Fullmetal Alchemist
This post is about understanding some children's literature. I was originally going to start translating my copy of Dune but it didn't have baby-mode Kanji so I'd have to do a lot of extra sleuthing just to get the Japanese on this page. It was surprisingly difficult to find the Japanese raws of the anything but maybe its because I was googling in English. Fullmetal alchemist was one of my first manga to read and is helpfully aimed at young children so shouldn't be too hard to understand.
Panel 1
In this panel Ed is shouting to elude to something going wrong. In Japanese he shouts "アル! アルフォンス!", his brother's name in Katakana (trivial). There is a smaller bubble with "...ル" giving the idea of the shouts fading in. Weirdly in the English translation they do the elipsis but then say Al! in full but I guess just going "...L!" doesn't make a huge amount of sense.
Next up he says "くそ！ こんなことが あって たまるか！" (I am ignoring Kanji for now because I don't know it and the page is super low res).
くそ is a curse word that is usually shown meaning "damn" although it seems to be pretty transient - also listed meaning bullshit, shit, feces, excrement, and google translate says it means "fuck". Either way he's too young to be using this kind of language.
こんな is used before nouns to describe the way it is, similar to "like this" or "this kind of" in English, with "this" being something close to the speaker. It has the same formatting as Kore, Sore and Are, where you can say "like that" or "like that over there" with Sonna and Anna.
こと means thing (thanks for teaching me this last week maxim!).
が is the particle indicating the previous noun is the subject of the upcoming phrase
あって is the -て form of the verb ある, meaning to be/to exist. There is another verb that means this, いる, however they are not interchangeable - いる is usually used to mean animate objects whereas ある is used for inanimate objects or more abstract objects. When paired with こと it usually means some sort of experience or event that's happened. The て form of the verb is used to make it be happening, as well as to connect it to the next clause.
たまるか vexes me. It is reportedly a "set phrase" for a strong denial, like "no way!" or "impossible!". The initial verb たまる means "to gather/accumulate" but can also be used to mean "to bear/endure". Adding the か turns it into a rhetorical question or an emphatic denial, similarly to being sarcastic in English, to be like "Could I endure this?" with the implied answer being "No way"/"Impossible".
Putting all of this together gets you a vaguely bastardised "damn, its impossible an event like this could be happening" but there are probably several ways to interpret it - evidenced by the official translation making it a real question not a rhetorical so it flows better. They also add an extra "Damn" for good measure.
Panel 2
Next up we get Ed reflecting on his poor decisions with "こんな... こんなはずじゃ... ちくしょォ"
こんな see above
はず can mean lots of things like "doubtless", "probably", "should", "ought", "must" and other similar words to mean you think something is obliged to be a certain way
じゃ is usually translated as "well then" or "so" and similar, and is the casual form of では
While this does look like it means "this is how it is supposed to be" and when I put the phrase in google translate it also says that it has been translated to be "it wasn't supposed to be like this". If you put the extra こんな... into google translate it also turns it into "This... this isn't how it should be". I would guess that じゃ is just an insanely loaded phrase. This is one for a future post perhaps.
- ちくしょォ is a bit funky because of the Katakana ォ at the end. ちくしょ means "damn it", but with the elongated sound brought in by the ォ it sort of makes it more emphasised. If the word was written in Katakana it would be elongated using a length marker "ー" but as the word was written in Hiragana it instead uses the Katakana ォ.
So it works out to "this... this isn't how it was supposed to be... damn it...".
I have emailed Cheiko-sensei to find out her thoughts.
Wow she replied quick. She says "じゃ(なかった) the part in brackets is omitted." I think she means that he just doesn't reach the end of his sentence rather than you can change the meaning but I have emailed again to make sure.
じゃなかった is like じゃない but past tense, so it does make sense that that is what it was supposed to be.
Ok she has replied again and says that he just didn't finish saying the whole word and this often happens. Hooray! This does not entirely explain why google translate was able to discern the correct meaning. Maybe I will look back on these days and laugh.
Next week I will continue with the later bits of text.
Text 1
Panel 3
Text 2
