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INTEREST: Swedish Woman Voices Her Own Manga About Living in Japan in Motion Comic




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samuelp
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Joined: 25 Nov 2007
Posts: 2233
Location: San Antonio, USA
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2015 7:23 pm Reply with quote
That's totally adorable. But why is her name spelled オーサ (O-sa) in katakana when it is spelled Asa in roman letters? Is that some Swedish pronunciation thing?
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lys



Joined: 24 Jun 2004
Posts: 1010
Location: mitten-state
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2015 8:02 pm Reply with quote
(any Swedes reading this, please forgive my ignorance :) ) I tried plugging "Asa" into Google translate and selecting Swedish for the language, since it has a little spoken-sample you can hear for whatever you put in. According to the sample, the first "A" sound is a bit more like "aw" than "ah." (similar sound to "author" maybe?)

edit: Actually, from the artist's website, her name is written Åsa, and the Å is definitely (according to Google) an オ sound rather than ア.
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here-and-faraway



Joined: 21 Jun 2007
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Location: Sunny California
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2015 9:06 pm Reply with quote
Adorable! She's very talented.

And she's living pretty much every non-Japanese otaku's dream... to move to Japan and create a successful manga.
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Wandering Samurai



Joined: 30 Mar 2014
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Location: USA
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2015 9:56 pm Reply with quote
Her pronunciation was excellent and the voice crew for that video did an excellent job. At least she is doing what she wants to do, times will be tough at the beginning and as she trudges through she will get even more where she wants to be. Good luck to her.
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Ferax



Joined: 22 Nov 2014
Posts: 31
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2015 10:09 pm Reply with quote
she's living the dream
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Northlander



Joined: 10 Feb 2009
Posts: 901
PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2015 4:03 am Reply with quote
lys wrote:
(any Swedes reading this, please forgive my ignorance Smile ) I tried plugging "Asa" into Google translate and selecting Swedish for the language, since it has a little spoken-sample you can hear for whatever you put in. According to the sample, the first "A" sound is a bit more like "aw" than "ah." (similar sound to "author" maybe?)

edit: Actually, from the artist's website, her name is written Åsa, and the Å is definitely (according to Google) an オ sound rather than ア.

It's always a bit problematic for Scandinavians to incorporate Scandinavian-specific letters in a foreign language, especially when we kind of have to if they're used in our names.
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Sparvid



Joined: 06 Oct 2009
Posts: 240
PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2015 5:06 am Reply with quote
Yes, Åsa and オーサ are pronounced the same way.

Much more practical than me doubling the syllables of my name...
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Hameyadea



Joined: 23 Jun 2014
Posts: 3679
PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2015 5:41 am Reply with quote
lys wrote:
(any Swedes reading this, please forgive my ignorance Smile ) I tried plugging "Asa" into Google translate and selecting Swedish for the language, since it has a little spoken-sample you can hear for whatever you put in. According to the sample, the first "A" sound is a bit more like "aw" than "ah." (similar sound to "author" maybe?)

edit: Actually, from the artist's website, her name is written Åsa, and the Å is definitely (according to Google) an オ sound rather than ア.


Writing foreign names in Japanese can be a bit odd, like U.S.S.R.'s Premier in the early 60's, Nikita Khrushchev [ニキータ・フルシチョフ (Nikīta· Furushichofu)], or the Premier in the in 30's, Vyacheslav Molotov [ヴャチェスラフ・モロトフ (Vu~yachesurafu· morotofu)].
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mewpudding101
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Joined: 07 Apr 2009
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Location: Tokyo, Japan
PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2015 5:45 am Reply with quote
Wandering Samurai wrote:
Her pronunciation was excellent and the voice crew for that video did an excellent job. At least she is doing what she wants to do, times will be tough at the beginning and as she trudges through she will get even more where she wants to be. Good luck to her.


Her accent was pretty off, but at least it was understandable. I do wish her the best.
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vonPeterhof



Joined: 10 Nov 2014
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PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2015 8:38 am Reply with quote
Hameyadea wrote:

Writing foreign names in Japanese can be a bit odd, like U.S.S.R.'s Premier in the early 60's, Nikita Khrushchev [ニキータ・フルシチョフ (Nikīta· Furushichofu)], or the Premier in the in 30's, Vyacheslav Molotov [ヴャチェスラフ・モロトフ (Vu~yachesurafu· morotofu)].
Well, I'm a native Russian speaker who understands Japanese and I see nothing odd about those transliterations (admittedly, they'd be hilarious to Russian speakers with no prior experience of Japanese pronunciation). The reason why Khrushchev's name looks so odd from an English speaker's perspective is that English and Japanese have very different approaches to transliterating Russian. Most Russian words are pronounced a bit differently from how they're spelled, and English transliterations tend to stick more closely to the original spelling, while the Japanese ones tend to reflect the actual pronunciation (through the prism of a Japanese accent). The only thing I'd change in the above katakana transliteration is how they rendered the letter щ - nobody in modern Russia actually pronounces it as "shch"; in fact it has a pretty much exact equivalent in ッシ, so I would write it as フルッショフ (Furusshofu). Molotov's name is actually transliterated closer to its spelling in both languages (according to modern Japanese transliteration rules it should be something like ヴィチスラフ・モーラトフ, Vichisurafu Mōratofu), but you kinda made the transliteration of "Vyacheslav" look weirder than it actually is - ヴャ is just "vya" (or you could be consistent and write it as Vu~yachi~esurafu Wink ).

As for the author's name, yeah, I figured out is should be spelled with an å as soon as I saw the katakana transliteration. What surprised me more was that she spelled her last name, Ekstrom, as イェークストロム (Yēkusutoromu). I was pretty sure that e doesn't get pre-iotated in standard Swedish, but for all I know that could be a dialectical phenomenon. Or maybe she chose this transliteration to emphasize that it's pronounced with an [ e: ] and not an [ ɛ: ].
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CheerSong



Joined: 29 Jun 2011
Posts: 92
Location: Route 7, Kanto
PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2015 9:31 am Reply with quote
I was wondering if ANN would pick up on this. Åsa and I went to the same design school here in Tokyo! She is a published comic artist in Sweden (her series being Sayonara September), and she worked her butt off for six months putting together this 4-koma manga picked up by Kadokawa. It was originally her graduation "thesis" project!

She's a great lady and yeah, she's living the dream! I hope she will be able to publish original, non-"foreigner in Japan" comics here in the future. (Also we need to catch dinner or something...)

Go Åsa!
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Hameyadea



Joined: 23 Jun 2014
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PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2015 9:46 am Reply with quote
vonPeterhof wrote:
The only thing I'd change in the above katakana transliteration is how they rendered the letter щ - nobody in modern Russia actually pronounces it as "shch"; in fact it has a pretty much exact equivalent in ッシ, so I would write it as フルッショフ (Furusshofu). Molotov's name is actually transliterated closer to its spelling in both languages (according to modern Japanese transliteration rules it should be something like ヴィチスラフ・モーラトフ, Vichisurafu Mōratofu), but you kinda made the transliteration of "Vyacheslav" look weirder than it actually is - ヴャ is just "vya" (or you could be consistent and write it as Vu~yachi~esurafu Wink ).


I copy-pasted it from Google Translate's phonetic reading. Katakana combination that are in use for quite some time, like using "Tsu" [シ] with a small "e" [ェ], will display the correct reading (like "chef" -> シェフ [shefu], or "teenage" -> ティーンエイジ [Tīn'eiji]), but newer combination, like those with a "Vu" (like Bosnia and Herzegovina's Capital City, "Sarajevo" -> サラエヴォ [Saraevu~o]) or a "Tu"/"Du" (like Nepal's Capital City, "Kathmandu" -> カトマンドゥ [Katomando~u]), will be displayed in a non-phonetically matching way.
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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 14794
PostPosted: Thu May 07, 2015 2:26 am Reply with quote
mewpudding101 wrote:
Wandering Samurai wrote:

Her pronunciation was excellent and the voice crew for that video did an excellent job.

Her accent was pretty off, but at least it was understandable. I do wish her the best.


Those who don't know enough Japanese can't tell. (Like those who don't know enough Japanese can't tell indistinct difference between good J-acting and bad J-acting.)
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Northlander



Joined: 10 Feb 2009
Posts: 901
PostPosted: Fri May 08, 2015 7:48 pm Reply with quote
Incidentally, wouldn't her last name also be written as "Ekstrøm" (or maybe "Ekström" since it's Swedish?) I can't really tell for the swedes, but we have a lot of different last names in Norway that ends with "-strøm", which translates literally to "stream" as in the context of a brook when used in names.
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CheerSong



Joined: 29 Jun 2011
Posts: 92
Location: Route 7, Kanto
PostPosted: Fri May 08, 2015 9:02 pm Reply with quote
Northlander wrote:
Incidentally, wouldn't her last name also be written as "Ekstrøm" (or maybe "Ekström" since it's Swedish?)


It's Ekström.
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