I was looking through my friends Facebook about 2 weeks ago and noticed he had a funny example of when Japanese is translated into English with comedic effect.

Here is the sign:



And the 日本語 if it is a bit hard to read from the sign:

"本日二の丸庭園の滝が、工事に伴い水を流しておりません。

何卒ご了承ください。"

As you can see the translation is very wrong and I really wanted to find out what it actually said so I tried to translate it!

However I hadn't learnt any Kanji at that time and found it very difficult looking them up and eventually gave up trying to make sense of it.

I tried again a minute ago and found I knew a lot of the Kanji already and I'm only 700 Kanji into RTK1! The ones I didn't know were easy to look up since I could recognize all the radicals instantly.

I obviously used a dictionary to look up words, but it feels great being able to translate something I had huge troubles with only a fortnight ago and its all thanks to a little of Heisig's book.

I got it to translate roughly to:
"The Ninomaru park waterfall has stopped flowing and is under construction today.
Thank you for your understanding."

Seems a bit too much to put on the sign to me so I can see why they just stuck to the major words .

Kewickviper Wrote:I got it to translate roughly to:
"The Ninomaru park waterfall has stopped flowing and is under construction today.
Thank you for your understanding."

Don't know if you actually want it, but I thought I'd improve your translation a bit (don't worry, you're not incorrect, it's just slightly different from what it technically has written, if one wants to be a perfectionist).

"In relation to construction, the water isn't flowing in the waterfall of the Ninomaru park today. Kindly understand."

Like you said, and as you can see from my quite literal translation, it's quite understandable why it's translated the way it is, and in an odd way, it sort of makes sense. That's one of the fun things of knowing Japanese, Japlish becomes even more interesting.

Congratulations on your first translation! Great feeling, isn't it?

Ah thank you very much for your real translation!

Yeah its a really good feeling

Hopefully soon I'll be able to translate simple sentences without a dictionary!

lol, Tomorrow must be still on the blueprint.