Can anyone help me puzzle out this sentence?

4 comments

1. I’m probably missing some cultural knowledge about Japanese school clubs and their activities but here’s my best shot:

   発表の場を持っている I would interprete as they have responsibility for holding presentations.

   部活単位でも as part of their club activities.

2. A more literal translation of the first half would be:

   “The cultural activities club*) provides an opportunity （〜の場を持っている here similar to 〜場を設けている) for holding presentations even at the club (activities) level”, suggesting that takes up a lot of their time without even taking into consideration whatever other activities are referred to in the larger context.

   *) 文化部 is usually a collective term referring to clubs related to, well, any kind of cultural activity. So depending on context one might need to change it to plural, i.e. that students beloging to one of the clubs from the culture “department” already have opportunities to present at the level of the individual clubs.

3. Can you provide some more context here?

   What was the explanation of? Whose events were delayed? The culture club students? The sports club students? Or some other club?

   The “raw” translation is roughly “The culture club has the opportunity for presentation even as an activity club, the sports club, the sports club’s training time is long during the year”.

   As you can see, the above can mean different things depends on what *final decision* it was justifying, since it kinda makes the case for one or the other, or both.

4. This is screaming out for some more context to get a proper translation – it would make it easiest if we had gotten the surrounding 1-2 sentences. But given that limitation…

   [First take a look at this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTidHbBClEs), the 文化部発表会, or “Culture Club Recital/Presentation”. Maybe that will make it a bit more clear what this means by 発表の場 – a bit like in English 場 here could be translated as “space”, in that it’s either a physical place or talking about the opportunity to do something (“Today’s meeting will give us a space to discuss our concerns on the project”).

   持っている usually is thought of as meaning to own/possess something, but when talking about locations or especially events it often means “to maintain” that thing, to keep it going, to make it available, etc.

   部活単位 is a “unit/denomination of club activities”, here seeming to mean like, “the baseline of club activities”, “one of the simplest building blocks of their club activities”, etc.

   Given that, and knowing it will not be completely accurate given the insufficient context, I’d translate it like this:

   > The culture clubs, before even taking their events into account, must maintain and organize the space to hold those events, and the sports clubs have long hours of practice throughout the year.