Of course it’s not always the case but I’ll give an example of what I mean.
Example: I was looking up たって on Takuboto Dictionary and the translation it gives is “even if; even though; however; no matter how) and that makes sense and all but..
Then I went to the Phrases section and I was wondering why almost none of the english translations is using any of those translations.
Example: The first example in Japanese they give is 今それを直そうったって無駄だ。and you learned that たって means “even if” but than the english translation they give is. “It’s no use trying to fix it now.” No trace of “even if” or any of the other translation.
Why wouldn’t it use something like “Even if you are trying to fix it now it’s no use.” ? It might not be as elegant as the first translation but it would use “even if” and it would still show the same meaning I think.
Another example with the same word 見てなくたっていいよお。I would have translated it as “Even if you don’t see it’s fine.” The dictonary gives you “You don’t have to stand over me.” as a translation Maybe it’s my undeveloped japanese, maybe it’s my missing english skills (I’m not a native) but things like this confuse me more than they would be helpful.
3 comments
I’ve seen this happen with large scale translation projects before, and it turned out the translation was done by different people at different times, and was separated from the context.
So the translator is handed the sentence 見てなくたっていいよお。to translate but nobody tells them it will appear under the sentence examples for “Even if”
A lot of times the translator team is simply given a big spreadsheet or database of words and phrases. Translating in context is still something companies are learning how to do.
i guess i have nothing to say about the translation part but if you want to see how a word is used try this site https://massif.la/ja
> Why wouldn’t it use something like “Even if you are trying to fix it now it’s no use.” ? It might not be as elegant as the first translation but it would use “even if” and it would still show the same meaning I think.
Well, because this specific case is something that really annoys me in translations from Japanese in how they overuse “if” and similar words.
> Another example with the same word 見てなくたっていいよお。I would have translated it as “Even if you don’t see it’s fine.”
You shouldn’t. It should be something like “I don’t care whether you’ve seen it or not.”.
I suppose the reason they teach you this is to teach you how one would actually use these forms of speech in actual sentences. In particular Japanese heavily uses conditionals to indicate desires or expectations. “食べたらいい。” really should be seen as “You should eat.” not “It’s good if you eat.” “妹さえいればいい。” is, correctly translated as “A sister’s all you need.” not “It’s fine if just a sister exists.”
This is a problem most common with conditionals. Japanese simply uses them often to indicate desirable and undesirable situations by literally saying “If X then it’s bad.” the correct translation is simply “You shouldn’t do X.”
Let me reverse this issue from English. If you say something like “I’m in the middle of work right now.”, do you conversely think a literal translation such as “今は仕事の中央にいる。” is correct which sounds as strange as “I’m in the centre of my work right now.” That’s simply not what “I’m in the middle of…” in English means; it has the same meaning as “I’m busy with …”