Koko Wa Greenwood
"Here is Greenwood"



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This movie clip shows a good example of the problems involved in translation
between Japanese and English. The conversation between the four schoolboys
uses many puns in Japanese which cannot be accurately translated into English
without further explanation. When the lavender-haired boy quips, "You'd probably
call a panda 'danpa'," American viewers may wonder why he didn't say "dapan" instead,
since the boys seem to be simply switching syllables around. In Japanese, however, words
are written in the kana system, which is basically syllabic: panda would thus be written in three
characters that have the following sounds: (pa - n - da)
The "n" sound in the middle is associated with the character to the left and is not pronounced by itself.
Thus, reversing the order of syllables in Japanese would indeed result in the word "danpa", rather than the
American way (using discrete letters), which would result in "dapan."