Has the in-joke gone too far?: Gratuitous Japanese

To some the folders in this page are titled in an amusing manner. To others this is an obnoxious in-joke completely imperceptible to those who know little of the real or pseudo Japanese language and see nothing but a giant array of incomprehensible gibberish.

I'm putting up a crowner requesting that the page's titling be reverted to the standard format used on the rest of the wiki. This is a page action crowner, so if anyone has a third option let's hear it. Haven has insinuated that the titles here are not the same ones he received Made Of Wins for earlier this year, so it's possible there's a middle ground here.

Third Option: Keep the Gratuitous Japanese, but append the necessary folder names in English. So "Nihon no Manga" would stay "Nihon no Manga" but "Bungaku" would become "Bungaku/Literature"

Crowner is hooked, and I added the "leave as is" option. Even though I agree that they've gotten too opaque to be funny as they are.

edited 17th Dec '10 12:28:28 PM by Madrugada

I like the have both version. It lets some of the joke stay while still making it transparent.

Guess how I voted. Go on. Guess.

^ You voted to get rid of them completely. Right?

This option's going to win anyway, but in our rush for compromise, aren't we kind of killing the joke? Why don't we just rename every folder to something that's both Gratuitous Japanese and understandable to English speakers? Like "Nihon no Manga".

edited 17th Dec '10 9:27:39 PM by Anthologist

I agree that it's not actually funny at all if you translate them. Just get rid of them entirely if they're getting in the way.

I agree that it seems like it should be no joke at all, or still kind of a joke but clearer ("Nihon no Anime/Manga", not sure what Literature or Film etc would be). Explaining the joke is the worst of both worlds.

We could probably get by with just leaving in the ones that are obvious and removing the ones that aren't. This joke doesn't need to be thorough for its purposes. It just needs to be gratuitous, whether that's all of them or just a few.

"Nihon no Manga" is only clear if you know what "Nihon" and "no" means. Which not everybody does.

Would Nippon be clearer? It's a bit strange grammatically but that's also sort of the point.

Hmmm... Or have the first entry in each folder be a Translator's Note. Just as keikaku  ^{Translator's Note}

Edit: Dammit, BW how do you misspell "planned"?!

edited 18th Dec '10 6:54:22 AM by BlackWolfe

Actually, most of the Gratuitous Foreign Language tropes have this...issue. I say, if we change the Japanese version, we edit them all accordingly. Some of the folders are understandable as Romantic languages, but many of them aren't. Especially because some are not listed in English alphabetical order, making it a bit tough to decipher who is who at a glance.

edited 18th Dec '10 7:09:38 AM by helterskelter

Sdrawkcab Name has a similar issue with folder names. At least a sensible reader will figure out that they're backwards but it's still very annoying.

Ha, yes. It is quite annoying. I changed the Laconic awhile back because it was all backwards as well...which absolutely does nothing to help people understand the trope immediately.

I want to make it like "Bungaku (Translator's Note: Bungaku means Literature)" for a certain other in-joke, but that's probably not the best idea.

I like the formatting on Altum Videtur; I'd be in favor of just copying that over wholesale.

It'd be rather obnoxious to have to click everything open searching for the category you want.

Folders start off open by default, so anyone who wanted to search wouldn't need to open anything unless they'd already closed something. Even then, the open/close all folders button would minimize the hassle.

I didn't read the trope description, would reading that make the titles sensible because it is gibberish to me.

Uh, really? Because, even when I'm not logged in and cookies are erased, they're all closed on default. And they're closed when I am logged in, and I altered no settings.

I've never seen this page before, and...ugh. Terrible. I think we should remove the Gratuitous Japanese. Maybe that's just because I hate Japanophiles, especially those that refer to themselves as Gaijin as if it's a badge of honor or something. It's a fucking racial slur! I'm going to start referring to myself as a Dago then!

I can't remember what it was, but there was one thread out there where each folder title was written in a unique form, then Pot Hole 'd to the trope page for that type of media. I'm going to search for it now, but meanwhile, I think using a similiar format would keep the in-joke nicely while still allowing us non-Japanophiles to find the right folder without having to click them all open.

Oh god no. Nothing worst than when people Pot Hole folders. You try to open them, end up clicking the name and it takes you to another page instead.