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Talk:Dr. Latency's Freak Report: Difference between revisions

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I ended up writing a lot of text, but I propose that the title be translated as "An Instant Longer than Plack Time" or something to that effect. This is based on interpreting 須臾 as 'instant (i.e. femtosecond)' and プランク as 'Planck time'. [[User:Biggest Dreamer|Biggest Dreamer]] ([[User talk:Biggest Dreamer|talk]]) 01:21, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
I ended up writing a lot of text, but I propose that the title be translated as "An Instant Longer than Plack Time" or something to that effect. This is based on interpreting 須臾 as 'instant (i.e. femtosecond)' and プランク as 'Planck time'. [[User:Biggest Dreamer|Biggest Dreamer]] ([[User talk:Biggest Dreamer|talk]]) 01:21, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
::I think it doesn’t imply “longer” or “shorter”. It’s a combination of a strict science (exact measurement) and a more metaphysical concept (the “instant”), that’s why I propose “An Instant Goes Beyond Planck’s Time”, as instant is not a measurable time length—[[User:Yamaxandu|Yamaxandu]] ([[User talk:Yamaxandu|talk]]) 05:06, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Revision as of 05:06, 21 April 2019

Translation of First Track

他愛も無い二人の博物誌 is currently being translated as "The Childlike Duo's Historical Publication". But my idea is that it should be "The Childlike Duo's Natural History".
博物誌 is Japanese translation of "Natural History" (both the books of Pliny the Elder & of Buffon), while the same word is also that of one of the fields of study. I think they did their best to collect objects of nature and to observe them. The "nature", I mean it for "the field without human's artification". Their ultimate goal was to record the whole world (including very rare or almost unseen things) without human's effect and create the database. Their plan was collection, not effective/scientific classification.
On the other hand, Renko and Merry are making their doujinshi of Merry's witnesses, of the record of Gensokyo things. The recorded topics aren't critically identified or well-classified, since the objects (youkai) are going to die when humans observe or conceive them well. You know, the insistence of the two will be suspected. On this point, their attempt should be similar to Pliny's & Buffon's.
What I want to say is that English word "Natural History" should be better. You should also know that the subtitle of the music is "Our Supernatural History". --03:14, 2 June 2016 (UTC)masuo64 Talk

This is good reasoning, but I feel that the phrase "Natural History" would make people think of the field instead of the book. For that reason, I think using the original Latin title of the book would make the reference clearer at first glance. NForza (talk) 15:50, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Planck

I think that the updated translation of 須臾はプランクを超えて does not reflect the spirit of the original text, so I did some more research and have compiled it below.

My first concern is with the interpretation of the particle は. From my experience, this particle isn't used to indicate the time during which an activity happens, which makes the new translation feel quite odd to me. It has other uses, like marking what comes before it as a target for description, but I don't think that marking the time period during which an action takes place is one of them. Please let me know if there are any resources or example sentences that support that interpretation.

In addition to this, the kanji used (超) has a different meaning to (越). My JP-JP dictionary lists the following for 超えて: 「越」は、境界を過ぎる意のほか一般的表記としても広く使う。「超」は、一定の分量や基準を上回る意に使う。 This makes it clear that 超 is used for indicating that something 'crosses over' a defined value. This makes the current translation impossible. The kanji would need to be 越.

The second question is as follows: What does 須臾 mean, and what does プランク mean? The only clue we have is the English subtitle of the song, "Very Very Short Time". One Japanese interpretation links 須臾 to cetain things said by Toyohime, Akyuu, and Kaguya. They refer to it as a unit of time so small it cannot be measured. Indeed, definitions of this word make it clear that 須臾 is not just a generic word for a really short period of time, but it is actually a unit of measurement. It's used to refer to a Femtosecond, which is 10−15 or 1/1,000,000,000,000,000 of a second. Apparently this isn't what Japanese people normally think of when they see the word, but it gives us a clear frame of reference for comparison.

Because of this, I think that the title should be read as 須臾は[プランクを超えて] where the bracketed part is describing 須臾.

So what does that mean for Planck? Apparently one way of expressing Planck time is tp = 5.39 × 10-44 s (formatting probably didn't carry over correctly). I'm not a maths whiz, but maybe there's a way of interpreting this in the context of the title? I tried comparing the two units of measurement using Google, and apparently 1 femtosecond is equal to 1.855e+28 Planck time.

In that sense, you could say that 1 femtosecond is longer than Planck time, so the title is a true statement. I think our original translation (The Instant is Shorter than Planck Time) was the closest to reflecting this. We just didn't make the connection between 須臾 and femtoseconds so ended up with the wrong translation of 超えて.

I ended up writing a lot of text, but I propose that the title be translated as "An Instant Longer than Plack Time" or something to that effect. This is based on interpreting 須臾 as 'instant (i.e. femtosecond)' and プランク as 'Planck time'. Biggest Dreamer (talk) 01:21, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

I think it doesn’t imply “longer” or “shorter”. It’s a combination of a strict science (exact measurement) and a more metaphysical concept (the “instant”), that’s why I propose “An Instant Goes Beyond Planck’s Time”, as instant is not a measurable time length—Yamaxandu (talk) 05:06, 21 April 2019 (UTC)