![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
GetBackers translation note, pedantic
So recently I figured out where "Rouran" was. My mother was watching a drama set in the Han Dynasty, and one of the female characters was a princess of Loulan. So I said, where's Loulan? And was told it was an old name for Xinjiang, which upon research was half right. It's a ruined city that lies in Xinjiang, between Kazakstan and Mongolia. (map)
Loulan, capital of the Loulan (Kroraina) Kingdom, was a small, prosperous commercial city on the famous Silk Road about 2,000 years ago... until it was mysteriously swallowed by the desert.
There's controversy over what happened to the Loulan civilisation, I think, similar to that over the Minoans. I suppose the GB backstory is that they picked up and left when the desert encroached, becoming the Chinese equivalent of the Romany. XD Or, well, any one of the nomadic tribes of the region: they were Caucasian, like the Uighurs or the Kazakhs, not ethnic Chinese.
The sense of major accomplishment in which I'm currently basking derives from the fact that I know what language Emishi's attacks come in now. The "robu no ruu" whatever furigana that bore no resemblance to the character pronunciations in Japanese or Chinese? Mongolian. It actually starts off "lop nur", like the name of the lake - it means "wandering", which in the case of the lake is due to the fact that it's not so much a lake as patches of salt marshes that expand and shrink. In the case of Emishi I suppose it means "wandering hither and to, pleasing only myself". The Chinese characters used to write that part of the attack are 彷徨 (pang2huang2), which actually has more the sense of "wandering about in circles like a headless chicken" but maybe the meaning's shifted a bit in Japanese. Or, yanno, Emishi.
Once again I don't know if I want to shake Aoki Yuuya's hand or beat him with a baseball bat.
Loulan, capital of the Loulan (Kroraina) Kingdom, was a small, prosperous commercial city on the famous Silk Road about 2,000 years ago... until it was mysteriously swallowed by the desert.
There's controversy over what happened to the Loulan civilisation, I think, similar to that over the Minoans. I suppose the GB backstory is that they picked up and left when the desert encroached, becoming the Chinese equivalent of the Romany. XD Or, well, any one of the nomadic tribes of the region: they were Caucasian, like the Uighurs or the Kazakhs, not ethnic Chinese.
The sense of major accomplishment in which I'm currently basking derives from the fact that I know what language Emishi's attacks come in now. The "robu no ruu" whatever furigana that bore no resemblance to the character pronunciations in Japanese or Chinese? Mongolian. It actually starts off "lop nur", like the name of the lake - it means "wandering", which in the case of the lake is due to the fact that it's not so much a lake as patches of salt marshes that expand and shrink. In the case of Emishi I suppose it means "wandering hither and to, pleasing only myself". The Chinese characters used to write that part of the attack are 彷徨 (pang2huang2), which actually has more the sense of "wandering about in circles like a headless chicken" but maybe the meaning's shifted a bit in Japanese. Or, yanno, Emishi.
Once again I don't know if I want to shake Aoki Yuuya's hand or beat him with a baseball bat.
no subject
I mean, it helps quite a bit that I'm taking a course on Travel on the Silk Road, and so I've just been reading Sven Hedin's autobiography, in which he describes finding Loulan, but. Damn, that's cool. (btw, Hedin's book reads like an adventure novel: it's a total trip.)
Wow. And Aoki Yuuya just decided to throw that in? I'm all for shaking his hand. Or hugging him and telling him how damn cool that amount of detail is.
Also, the desert that swallowed Loulan? So nasty. Really damn dangerous place, even now. *total tangent*
no subject
I'm more for shaking his hand too, but seriously, when I was translating that chapter I went nuts trying to figure out what was going on with that furigana. :P
Yeah, it's dangerous. There was a famous Chinese archaeologist who died around Lop Nur in the seventies, apparently.
no subject
I can only imagine how frustrating that must have been to translate. I get to sit back and go "oh, how awesome!" once you've done all the work of figuring it out. :P
Hedin almost died, too. It's a fantastic chapter. :D And my prof. got stranded around the edges of the desert a few years back and was eventually rescued by some guys and their donkey cart. We were amused by that story.