Current Events > Can anyone translate Japanese?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Just a paragraph in this hentai I'm reading.
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PM me. If it's not too long I'll give you a rough translation.
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action52 posted...

PM me. If it's not too long I'll give you a rough translation.

Is translating really that hard?
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CE please help this man get his nut off
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I got you fam

It says

n-n-nooo big brother! Not in that hole... Unless it really means that much to you *blush*

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Kisai posted...

action52 posted...

PM me. If it's not too long I'll give you a rough translation.

Is translating really that hard?

There's a handful of puns that involve reading a kanji in either of its potential readings. And the way they're read isn't like read (past tense) and read (present tense) but could be like, (person's name, a flower, close companion). Then factor in the cultural differences and phrases that don't translate well or at all, and it can be very difficult to convey a lot of things even for short text excerpts.

I can only really make do in games if they're full of katakana and hiragana, dating sims I can somewhat follow but only by audio. Text wise, it is a very time intensive task to actually learn.
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gunplagirl posted...

cultural differences

@krystal
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Krystal is still active on this site? Oh lawd.
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Your American penis so large
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gunplagirl posted...

Kisai posted...

action52 posted...

PM me. If it's not too long I'll give you a rough translation.

Is translating really that hard?

There's a handful of puns that involve reading a kanji in either of its potential readings. And the way they're read isn't like read (past tense) and read (present tense) but could be like, (person's name, a flower, close companion). Then factor in the cultural differences and phrases that don't translate well or at all, and it can be very difficult to convey a lot of things even for short text excerpts.

I can only really make do in games if they're full of katakana and hiragana, dating sims I can somewhat follow but only by audio. Text wise, it is a very time intensive task to actually learn.

Learning aside, simply translating... well, anything can be that difficult?

I just ask because I see lots of fan-translations for anime with subs, or fan-translation patches for games, and then there's manga, etc., etc. so it seems like it's probably simple enough once you actually know Japanese.

My Japanese friend however, absolutely hates translating things from Japanese though. I was wondering if maybe it's different depending on the person, or if it's universally difficult.
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Really differs. Like, I could probably translate some doraemon comics for you reasonably quick but I'd need about an hour to translate a handful of seinen 4koma.

It's Japanese (in text form, primarily) that's the challenging part.

Like, just entry level speaking, you'll learn several variations of "I, me" speaking that have different levels of formality. But when reading and writing, you'll also have de aru introduced which is an even more formal version of that and besides narrators and one of the guards that follows Flynn around from tales of vesperia, you'll never hear anyone speak like that. While it's easy enough to get that, that's also entry level knowledge. Look up a kanji database and study how certain characters (kanji and otherwise) preceding or following kanji can change them entirely. Hence why I am better at following along by listening rather than reading the dialogue in games.
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Nevermind. Installed a kickass translation software that specializes in Japanese. This shall help me with my hentai. :)
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Scotty_Rogers posted...

Nevermind. Installed a kickass translation software that specializes in Japanese. This shall help me with my hentai. :)

It's... not going to help at all.
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Get cha L fam!
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Taking a language that you know and translating it into another language you know, in a somewhat understandable way, is typically not that difficult.

Translating it in such a way that it reads as though it were originally written by a native speaker while also keeping as much of the nuance as possible? A bit more so.

Only Hiragana and Katakana for now.

Scotty_Rogers posted...

Nevermind. Installed a kickass translation software that specializes in Japanese. This shall help me with my hentai. :)

Erm, how does it do that?
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Kisai posted...

action52 posted...

PM me. If it's not too long I'll give you a rough translation.

Is translating really that hard?

It depends on how good a translation you want. Also I've had people on this site say they want "just a paragraph" and it's this 1000 word wall of text. Also people usually just give whatever they want translated but if you don't have what comes before and after that can make things a lot more difficult. And something like this is likely to have weird slang expressions that are very difficult to translate.

I don't want to be a dick but I don't want to just promise without seeing anything because it can be very difficult.

Also keep in mind that typical translation rates are 10 cents a word so you're asking for something that would cost typically cost 10-20 dollars--50 dollars or more if it's a long paragraph--for free.
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Translating from Japanese sucks. Very few sentences have 1:1 translations between JP and EN. Even though the meaning itself is very clear to someone who understands it, sometimes arranging your thoughts correctly to make a good translation (which, as others have mentioned, sounds natural/native instead of translated) is not easy. It's why Google translate has some hilariously garbage translations for even the simplest sentences.

For example, when I read the Japanese news in the morning and my friend asks me what an article is about, although I might understand it 100% inside, sometimes finding an elegant way to explain it in English has me sounding like ENGLISH is my second language.

Understanding a language does not mean you can translate it well. That is a separate skill on its own and tbh it's a lot more effort than most care to put forth, which is the whole point of learning a new language - to understand IN that language rather than processing it through your internal translator.
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lol I just want to translate Japanese so I can understand the meaning of the characters are saying.

sometimes arranging your thoughts correctly to make a good translation (which, as others have mentioned, sounds natural/native instead of translated) is not easy.

It's hard for a translation not to sound like a translation? Well, no shit fam! If I wanted to understand the sentences in an actual Japanese way, I'd just learn Japanese. When I want something translated, I want it in English.
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Scotty_Rogers posted...

It's hard for a translation not to sound like a translation? Well, no shit fam! If I wanted to understand the sentences in an actual Japanese way, I'd just learn Japanese. When I want something translated, I want it in English.

Look, before I learned a second language I imagined it to be easy. But it's surprising how often it can be hard to decide what the best translation is.

Like one of the most common expressions in Japanese is "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu." If you work in Japan you will probably hear it ten or more times a day. It is heavily used in any situation where people are being polite. The more casual versions "yoroshiku" or "yoroshiku ne" are also fairly common.

Here is a web page that is thousands of words long devoted just to explaining what it means:

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/yoroshiku-onegaishimasu-meaning/

Now after over a decade of speaking the language I have a good feel for what it means. But there are a lot of nuances, and it is tied into social norms which are different outside Japan. So it can be quite difficult to translate the expression.

Anyway there are reasons that anyone who is bilingual tells you that translating is harder than it seems, and that people go to school and get certification to be interpreters or translators.
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