The Observatory

I think it’s interesting how an artist will change over time. Take Avril lavigne for instance. When her first album, Let Go, came out, the subject matter was very identifiable with teenagers. Change, uncertainty, questioning authority, and self definition were all themes present in her music, and since she was a teenager herself at the time, everything she sang about came from a teenage perspective. Overall, the tone was relatively light. There was idealism in her music, and if the songs weren’t outright positive then they at least had hope in them. When she sang about something unfair or frustrating, you got the feeling that she was taking a stand against it rather than falling into dispair. For reference, I’ll list some of the songs that were best known from her first album.

Complicated
Sk8ter Boi
I’m With You

Avril’s second album, Under My Skin, was noticably darker and seemed to have a lot of the cynicism of adulthood. Relationships didn’t work out, guys tended to be duplicitous and untrustworthy, and life was depressing. While there were some songs that retained the hope, individuality, and rebellion of her first album, the collection focused on the negative a lot more than the previous one. Instead of being a teenager getting into the hang of life, you got the sense she had more experience and was having trouble holding on to the positive idealism of her younger self. Again, here are some of the better known songs from the album.

Don’t Tell Me
He Wasn’t
My Happy Ending

The only thing I’ve heard of Avril’s recently is her song Girlfriend, and therefore I can’t really give much of an opinion on how she’s changed since 2005. I will give my opinion of the song, though realize that my opinon of it will be more biased because it’s an individual song.

When I first heard Girlfriend, I really liked it. The message was, to put it simply, ‘I don’t like your girlfriend. You can do better. I want to be your girlfriend.’ The song was upbeat, and the emotion was easy to understand. I didn’t even realize it was sung by Avril Lavigne until I read a comic that referenced the music video. However, once I watched the music video my perceived meaning of the song was completely changed. The message of the music video was essentially, ‘I think you’re hot and I’m going to steal you from your girlfriend, and since I’m cool and she’s dorky, you’re going to be a steriotypical male and let me.’ The singer was suddenly changed from the protagonist to the villain, and I found it rather upsetting. The music video didn’t give a positive message, and while I like the song, I have trouble enjoying it when that’s the image I associate with the lyrics. Like I said, I can’t make much of an opinion of Avril based on this one song. I would be interested to see whether this is a trend in her current music… though as I’ve expressed above, I’m hoping it’s not.

For anyone who’s read the manga Magic Knight Rayearth by CLAMP, you probably remember Caldina (also known as Kaldina and Gardina). Her name is switched around at least three times through the series, and as a child who knew little to no Japanese when I first read it, this frustrated me to no end. After all, why would you keep changing a character’s name? The reason, as I understood once I learned the hiragana alphabet, is that the name probably wasn’t changed at all, it was just translated differently.

The thing you need to understand is that the Japanese alphabet is made up of characters, and most of these characters are a consonant followed by a vowel. The only exception is n. Personally, I’ve always thought the Japanese language was easier simply because it’s phonetic. Each character makes one sound. However, it gets difficult when you try to translate between languages with different rules. Remember, other than n all consonants are followed by a vowel, so a Japanese spelling of mark would be maruku, arbate (german word for part-time job) would become arubaito, and ice cream would become aisukuriimu. Furthermore, Japanese has a sound between r and l, which can be romanized as either, and with some characters, such as ka, adding two small marks (ten ten) alongside it can change the sound. Translating from English to Japanese tends to be simple as far as spelling goes since Japanese is phonetic, but when you try to go the other way you suddenly have options.

This is what I believe happened with Caldina’s name. The romanization was probably Karudina. When it came time to translate, however, things became tricky. Do you translate the ka sound as ka, or ca? Is the ru sounds an r, or an l? Is that the font, or is there a ten ten next to the ka (making it a ga), because you know that would make it a completely different sound…
Considering these are the people who translate CLAMP, and considering CLAMP loves coming up with new words, you know they had more to worry about that just this one character’s name. The way I see it, they started with the more romanized spelling of Kaldina, then thought that maybe the name was supposed to be Gardina and switched it to that, before finally settling on Caldina.

I could be wrong. Maybe they switched the names because they thought one sounded better, or maybe CLAMP changed the names. Maybe it’s another reason entirely.

I think my version sounds cooler though.