7:48pm — My colleague with the baby talks about sending the baby to day care when she’s ready to go back to work. There is no discussion of her husband taking time off to split taking care of the baby.
This is often true not because of gender roles in the family, but because of gender roles in the work place (which are just as, if not more, pervasive); there are many companies which offer maternity leave but not paternity leave. Even if both parents would prefer to have the man take time off to take care of the baby, it's frequently just not possible.
11:40am — Read [info]rosalarian’s entry about how in the professional American release of CLAMP’s series Wish, one of the characters who had been translated as male in other translations is now translated as female. (People who know more CLAMP than I, what’s the deal with this?)
Okay. The character whose gender was changed, Kohaku, is one of the main characters. Kohaku was translated as male in fan translations. In the French translation, which was actually my first exposure to the series, Kohaku was translated both ways, carefully alternating; I suspect this may have been the way the original was, but I'm not sure.
Either way, Kohaku is clearly meant to be of ambiguous gender, and is extremely girly in all the traditional ways. Frankly, I can understand translators who are told "pick one" picking female. Kohaku looks female, acts girly and housewife-ish, dresses in women's clothing, is wider at the hips than at the shoulders, and talks about being someone's wife (the only gendered term Kohaku ever uses about him/her/itself, I believe - but it's been a long time since I read it, so I could be wrong).
I personally find Wish much more problematic in that the main message of the series is that horrible things happen to people for no reason, but that's okay, because it's all part of God's Plan, and the fact that there is a plan should be enough to make us accept both the horrible things and the fact that we will never understand any of said Plan, and we should all just submit to the will and Plan of God if we want to be happy and serene.
*snarl* I hate that series.
Anyway. I can see why the translators did what they did; the fan translators were shounen-ai fans, so they picked male. The Tokyopop translators weren't, so they went with what Kohaku "looked like." I like what the French translators did, and at some point, if I can stand to read it again, I'd like to take a look at the Japanese.
no subject
7:48pm — My colleague with the baby talks about sending the baby to day care when she’s ready to go back to work. There is no discussion of her husband taking time off to split taking care of the baby.
This is often true not because of gender roles in the family, but because of gender roles in the work place (which are just as, if not more, pervasive); there are many companies which offer maternity leave but not paternity leave. Even if both parents would prefer to have the man take time off to take care of the baby, it's frequently just not possible.
11:40am — Read [info]rosalarian’s entry about how in the professional American release of CLAMP’s series Wish, one of the characters who had been translated as male in other translations is now translated as female. (People who know more CLAMP than I, what’s the deal with this?)
Okay. The character whose gender was changed, Kohaku, is one of the main characters. Kohaku was translated as male in fan translations. In the French translation, which was actually my first exposure to the series, Kohaku was translated both ways, carefully alternating; I suspect this may have been the way the original was, but I'm not sure.
Either way, Kohaku is clearly meant to be of ambiguous gender, and is extremely girly in all the traditional ways. Frankly, I can understand translators who are told "pick one" picking female. Kohaku looks female, acts girly and housewife-ish, dresses in women's clothing, is wider at the hips than at the shoulders, and talks about being someone's wife (the only gendered term Kohaku ever uses about him/her/itself, I believe - but it's been a long time since I read it, so I could be wrong).
I personally find Wish much more problematic in that the main message of the series is that horrible things happen to people for no reason, but that's okay, because it's all part of God's Plan, and the fact that there is a plan should be enough to make us accept both the horrible things and the fact that we will never understand any of said Plan, and we should all just submit to the will and Plan of God if we want to be happy and serene.
*snarl* I hate that series.
Anyway. I can see why the translators did what they did; the fan translators were shounen-ai fans, so they picked male. The Tokyopop translators weren't, so they went with what Kohaku "looked like." I like what the French translators did, and at some point, if I can stand to read it again, I'd like to take a look at the Japanese.