I'm still very early on in the deck, but I feel like I've found a mistake in a translation of one of the cards in the Core6k deck. I'm using Nukemarine's version.


Card Core Index 206
旅行の日程が決まりました. It gives the meaning as "I've decided on my travel schedule". However, based on my limited understanding, that would be only the correct translation if they were using the verb 決める　not 決まる. I think the translation for 旅行の日程が決まりました. would be more along the lines of "My travel schedule has been decided." Or "The travel schedule has been decided."

Any thoughts? Thanks.

To my mind, your translations would be correct, kind sir.

Be prepared to come across a few more of these in the Core6k. It's not really a mistake, don't let the English translation throw you off.

In general I've noticed that non-transitivity is often lost in J to E translations (perhaps because it sounds so awkward in English?)

It's not a mistake at all. Rather, the translator has opted for the most natural sounding English translation. Often you'll find intransitive Japanese verbs, such as 決まる, are best translated as transitive verbs in English.

Regarding: "The travel schedule has been decided", you're not realising there is actually a "hidden topic or は" in 旅行の日程が決まりました - i.e. who the sentence is talking about. It has to be talking about someone. The translator has understandably assumed the hidden topic is 私は, but you can just as well translate it as "He's decided, she's decided, you've decided" etc.

Regarding: "The travel schedule has been decided," you've now gone and changed an intransitive verb with a hidden topic to a passive verb with a hidden indirect object.

As an advanced student, I really like the Core translations because they haven't stuck to rigid direct translations. Sometimes you have to think "now why have they translated it that way?" This is not really good for beginners though because because they are still trying to grasp the grammar itself and those types of sentences can end up confusing.

I think that's a very clear mistake, and should be treated as such. It's assuming a context that you don't actually know the details of. The translation is not assuming a topic of「私は」because that's the ENTIRE point of intransitive verbs. They have no active agent within the sentence. Sure, the sentence in certain contexts could mean "I decided," but we don't actually know that context.

In a flat context as the sentences are presented in the Core deck that's a mistake. People should really quit leaning on translations of sentences as if they're gospel. I think you're all hobbling yourselves by thinking about Japanese in English rather than Japanese in Japanese.

You shouldn't be translating in your head. It's a terrible habit. You also shouldn't be translating as a method of checking understanding. A translation is a re-write in a different language that attempts to approach the same meaning. It is not the thing itself, and should not be treated as such.

YOU can know on your own whether or not you've understood a sentence without a translation. You know if you've understood all the words individually. You know if you understood the grammar. You know if the sentence makes sense to you. You don't need English translations that are often erroneous to validate your understanding.

It's also okay to have a kind of vague or fuzzy understanding of something that deepens over time. I think the English translations convince people they understand the sentence better than they do. They understand the English sentence so therefore they think the Japanese sentence is the same, and so it makes them feel good. It's not really that way, though.

That's a false sense of understanding that only serves to mask the fact that your understanding of the Japanese sentence is still fuzzy. As long as you keep pushing forward learning new things in Japanese the stuff that used to be fuzzy will start to pop into focus. You have to learn to become comfortable with that process. It's scary at first to be off in the wilderness, but I promise it gets better.

Japanese is kind of a vague language. People always talk about it in terms of needing to know more "context," but fundamentally it's just a different mentality from English where lots of things are explicit. Sometimes that context is not available, and nobody cares. Things being kind of vague is seen as artful, tactful, and beautiful within Japanese society.

By translating to English and projecting a completely made-up context for the sentence they're really masking the Japanese in a way that I think probably ends up misleading people.

It gives people the impression that they should have understood it a certain way, and then they beat themselves up over it for not "getting it." In reality the information just wasn't there in the Japanese sentence at all. There was no way for them to know.

Whether or not the translation is a mistake is a matter of opinion. The Japanese verb is intransitive, but it's not a passive verb. There's no useful direct translation into English. Personally, I prefer the translation in the deck, since looking at it reinforces in my brain that a Japanese intransitive is not a passive verb. After all, Japanese has its own passive verb form that is different.

erlog Wrote:I think that's a very clear mistake, and should be treated as such. It's assuming a context that you don't actually know the details of. The translation is not assuming a subject of 「私は」because that's the ENTIRE point of intransitive verbs. They have no active agent within the sentence. Sure, the sentence in certain contexts could mean "I decided," but we don't actually know that context.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of は and が. Firstly, は tells us what the sentence is about. が marks the grammatical subject. The grammatical subject in the example given is 旅行の日程, which is why it is marked by が.

I'll also assume that by "no active agent within the sentence" you meant that the verb does not refer back to anyone, i.e. a topic. However, newbies must know there is always a topic. In the example, there is certainly a topic marked by は, it's just unsaid, and the translator just didn't know what it was because of this, so understandably defaulted to "I/私".

Finally, the OP was clever to pick up on a perceived mistake in translation. But I imagine he/she has not had enough exposure to "unsaid" topics, Japanese intransitive verbs, and theories of Japanese to English translation to understand why the translator chose that particular translation. For what it's worth, I probably would have translated it as "the schedule for tomorrow's trip is set", but I would have gladly accepted "I've decided on my travel schedule" for the reasons I've outlined.

bertoni Wrote:The Japanese verb is intransitive, but it's not a passive verb. There's no useful direct translation into English.

Exactly. The closest we have in English is "the schedule is set", but this will inevitably raise questions about tense, whether it is passive or intransitive, whether there was an actor involved etc.

As a literal translation it's wrong, and as such is probably inappropriate for the core 6k deck. If you view it instead as an English equivalent, i.e. a non-literal translation that represents something a native English speaker would say in the same circumstance, it's perfectly fine.

Quote:YOU can know on your own whether or not you've understood a sentence without a translation.

The earlier you are in your studies, though, the less you can trust your understanding. It's entirely possible to believe you've understood a sentence when in fact you've totally misinterpreted it. This is true even if the sentence is in context.

Quote:Japanese is kind of a vague language.

I've always thought this is kind of a dangerous way to think about things. Native speakers don't go around saying things that other people don't understand because they're vague. I find that too often learners use this "Japanese is vague" as an excuse not to understand the grammar. I've seen plenty of cases on this board and other places where people have claimed that a sentence is ambiguous because "Japanese is a vague language" when in fact it's completely and totally unambiguous; the person just didn't understand the grammar well enough to see that.

Japanese allows you to leave things out that are required grammatically in English, but that doesn't make things any more vague, it just means you have to use the context to figure out what the meaning is. Japanese natives still have no trouble understanding each other.

Actually, OP is right. The translation is clearly wrong and I don't see why people who have learned Japanese for god-knows-how-many-years can make statements like the ones above. You all assume that only you alone can decide what the traveling schedule will be, but there are exceptions. A good example would be an employee's trip. In many Japanese companies when you go on such a trip you can't decide the schedule on your own. I don't need any further context in order to understand that the sentence is about that kind of a situation.

BlackMarsh Wrote:I'll also assume that by "no active agent within the sentence" you meant that the verb does not refer back to anyone, i.e. a topic. However, newbies must know there is always a topic. In the example, there is certainly a topic marked by は, it's just unsaid, and the translator just didn't know what it was because of this, so understandably defaulted to "I/私".

You have actually confused transitive/intransitive with active/passive here. The sentence does not have an agent that's causing it. That's the literal distinction between transitive/intransitive.

The sentence does not have a "topic." Sentences do not need to have "topics" in Japanese. Here's proof that intransitive verbs do not work the way you just described.

「雨が降る」<--In this example what's the topic that's been left out? 神様?

BlackMarsh Wrote:

bertoni Wrote:The Japanese verb is intransitive, but it's not a passive verb. There's no useful direct translation into English.

Exactly. The closest we have in English is "the schedule is set", but this will inevitably raise questions about tense, whether it is passive or intransitive, whether there was an actor involved etc.

This is precisely why relying on translations to check understanding is a bad idea.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Japanese allows you to leave things out that are required grammatically in English, but that doesn't make things any more vague, it just means you have to use the context to figure out what the meaning is. Japanese natives still have no trouble understanding each other.

In day to day conversation you're entirely correct. There usually is knowable context. However when it comes to written Japanese it's very different.

In lots of cases Japanese people are purposely vague in order to create distance or as an attempt to put things more eloquently. The Japanese see beauty in a lot of sentences specifically because the understanding is incomplete and there are many possible meanings. Haiku is an extreme example of that, but there are lesser versions of it too.

My main point is that people need to be okay with having a vague understanding of some of the Core6k sentences because the context of those sentences is literally unknowable. In a lot of instances a context can be assumed, but let's not pretend the sentence actually carries that information. It doesn't. It's vague.

If you had a paragraph before it and a paragraph after it then you'd be able to know. All we have is this single sentence. There's nothing else to call that but vague, and it's not due to an inability to comprehend grammar.

Understand grammar all you like, but that grammar isn't going to give you tons of context for any of the Core sentences.

Going on my gut instinct, I would say yudantaiteki and BlackMarsh are right. I think it's a good translation of the Japanese sentence, as long as you're not going for a direct translation. (Although, a direct translation would arguably be more help for learners.)

erlog Wrote:The sentence does not have a "topic." Sentences do not need to have "topics" in Japanese. Here's proof that intransitive verbs do not work the way you just described.

「雨が降る」<--In this example what's the topic that's been left out? 神様?

The が in this case introduces 雨 as the new topic.

I don't have time to reply to your other points, but try reading up on equivalence in translation to understand why the example sentence is perfectly fine. Actually, yudantaiteki's post covers most you need to know.

BlackMarsh Wrote:

erlog Wrote:The sentence does not have a "topic." Sentences do not need to have "topics" in Japanese. Here's proof that intransitive verbs do not work the way you just described.

「雨が降る」<--In this example what's the topic that's been left out? 神様?

The が in this case introduces 雨 as the new topic.

I don't have time to reply to your other points, but try reading up on equivalence in translation to understand why the example sentence is perfectly fine. Actually, yudantaiteki's post covers most you need to know.

Translation style should differ depending on the purpose of the translation. A translation of a sentence for learners of Japanese is different from a translation in the case of a novel.

I wasn't saying it was a Wrong translation with a capital W. For most purposes as a translation it's fine. I was saying that for the purpose of studying Japanese it's bad, and it will give learners the wrong impression.

It assumes a context that can not be inferred from the actual information on the card. Yes, it very well could mean "I decided." However, it's also just as likely that it means the schedule was decided by someone else. We don't know, and putting it in the translation on the card like that is going to give students the impression that they should know when they couldn't possibly have known.

The idea that you're even bringing up translation equivalency points even more to the validity of my main argument that translation is a terrible way to check understanding.

BlackMarsh Wrote:

erlog Wrote:「雨が降る」<--In this example what's the topic that's been left out? 神様?

The が in this case introduces 雨 as the new topic.

So in the case of the original sentence why is が in that case not introducing 旅行の日程 as the new topic? Your logic here is flimsy.

決まる is an intransitive verb. It does not have an active agent causing it to happen. So your logic of, "there's an implied 私は" doesn't actually make sense. That's the very definition of an intransitive verb.

i think what can be taken from this is all but the most authoritative of authorities have mistakes - i contacted the author of an OUP book on Japanese about a mistake in it and he acknowledged it.....

erlog Wrote:It assumes a context that can not be inferred from the actual information on the card. Yes, it very well could mean "I decided." However, it's also just as likely that it means the schedule was decided by someone else. We don't know, and putting it in the translation on the card like that is going to give students the impression that they should know when they couldn't possibly have known.

Why are you assuming that learners don't get this? Yeah, it could mean "I decided," or it could mean that it was decided by someone else. When I started learning Japanese one of the first things I learned was to appreciate the fact that even in sentences with straightforward transitive verbs it is often impossible to know who the subject or topic of the sentence is outside of context.

I took a bit of Japanese in university, and we were told on tests that if we had to give the meaning for a sentence outside of context we should simply choose one of the many possible ways to interpret the sentence. Actually, we had a lot of fun when we first started learning speculating about many different subjects and interpretations that were possible for a sentence with no context. And this process taught us a lot about Japanese.

A translation might give a possible context to the learner that he did not expect or think of (certainly, this has happened to me a few times with anki decks I did, either Core or a N1 vocab deck), and therefore choosing a specific context sometimes lets the learner know new possibilities for a sentence that he or she had not thought of.

Anyway, anyone with a solid foundation in Japanese should be able to look at a basic sentence and have some idea of the range of different contexts it could be used for. There was no reason for the people who made the Core sentences to believe that people wouldn't have a solid basic knowledge before they started going through Core.

It's really only in our little world of this forum that a lot of people end up thinking it's fine and dandy to go straight from RTK to Core without any real knowledge of grammar, a state of affairs in which this translation could confuse the learner. Maybe this translation is bad for that method of learning, but it's certainly not bad for people who know Japanese grammar to some extent.

I spoke with my Japanese wife about the sentence this morning. She said she would translate it as "The travel schedule has been decided." and agreed the translation was incorrect. So I'll just go with that.

While going through the KO2001 I noticed another "error", but this one is actually in the Japanese.

Kanji 33, "SF映画を見た。少年がタイムカプセルに乗って、1000年後の未来に行く。"

At first I assumed タイムカプセル was another katakana English oddity where it really meant "time machine", but I looked it up in the dictionary and タイムカプセル is given as time capsule, and タイムマシン is given as time machine. I asked my wife and she said the sentence is wrong. I guess its possible they really meant he rode a time capsule, but that seems less likely. If anything I suppose it is a poor word choice because it lead me to believe タイムカプセル could mean time machine.

Good job, OP ^^ I already explained why the current translation is incorrect, but everyone seems to have ignored it.

Another wrong sentence as well. タイムカプセル is used with other verbs. Guess, you should just trust your instincts from now on

merlin.codex Wrote:Good job, OP ^^ I already explained why the sentence is correct, but everyone seems to have ignored it.

Because you weren't entirely correct in what you were saying. Your explanation is possible, but it would also be possible for someone to use this in a situation where they decided things themselves. Using intransitive verbs to talk about things you did is more common in Japanese than in English and it sounds less strange.

No, actually what you are saying isn't entirely correct, cause that rules applies only to some verbs like 止まる／止める for example. You seem to live in Tokyo so just go and ask whatever Japanese you like, 決まる doesn't work that way.

EDIT:
Try to build me a sentence where you decide something with ～が決まる just for the fun of it.

Oh and I forgot to ask you, are you suggesting that OP's wife doesn't have ability in her own language?

Sure, here's an example:
http://www.kcn-tv.co.jp/support/kaiyaku/01/index.html
In English we would not express this idea with an intransitive verb, instead it would say something like "For those who have decided to move" Even if some would use an intransitive in English as well, it would be ridiculous to suggest that お引越が決まったから、今のサービスを使えないと思っている方、いらっしゃいませんか？ is addressed specifically to people who are moving because someone else made the decision.

Quote:Oh and I forgot to ask you, are you suggesting that OP's wife doesn't have ability in her own language?

Unless she's bilingual she could make a mistake in translation, but that's not really what I was saying. Intransitive verbs like this should be translated into English intransitives in out-of-context sentences like this that are intended for learners. But the idea that the use of intransitives and transitives match up exactly in English and Japanese is wrong, and the use of intransitives to be less specific (and thus more polite) is not limited to certain verbs.

For asking a native speaker I would not ask what an English translation of that is -- ask them whether it would be OK for someone to use that phrase when they made the decision about the travel days themselves or whether they would have to use を決めました in that case.

(Although it may be more common with other verbs. Searching for が片付いた, for instance, brings up a lot of hits where it's clear the person is talking about something they cleaned up or dealt with themselves; they're just putting emphasis on the thing rather than their own action by using an intransitive.)

Do you even read what you are using as an example? The sentence you provide obviously indicates 今のサービスを使えないと思っている方, not one person who decides on something.

yudantaiteki Wrote:is addressed specifically to people who are moving because someone else made the decision

You even say it yourself...

Plus, the sentence you are trying to defend (the one OP mentioned) is a declarative sentence. You should know what that means...

EDIT:
And since you don't seem to listen, I asked one professional Japanese→English translator (she's Japanese) plus 2 Japanese who major English at the university. The translation is off. Satisfied?

Verbのが決まる, from what I understand, can indeed be used when you yourself are making the decision. However, it's usually only used that way when you didn't have much of a choice.

For example, imagine you decide on using a specific rental car company for a certain reason. For example, maybe you are flying into Albany but flying out of Rochester, and ultimately you go with Company X because it's the only one that won't charge you extra to drop the car off at the Rochester airport. You could say (blah blah blah, explanation,)　X会社からレンタルするのが決まった. (Technically though, you are still making the decision, since you could go to one that would charge you if you wanted to)

Sort of in the same way as when you are thinking over options outloud or in your head and then you say: じゃあ、決まった！明日にする！ "(I've thought about it and come to the only logical conclussion and thus) I've decided! I'll do it tomorrow!"

You're giving a good example, but isn't it supposed to go like "*explanation*, so I decided on ~" in English? You don't have any further context to support this theory and the sentence is declarative which leads to the most logical conclusion - something like a 社員旅行.

merlin.codex Wrote:You all assume that only you alone can decide what the traveling schedule will be, but there are exceptions.

No, I assume that translations are all approximate. I think in real life, it's unlikely that someone I don't know will walk up to me and say, "旅行の日程が決まりました" and walk away, never to be seen again. In reality, there will be some context, and that's where the subject would be given (or left tantalizingly unstated) in a real conversation or novel. For a sentence in isolation, having a card give some arbitrary context that doesn't exist in the question is fine by me. It's just a reminder to me of the possibilities.

It's only the answer on the back of a flash card. Its purpose is to train. If it were a sentence in a translation of a novel, I might care more about precision.

As far as what someone's Japanese wife said, well, I've gotten lots of mistaken translations by Japanese people. They likely know Japanese quite well , but they don't necessarily know English or translation problems very well.