Abstract concepts are difficult to translate because many words and phrases simply cannot be translated literally. We’ll delve deeper into this point below.ĩ. Honorifics, known as keigo, has no equivalent in English and is thus, difficult to understand. Pronouns are rare – In Japanese, pronouns like “I” or “you” or “me” are rarely required because the social position is marked by the grammar.Ĩ. No subjects – In Japanese, the subject is frequently omitted. So when translating a sentence, the translator must understand the entire sentence before changing the order of words.ģ. Japanese sentences have the verb at the end. SOV instead of SVO – English is ordered as subject, verb then object. So the sentence: “There is a dog” and “There are a few dogs” are the same in Japanese.Ģ. There is also no difference between singular and plural in Japanese nouns. Further clarification would have to come from context. In fact we don’t even know who received the sweet. If translated literally, it is not clear at all how many sweets were received, and by how many people. The way of counting also changes all the time, even with adjectives and pronouns.Įnglish: I/you/he/she/they received a sweet/sweets from Clara. No plural nouns – There is no differentiation between plural and singular in Japanese. Among some of the grammatical differences include:ġ. And that is truly no small task.Īnother challenge is that English and Japanese do not share any similarities in grammar. Thus, to translate from Japanese to English, the translator will have to have a strong understanding of both languages, spoken and written, to be able to make sure the meaning is retained when translating. There is no way to show meaning other than to understand completely what is said in Japanese, before thinking of a way to reproduce it in English.
To compound the difficulties, this difference also means that there is no English equivalent to how a Japanese writer lays out their sentence. Altogether, there are thousands of Kanji characters in the writing system. Japanese often use Kanji and Hiragana together to form one word. Hiragana is used when Kanji characters can’t be used. Katakana is used for words that have been borrowed from other languages. Hiragana and Katakana are the Japanese phonetic alphabets, with 46 symbols each representing every sound in the Japanese language. Meaning is derived from different strokes, the placing of the strokes within a character and different ways of interpreting each.Īdd to that the fact that Japanese use three different character sets: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Not only are there often no direct translations for words, the alphabet used is completely different as well.Īs in Chinese, Japanese characters, known as kanji, are ideograms. Japanese and English originated from completely different places. This post was updated in April 2021 Alphabet woes Listen to the TLDR(Too Long Didn’t Read) version of this article: Here are a few reasons why translating from Japanese to English is so difficult: While machines have improved in leaps and bounds, with all the complexities involved in translating, you will end up with a completely unusable text. That’s why it is definitely not a good idea to use machine translations for Japanese to English. So it comes as no surprise that translating Japanese can take a translator double the time or more. Obstacles include a completely different alphabet, the context-heavy nature of Japanese, the use of honorifics, as well as the great differences in grammar and sentence structure. Japanese itself is a difficult language for a Westerner to master. So what happens with translation work wherein the languages are completely different from each other? In the words of English poet and translator John Dryden: “What is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author’s words.”
A delicate balancing act, wherein a translator must have not just a good understanding of both the source and target language, but also a knowledge of society and culture. It is not merely the task of replacing words, but an art in itself. Translation itself is an often laborious and anonymous job the translator’s job is to reproduce a piece of text in a manner that is faithful to the original, but also pleasant to read and culturally relevant to the translation’s intended audience. It’s a notoriously difficult task to translate from Japanese to English.
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