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Interestingly @RandomRanger cited a video in another thread that's an unintentional example of this. It's an Avatar compilation video titled "Hardest RDA Edit" where 'hard' is used to mean based/awesome/woah. My browser mistranslated that to "[Most Difficult] RDA Edit' i.e. 最も難しい RDA 編集.
If GPT is given both the title and the summary (which Youtube could do internally with their API) it gives the much better translations "Max strength RDA edit" 史上最強RDA編集 or "Most villainous RDA edit" 最凶RDA編集. In general I find GPT much better on language problems than they are on almost any other task, and miles better than standard machine translation.
The translation of "edit" as 編集 also feels iffy to me - I haven't seen that word used in the nominal sense for a product of editing, but only in the verbal sense for the act of editing. The term that JP net culture uses for these sorts of videos is MAD, or if you are okay with dropping any connotation that the clips were modified as opposed to just stuck together, you could stick with just 編 or even 編成動画 (compilation video).
"Hardest" feels borderline untranslatable, with its simultaneous connotation that the edit itself "goes hard" and that it makes the RDA look hard. It's actually serendipitous that 最強 works as well as it does - I couldn't think of anything that would work as well in German.
I like 最凶 better - you get the pun on さいきょう and also the slightly evil connotation.
Good to know, I thought the M stood for music and it was the same as an AMV.
Fair, if you want that connotation it's not a bad choice.
This line of discussion got me thinking a little about how strange a word edit is to begin with. Following the Latin roots, it really should just denote the act of releasing a text (e(x) + dare = give out), and there is plenty of semantic overlap between editor and publisher so that this connotation isn't gone, but somehow along the way it has acquired the overwhelming meaning of modifying something which I guess any sufficiently micromanagerial publisher has to do. Either way, in English this etymology is now pretty opaque, so edit is generally tied to this perception of some modification being involved - though there is also the expression "to edit [2+ things] together" which is rather in line with the thing below.
On the other hand, the suggested translation as 編集 (which indeed is the canonical JP name of the "Edit" UI element, as well as the job of a magazine editor) suggests a much more light-touch process of editing/publishing - it is made up from 編 "weave" (with both the literal meaning and a metaphorical interpretation as in "weaving a tale" going way back) and 集 "collect", suggesting an act of finding the right pieces and stringing them together skillfully, and this etymology is completely transparent. Meanwhile, there is an absolute overabundance of words that instead capture the modificatory aspects of editing, with subtle differences - 変更 (change+replace=modify), 調整 (tune+arrange=adjust, fix, tweak), 訂正 (correct+right=correct), 改変 (alter+change, with possible slightly negative connotations), 改訂 (alter+correct, with positive connotations)...
Part of this is that JP has a much more recent reification period, right? IIRC, the Meiji Era government basically had an explicit taskforce sitting down and deciding how to translate scientific, literary and other types of words into kanji in a way that was clear and useable. Thus 編集, 銀行、糖尿病、etc. as well as the creation of new pronouns such as かれ.
British English hasn't had such a process and the Americans were focused on other matters, so they're much more evolutionary. and the evolutionary process is what gives us the various masterpieces that @phailyoor has kindly provided for our, um, edification.
For 編集, at least, kotobank has citations from a 13th-century Zen Buddhist tractate ("Historians may 編集 this into an example of [some form of meditation]..."), and a 1656 translation that evidently uses the "compilation"-editing meaning ("Having resolved to do so in last year's spring, [I?] 編集 a 20-volume book called Shinpi Ketsudanshou").
edit: I also want to dispute the novelty of かれ as a pronoun. It's simply an older (perhaps regional? I have little intuition for what just fell out of prestige language use due to the west->east power shift) form of あれ that slots regularly into the this-that(close)-that(far)-which determiner pattern: これ・それ・あれ(かれ)・だれ, この・その・あの(かの)・どの, こなた・そなた・あなた(かなた)・どなた. If you have any exposure to period-drama or fake-oldtimesey speech, you might have heard かのもの with a very emphatically up-pitched か for "that person". It didn't take long to find an example of かれ being used as a personal pronoun all the way back in the Tale of Genji.
I bow to your superior knowledge. I was told that 彼 and 彼女 as gendered pronouns were an innovation to allow translating European works into grammatical Japanese, but perhaps it's not so or it was a minor twist on an established usage.
Eh, I think it is probably correct that かのじょ is an innovation! To begin with, it's an awkward mixed kun-on reading that just makes it look more pronominal over the natural かのおんな which is really just that woman, and there is no reason to believe かれ or あれ should originally be gendered - indeed, in the Genji quote it refers to a female character (Lady Kiritsubo), and in deliberately old-fashioned speech you still find lots of examples of あれ referring to females.
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Yeah I was using a Claude script to translate a fic from Russian. I can't read Russian so I can't really tell what I'm missing out on (also the author is not the most amazing wordsmith) but it was quite decent in context even where they were using words like 'necro-energy' that don't even exist in either language.
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