I need to give a few more details about Japanese orthography...

Ellen would actually be very easy to write in katakana, since n is the only consonant allowed to exist by itself; it'd be e-re-n.

The ne used in the instance of e-ru-o-o-ne has the E pronounced as well, unlike the English would be. It's the same syllable that you get at the beginning of the word negai. It's not just the n sound by itself.

So it kind of rules out alone too, since that also has a silent E. Also, English-style long As are usually written in Japanese as ei -- i.e. the name Amy in an English-speaker's accent, given a Japanese spelling, would be Eimi; Emi would sound more like the name Emmy...

Reagan...? I'm pretty sure that would be re-e-ga-n in katakana... ^^;;;

@Elanor: thanks! ^^;;; I called in sick to work and fell asleep about 6 a.m. and woke up about 10 minutes ago, which is about 7 p.m., which means apparently my brain really REALLY wants to be back on Osaka time or something. @_@ I'm so looking forward to getting my brain chemistry unscrambled... I really am going to try to be both awake and coherent long enough to write email soon, honest...!

[Risu-chan]

oops, browser hung, had to hit reload, and it reposted...

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ June 12, 2003 08:09 PM: Message edited by: Risu-chan ]</font>

[Lady Elanor]

@Risu-chan: Ah I understand. In this case I'd tendend to Ellone. The second name is still a mystery.
What I wanna ask: Is this story placed in Japan?

I'm waiting for your eMail but don't stress yourself. [img]biggrin.gif[/img]

[tenjou_sama]

I'll do the editing. [img]biggrin.gif[/img] I have plenty of time to do it XD You can send me what you have finished if you really want. Or if you just want to wait until Sunday, that's fine.

Sure, sure! I can give you a zipped version of the files. I'll just have to resize them since I scanned them at a reallllly high resolution (all together they're 202MB XD) and change them from .png to .gif. Shouldn't take me too long.