I thought about a multilingual thread where people could discuss translations from Japanese sentences to other languages they know, specially when these sentences work better than those in English. I will illustrate what I mean with the first example.

もう一口も入りません。
(I) can't have another bite.

That's a good translation but it just doesn't match the Japanese as good as this one in Spanish:

Ya no (me) entra ni un bocado.

Spanish features two words, ya and ni, that match the usage of もう and も like a dream in this instance.

Why do you even need to translate? Is your goal to understand Japanese or to translate Japanese? For the former you don't need any intermediate language.

That's not what this is about. I'm interested in languages and how they work and doing this is exciting / interesting.

In that case I hear that Korean and Turkish are somewhat similar to Japanese. I have no experience with either so can't comment on how specific phrases would look like. Maybe someone with experience in those languages could help?

Here's an example from tae Kims blog entry


Japanese: 私は７時に学校に行った。
Korean: 나는 7시에 학교에 갔어.

Can’t see the similarity? Ok, why don’t we add spaces to the Japanese, replace the Korean with hanja, and use the same style for the characters.

私は ７時に 學校に 行った。
나는 7時에 學校에 갔어.

So they have he same grammar order and they both HavE particles. THe particle usage is not exactly the same though. They both have words based on Chinese characters and I read somewhere that 75% of the words made of Chinese characters are the same ( but the readings are diff)

http://korean.nomaki.jp/site_j/kanji.html

毎日テレビを見ます。

Word by word: Hver dag - TV (を) - ser på
Translation: (Jeg) ser på TV hver dag.

The Norwegian word order is the same as English most of the time, though there are exceptions.

Which one is more natural? hver dag TV ser på or Jeg ser på TV hver dag.?

If it's the first one then this makes sense.

turvy Wrote:Which one is more natural? hver dag TV ser på or Jeg ser på TV hver dag.?

If it's the first one then this makes sense.

The first one is completely unnatural. "Hver dag" can be put first, but only if it must be emphasised. The first translation was just word-by-word, but the latter was a natural phrase with the same meaning as the Japanese phrase.

The first line was just a listing of the words used...

もう一口も入りません。
(I) can't have another bite.

Word by word: "Noch so viel wie ein Bissen passt nicht rein."
Grammatical correct translation: "Ich bin so voll.. noch ein Bissen und ich platze!"

If you translate the German translation again into Japanese you get something like 「もう一口を入ると嘔吐をするほどお腹が一杯だぜ」. The German translation uses "so voll, ... dass ich platze" (my stomach so full that it might explode) to bring across the 一口も more naturally from the Japanese sentence.

もう/一口/も/入りません。
Literal: Artık/bir lokma/daha/alamam.
Natural: (Artık) Bir lokma daha yiyemem.

私は/ ７時/に /學校/に/ 行った。
Ben/(saat) 7/'de/okul/a/gittim.
Natural: Ben (saat) 7'de okula gittim.

毎日/テレビを/見ます。
Her gün/televizyon/izlerim(or izliyorum -- the former is present simple tense, the latter is present continuous tense).
A small note here on how turkish differs from japanese in use of the accusative(-ı,-i,-u,-ü versus を) :
televizyon izlerim (I watch TV).
televizyonu izlerim (I watch that specific TV --say the one we talked about before which happens to be located in my room).

Well, it is not the most natural sounding example in turkish but it ties well with sentence at hand, so I rolled with this one.

Italian is kind of tricky in these situations. It doesn't have a strict word order like English and doen't need to put there the subject everytime so it can be very flexyble and you can "mimic" a japanese sentence very well most of the time. Fact is, italian has a complex grammar unlinke Japanese, English, Chinese... and that's why it has fewer words. Hard grammar, small vocabulary. Big vocabulary, simpler grammar. Some way or another languages have to go easy on people (well, it's just my idea).

Certainly there are other factors... for instance Italian didn't really change over centuries 'cause none was really using it: it was a literary language, people just used dialects (sometimes people living 20 Km away would never understand each other... and this was true at least till after WWII adn the advent of television!).
This means no real evolution in language, no increasing in the number of words.
So, long story short, it happens quite often that "Japanese [i]and English[(i] have a word for it", but Italian doesn't.

For instance... well, it doesn' fully prove my point, but better than nothing:
もう/一口/も/入りません。
Literal: Ormai/un boccone/anche/non entra.
Not-really-natural: Ormai/non (mi) entra/nemmeno/un boccone.
With negative verbs "anche" tends to become "nemmeno" (not even). Moreover "ormai" isn't your "everyday word", it's too literary... and I had to add "mi" (to me), 'cause "non entra" (hairimasen) kind of makes you ask you "where?!"

Really natural sentences however are completely difference 'cause if I want to use "hitokuchi" (a mouthful/un boccone) there's just one [i]natural[i] sentence I can think of that can be created, but nothing else of the japanese sentence will still be there.

[Zgarbas]

もう一口も入りません。
Romanian: Nu introduce un alt muscatură.
Well, it's highly nonsensical, that's for sure. It's funny because we use ”o gură", which literally means ¨a mouth¨ to denote a bit, so you´d think they´d at least get that right...Also, apparently Google translate in Romanian doesn't offer any diacritics o.O....

毎日テレビを見ます。
Uita-te la televizor în fiecare zi.
"Watch TV every day"

Then again, Google translate in Romanian never did get much attention =(. Apparently it translates everything from Japanese as being imperative o.O.

kazeatari Wrote:Fact is, Italian has a complex grammar unlike Japanese, English, Chinese... and that's why it has fewer words.

So if one already knows Spanish or Portuguese, learning Italian should be easier than other romance languages because of the fewer vocabulary in addition to similar words and grammar.

Ohhh... you were supposed to google-translate it. Then here we go:

もう一口も入りません。
Ikke kommer en annen bit.
That's highly nonsensical. "Not come another bite." :p Even if I fixed up the syntax, it would be completely off.
A proper translation would be: "Jeg klarer ikke enda en bit." (I can't take another bite.)

私は７時に学校に行った。
Jeg gikk på skolen kl 07:00.
I didn't walk on the school did I? That's the only mistake here; if they've used "til" instead of "på", it'd be correct.

毎日テレビを見ます。
Se på TV hver dag.

This sounds like some weird advice. "Watch TV every day."... :p

i wonder sometimes if google translate isn't purposely bad, to save translators or something. It seems like with Google's search & computing power it should be a lot easier to make good translations...

I think it's better than it used to be, and they must be improving it all the time. Give the technology some time.

Another example, again with もう where the Spanish seem to work better, it's hunting me.

もうないよ
English: There are none left. Lit: (There is) already nothing.
Spanish: Ya no hay.