Afterword
Hello, everyone. My name is Sōshun. Thank you very much for reading "Singularity". I hope you enjoyed it. Usually, I write an afterword in Japanese once I finish posting the entire story. However, since the story is written in English, and I assume that the readers are also fluent in English, I will write it in English as well.
First of all, this is just my guess, but I think the majority of readers of this story are bilingual, like me, which means they are fluent in both English and Japanese. I don't think any of you can read only English, because otherwise it would be extremely difficult to even find my story on this website, which everything is entirely written in Japanese. So I'm pretty sure that most of you have already read the Japanese version of "Singularity" before, or at least have known my previous stories in general.
If there are those of you who don't understand English much, but decided to read this story, just because you have been reading my stories for a long time, I would shed tears with deep emotion. Thank you very much. I hope I didn't make you struggle too much to read. Do not offend English, because the language has nothing to do with it. It's just because my way of writing is complicated.
Anyway, regardless of how you found my story, I would like to show full gratitude to you all for reading this far. To be honest, I was anxious when I started posting the story weekly, because I knew that the target audience of this website is Japanese people who enjoy reading literature in Japanese. However, I was glad to see people reading the chapters every week. I hope my story didn't take up much of your leisure time, right? I feel sorry if you were reading every chapter using a dictionary or a translator.
Let's stop the greeting around here and move on to the main topic. Because this is just a translated version of what I have previously written, I will not talk about what makes me write this story or what message I wanted to tell you. I wrote that in the 『あとがき』in 『シンギュラリティ』, so go check that out if you haven't done so. Instead, I would like to focus on why I decided to translate the story and what challenges I faced while translating it.
So, I was thinking of translating my stories from long before. I don't know whether I told you this in my autobiography, but actually, the first story I wrote was in English. It was when I was in grade 6 that I was impressed by the rhetoric of the Japanese literature by Shinichi Hoshi. Inspired by him, I wanted to make my story as well, but because I didn't study Japanese for three years prior to that, I started by creating a story in English. It wasn't an entirely original story, but it was actually a translation of "The Chronicles of Narnia". I still remember that I translated the third series of it, because that is what I was reading in Japanese at that time. I typed up the story on the school's laptop, printed it out, and put it in my portfolio. I don't know whether the teacher back then read my story or not, but I feel bad for her, because I knew that it should be difficult to read, as my English was very poor back then. Since then, I changed to write Japanese stories; however, there was still a part of me that wanted to take revenge of writing a story in English someday.
If I remember correctly, it was my fourth year in university when I worked on "Singularity". I chose this story just because I feel deeply attached to it the most, compared to the other stories I wrote. I did the translation during the summer vacation, so I should say I already finished my history diploma, and it was right before the 11-month Teacher Education Program began. I went to the Asian Library (where you could find a variety of Asia-related books) to work on it. Since I wasn't making the story from scratch, it took less time than I expected. I think I translated around five chapters per day.
Sorry for disappointing you, but I used a translator to do this. Unfortunately, my English is not as good as Japanese, especially in this kind of non-academic situation. I'm pretty confident that I know more English words if it is specific terminology that you learn in school. But in terms of general conversation, I would say Japanese is still better, and I have more variety in Japanese in terms of grammatical structures, which is a crucial part of expressions. What you are reading now is my actual English level, and how I formulate sentences without using a translator. However, I didn't just type the entire story into the translator. I read over each sentence carefully, comparing it with the original Japanese version, and made adjustments to the best of my ability, where I felt the translation was something off. I was hoping that by working on the translation, it could contribute to the improvement of my English level, but I guess it didn't have much effect on me. As I translated the story, I made a few changes to the original Japanese version as well, if you noticed. I didn't change it dramatically; I just changed some of the expressions, or added or reduced a few sentences, that I found contradictory.
Even though the majority of the terms in Japanese also exist in English, some of them provide different kinds of impressions. For example, one thing I changed entirely is the word "試練". It can be translated as ordeal or trial, but I used "試練" in Japanese as something people struggle to overcome; however, in my opinion, ordeal or trial has the meaning of a mastermind giving ordinary people hardship and pain. Do you see the difference? The Japanese one focuses on the people given the challenge, while the English ones focus on the existence of the person behind the scenes. Also, the Japanese one gives me the impression that the people desire and try to overcome, but the English ones do not include that kind of emotion. Maybe this is just my subjective interpretation, but because I felt they are slightly different, what I did was I changed all "試練" into "実験" and translated it as "experiment".
There are three more things that I want to tell you that I struggled with when I worked on the translation. This is completely my opinion, so you may argue, but I felt like the Japanese have more repertoire in the rhetoric, which adds more depth to the so-called beauty of the literature. The first thing I found difficult was the onomatopoeia. Although both alphabets and hiragana are phonograms, I thought hiragana has more variety in onomatopoeia and has more freedom in terms of coming up with a new representation of sound. Moreover, because I still don't know how English speakers transcribe what they hear, I really had a hard time translating those words.
The second point is something I felt was inconvenient when translating a sentence in English. Japanese is known as a very high-context language. I don't know whether it is one of the most complex languages in the entire world, but I'm confident that it is more context-dependent than English. That means, although there is a sentence that tells a general meaning, we can make a wide variety of adjustments depending on the context. The general meaning remains the same, but the details, such as the relationship between the speaker and the receiver, how the speaker feels at that time, and what the speaker truly wants to convey, differ. Because of those characteristics, Japanese is more flexible in terms of its sentence order and has more kinds of grammatical structure. That makes me think that Japanese literature is deep, and I would like to imitate it as well.
Nevertheless, one of the things that Japanese can do, but English cannot do, is the removal of who the speaker is talking to and who he or she is referring to. I just demonstrated the dilemma that I had in this previous sentence. If I translate that sentence into Japanese, it would be like this: 日本語にできて英語にできないことの一つは、誰に向けて話しているのかと誰のことを指しているのかを省略できる点だ。. As you see, in Japanese, it still sounds natural even though I didn't include "the speaker". I felt that every time adding "you", "he", or "she" restricted the creation of complicated sentences. In addition to that, as I used in the English sentence above, I have to use "he or she" when referring to someone whose gender is unknown. This problem was especially prominent when referring to Suguru Anzai. Suguru sounds like a male first name, but I did not specify until Minami was the culprit. Of course, she is a female character, so it should be grammatically accurate that the characters call Suguru Anzai, "her". However, it would be too obvious if I used that kind of expression, meaning it reduces the audience's excitement of figuring out who the culprit is. What's more, the characters should not know the gender of Suguru Anzai until the end. That is why I had to use "he or she", or use "the culprit" or "the criminal" instead.
Last but not least, I had to add more narrations in the English version. This relates back to the fact that Japanese is a more high-context language. Japanese is famous for having a variety of sayings for "I". For example, "僕", "私", "あたい", "拙者", "小生", "某", etc. These different representations of "I" could convey a certain personality of the character, right? The same goes for how the characters' lines end, such as "だね", "だぜ", "ですぜ", "でっせ", "だよネ", etc. Those expressions represent the identity of the characters and allow us to distinguish them. However, because in English they don't have those things, it would be difficult to identify whose speech it is. So, I had to add a narration after or before the line to clarify which line belongs to whom.
In summary, those are some of the challenges I faced while working on this story. It was my first time doing this kind of work authentically, so it took more time than I expected initially. Especially when I'm revising, I always feel tired of checking and correcting sentence by sentence.
This is just an excuse, but as you know, I'm not a native English speaker, and my occupation is not a translator. I'm fully aware that there are a lot of times when you, readers, have trouble following along the story. Personally, I suffered of finding a way to distinguish the lines that were already mentioned in the past, and the character looks back, and the lines that were said at present. In Japanese, I used 「」for the present lines and "" for the past. But because in English, we use quotation marks in quotes, I had to deliberately make spaces in between the lines or scenes to show that they were in a different timeline.
Nevertheless, since I lack experience reading novels in English, and I'm more familiar with persuasive writing, it was difficult for me to write sentences in a narrative form. I sometimes watch Japanese anime with English subtitles on, and that's about it in terms of my knowledge and experience with translation. So, I know myself that the quality of this story was poor, but if you are looking forward to it, I may translate another story in the future.
Again, I sincerely appreciate all your support. I'm willing to get any comments or evaluations you may want to give me. Also, my newest Japanese story, 『新・創世紀』is going on weekly, so if you don't mind, please check that out as well.
みなさん、お久しぶりです。いかがお過ごしですか。前記で申しました通り、改めましてここまでお付き合いくださり、誠にありがとうございます。これにて『Singularity』は完結となります。
一つ、個人的に嬉しいご報告があるのですが、この度これまで投稿した物語の中で、なぜか一番好評だった自伝、『20年の軌跡、現在、そして行く末』を一旦終了とさせてから一年が経過致しましたので、続編を近日投稿することをここに宣言いたします。結婚報告などの人生の転換期とかでなくて申し訳ありません。
もうすでに題名は決定いたしました。その名も『灯火の記録』です。「灯火」は慣用句、「風前の灯火」から拝借しました。人生は風の前の蝋燭の火に等しく、いつ途絶えてもおかしくない、儚いものである。悲観主義者を自認している私が、人生は有限であることを自覚しているからこそ、常日頃変化する今の状態や心境を大事にし、将来のために記しておきたい、という思いを込めました。
今の所一年分、切り刻めば二年はストックが持つと思うので、もう少ししたら、投稿を始めようと思っています。心待ちにしていた方々、大変お待たせいたしました。投稿は毎週月曜日の朝六時ですが、具体的な投稿開始日は、『新・創世記』にて追ってご報告しようと思っています。ちなみに『新・創世記』は、R18の年齢制限を設けていますので、『小説家になろう』・『小説を読もう』からは検索できません。詳しくは私の作品、どれでもいいので探していただき、私の名前（蒼蕣）をクリック、そしてマイページの活動報告欄に記載がありますので、そちらをご参照ください。
それでは、またいずれ。あ、新社会人や新入生の方々、新しい環境で戸惑うことはありましょうが、精一杯頑張ってください。私はここから、当たり障りのない単調な意見を発することしかできませんが、皆様の周りには頼れる、信じられる存在がいるはずなので、一人で抱え込まずに彼らに頼ってみてはいかがですか。きっと力になってくれるでしょう。
