While waiting for the train today I got to wondering: What doesn't translate very well from your Native language to Japanese very well or even not all? Put another way, what can't you express very well in Japanese that you can do easily in your L1?

In English the only thing I could really come up with is a lack of variety of adjectives to choose from in Japanese that I can in English.

I've been on Lang-8 a lot lately, and I've noticed they tend to say some things that we don't, so they don't really translate. I mean, you -can-, but there's no way to make it sound fluent. For example:

"I hope that my initial will in the company will continue through the next year." ... Seriously, I don't even know what the guy was going for. I assume it has to do with attitude and motivation, but it's so unlike anything that we'd say that I couldn't make it fluent.

And reading books and watching anime, there's plenty of other things that just don't have a way to translate them properly. よろしくお願いします comes to mind. It almost never gets translated as a request on the listener, and yet that's what it really is. That dork Peter on JPod101 always says something stupid like 'please be good to me and I'll be good to you back' or something. A+ for effort, but minus several million for sounding like a tool.

I don't have any examples in English yet because I'm not good enough at Japanese to know the difference between things I can't say and things that can't be said. Oh, except one:

"You're wrong!" - I think it's hilarious that there's no fluent way to translate that. "It's different!" just isn't the same thing, even if that's how they use it.

Doesn't it depend on what you mean "translation"?

A thing that people in a given country have never seen or heard of can't have the so-called equivalent translation for obvious reasons. You need at least an sentence or two to explain it. Whether the sentence explanation is "translation" is a matter of definition. A slightly more "translation" situation is that if there is a thing similar to the exotic thing, e.g., things used for a similar purpose in the country, you might be able to use the word as a rough approximate or makeshift translation. I guess some people would call this translation.

Cultural things are difficult to translate; an obvious thing that doesn't require any explanation can be exotic or bizarre to people from another culture. Greetings and stuff are good examples. I read an article posted here where the author is complaining about お疲れ様 by taking it literally. I don't think an English speaker would say anything even remotely similar to the literal translation done by your machine translator when a Japanese person says it as a meaningless set phrase. There was also a thread where people were wondering why the Japanese don't say "Thank you" to a shop clerk. I was like it's not as if there is a perfect equivalent of "Thank you" in Japanese. The "Thank you" to shop clerks is an example that can't be translated into Japanese, but most people in the thread didn't understand this and thought it was a rude behavior not to say thanks. If you watch translated movies and such, you'll often encounter sentences that are "localized" to sound smooth so the translated version has completely different dialogue. It can even be silent or has sentences where the original doesn't. Some say this kind of localization isn't translation, but others say it is.

In other words, saying nothing is also translation. Speaking something when the original sentence has no word in it is also translation.

In the strictest sense, any kind of translation loses nuance to an extent and adds something that doesn't exist in the original source words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, dialogues, etc. The grammatical structure can't be the same either. So I think it all depends on your definition of translation. As long as you're saying something (or nothing) and you think it's equivalent, anything from a long explanation for exotic stuff to the so-called faithful translation to absolute silence is all translation.

If I said anything and everything could be translated, it'd be a lie. It's more like anything and nothing can be translated.

You are right, most stuff can be translated but it might require 2-4 sentences to explain the idea. But I suppose that's my point, if something takes 3-4 sentences to get the same exact kind of idea across then it doesn't translate very well in my opinion--the words aren't there in the other language. The "Thank you" example you used probably fits better in the idiom category. Every language has idioms, every culture has idioms. In some cases they can be translated but not in a literal sense. Either way, I'll leave it up to people's discretion to decide what "translate" means in this sense and to what degree. I posed the question with the intent of it being open ended just see if a discussion would start and maybe learn something new.

That's a good point, too. Nobody ever tells you that 'arigatou' doesn't literally mean 'thank you' or 'You have my appreciation'. We always learn that as the translation, though.

Looking up the kanji just now, it seems to literally mean something more like 'there were hardships' or something. So you're expressing appreciation by noting their hard work, rather than just the one-size-fits-all 'thank you' that we use in English.

The same with 'sumimasen' and 'shitsureishimasu', etc.

Of course, I could be wrong about this. I'm far from fluent yet.

vix86 Wrote:You are right, most stuff can be translated but it might require 2-4 sentences to explain the idea. But I suppose that's my point, if something takes 3-4 sentences to get the same exact kind of idea across then it doesn't translate very well in my opinion--the words aren't there in the other language. The "Thank you" example you used probably fits better in the idiom category. Every language has idioms, every culture has idioms. In some cases they can be translated but not in a literal sense. Either way, I'll leave it up to people's discretion to decide what "translate" means in this sense and to what degree. I posed the question with the intent of it being open ended just see if a discussion would start and maybe learn something new.

If I were to translate my previous post into Japanese for a Japanese person, it might have a different logic flow e.g., "equivalent" sentences appear in different order and examples are replaced so it's clearer to a Japanese person. If a concept is obvious to Japanese people because, for example, our culture happens to have an adage for the concept, I would delete part of argument. If I took advantage of popular logic with English speakers somewhere in the original post, I might have to expand that part. But if I translate it for Japanese learners, it can be quite different from translation for native Japanese speakers.

So if the target audience is different, a concept that required a few additional sentences to translate can be "translated well" according to your definition even when the language pair is the same.

If you want to translate fairly long text or speech by native English speakers for native English speakers and if the target audience of your translation is the average monolingual native Japanese speaker, I think it can happen that pretty much every sentence falls into the hard-to-translate category.

By the way, I'm of the opinion that every expression in a human language is an idiom to an extent. And I think every human language is the same language. It's quit difficult to explain these things in a short post, but at least I see English and Japanese that way. So I don't think it's a stretch to say translation is simply rephrasing.

You have to "translate" things even within the same language in the conventional sense when talking to people who are not familiar with the subject you're talking about because knowledge, vocabulary, idioms and grammar that are common sense to you are not obvious to interlocutors/readers. This kind of gap or discrepancy is the reason we have to change wording etc. to make us understood, I guess.

So if you subtract grammar and such you think is included in your definition of translation from the gap in knowledge between you and readers/listeners, you get the very thing you think you can't translate well by your definition, I guess. For example, if you don't think knowledge popular bilingual dictionaries/textbooks contain counts as an impossible/hard-to-translate kind of thing, your definition of hard-to-translate doesn't have it. Take away from gaps between you and readers/listeners every kind of gap you think shouldn't be in your hard-to-translate things, and you'll get what you asked in this thread. I assume that a lot of people get cultural differences and stuff as hard-to-translate things.

I think the gap you think is very hard to fill by "translation" is the thing you find difficult to translate.

Edit: The article linked in The Braking into Video Game Translation thread says game translation is called localization, not translation, for a reason. The difference between localization and translation might roughly define what people find difficult or impossible to translate.

wccrawford Wrote:That's a good point, too. Nobody ever tells you that 'arigatou' doesn't literally mean 'thank you' or 'You have my appreciation'. We always learn that as the translation, though.

Looking up the kanji just now, it seems to literally mean something more like 'there were hardships' or something. So you're expressing appreciation by noting their hard work, rather than just the one-size-fits-all 'thank you' that we use in English.

Actually it literally means "difficult to exist" (ありがたい is like 信じがたい) and the original meaning seems to have been "rare" (although it was also used with a more literal meaning of "difficult to live"). A related meaning of "excellent" developed, as well as もったいない or 恐れ多い; it's probably the latter meanings that the modern "thank you" developed from.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Actually it literally means "difficult to exist" (ありがたい is like 信じがたい) and the original meaning seems to have been "rare" (although it was also used with a more literal meaning of "difficult to live"). A related meaning of "excellent" developed, as well as もったいない or 恐れ多い; it's probably the latter meanings that the modern "thank you" developed from.

Ahhh! Thanks!

magamo Wrote:By the way, I'm of the opinion that every expression in a human language is an idiom to an extent. And I think every human language is the same language.

I found this to be quite a profound statement once I thought about it. Although when you start reaching to that point you are starting to get into the issue of philosophy and semantics (the philosopher of semantics?). Either way its very true when you break it down. Language learning is nothing more than a creation of connection of ideas and concepts to other ideas and concepts. Learning an L2 is usually about mapping to your L1 and eventually back to a core understanding. I suspect Chomsky and those that came before explain it better. Idioms kind of return this process but build on current language components to create/link to complex concepts/ideas.

magamo Wrote:By the way, I'm of the opinion that every expression in a human language is an idiom to an extent. And I think every human language is the same language.

Darn hippie.

I thought ありがとう's literal meaning was "there are 10 ants".

You didn't make the connection after learning 有難い? Pfft, I say. That's in Core 2000 or something. I sneer at your pattern recognition abilities. ^_-

I spent like 15 minutes today in #japanese discussing how to translate "That makes a lot of sense"

Who would've known that "to make sense" was such a tricky phrase to translate?
In Korean I knew it'd be 말이되다 but Japanese... センスになる?

In the end I settled for 通じる. それなら十分通じる。

Vix86 Wrote:Idioms kind of return this process but build on current language components to create/link to complex concepts/ideas.

suspiciously Nest0resque...

ocircle Wrote:I spent like 15 minutes today in #japanese

What server?

Thora Wrote:

Vix86 Wrote:Idioms kind of return this process but build on current language components to create/link to complex concepts/ideas.

suspiciously Nest0resque...

As if I would mention Chomsky without making fun of Chomsky. ;p

I starting working on educational curricula translations recently and I am noticing how much of what can be called "translation" is really just an internalizing and reformatting of the idea on the part of the translator. Translation is held in much higher esteem than it should be, which is good because people have an inherent trust in your product but they don't see all the doubt and guessing and "ah screw it"-ing that we do.

magamo Wrote:By the way, I'm of the opinion that every expression in a human language is an idiom to an extent. And I think every human language is the same language.

I definately can agree with that. There is so much information behind every sentence uttered that is not stated. From the more particular who, what, how many to the more abstract like the differences that "a" and "the" point to, whether it is one item of the set of all like items or any item of the set.

I would say human language is like visual art. Give ten painters one object to paint and you'll get ten very different interpretation of that object.

Which is, btw, why I've never cared for the word "translation" In my mind, it's almost all interpretation not translation. It's unfortunate that the words interpret and interpreter only usually refer to the expressions of spoken languages because the same process happens in written communication as well. "Localization" sums it up well but it is too buzz-word-y.

As for the OP, I think っぽい doesn't translate well. Its an easy concept but doesn't express well in English always. Also, it gets used in places in Japanese that it probably wouldn't in English like with colors. 黒っぽい - black (lit. black-ish).

nest0r Wrote:You didn't make the connection after learning 有難い? Pfft, I say. That's in Core 2000 or something. I sneer at your pattern recognition abilities. ^_-

I haven't finished Core 2000 yet