Which, kind of makes a bit of sense, given that their language has things other than quotations to denote emphasis.
Wow, this is quite informative. Thank you.
dowolf posted...
SovietOmega's links more or less answer the question. The answer is no, finger quotes are most definitely not a thing in Japanese. If you're referring to the animation I'm thinking of (I might not be thinking of it--I last played the game back in 2013 or something), I always thought he was doing a little picture-frame thing.
But to quickly dive into things in a bit more detail: There's two reasons quotes are used for purposes other than, err, quoting in Japanese. First, as you probably know, Japanese is written with no spaces. So then, how do you know where the word boundaries are? I don't know if I can give you a short answer (other than "git gud baka gaijin"), but basically you use pattern recognition, the knowledge that kanji usually start terms, etc. However, this means that identifying fictional terms -- that is, new terms -- can be extremely tricky. Therefore, authors will on occasion use quotes to offset a term to make it easier for their readers to parse.
Also, as a fun experiment, try reading a sentence written in all-caps with no spaces. It messes with how your mind processes the text, forcing it to read English in the streaming, greedy manner that it reads Japanese rather than the "normal" way to read English (i.e., to grab the first and last letters and then all the ones in the middle all at once). It's kinda neat! And as an aside to an aside: yeah, the brain processes ideographic (i.e. kanji-based) languages like Japanese in a fundamentally different way than it does an alphabetic language like English. Because of this, you get cool things like that someone dyslexic in English may be perfectly able to read Japanese, and vice-versa. But I digress.
The second reason is for emphasis. Japanese characters, with their increased complexity relative to English characters, don't lend themselves to bold or italic or ALLCAPS or even BOLDTASTIC CAPS adventures. Marking them with quotation marks serves this purpose instead. You'll also see texts (usually manga) where dots are placed over certain words; this works the same way.
So the next time you're playing an RPG and you're wondering why some "key term" keeps getting put in quotation marks, now you know. This is actually one of the things I consider a strong mark of amateurish translations, but that's neither here nor there.
This even more so. Never knew any of this. You guys are great. ---
FC 5026-4424-6331 -- Native Vivillon type: Polar Still need Marine, Sun, Icy Snow, Monsoon, River, and Jungle