Hi. I was wondering how to best translate “TAIHEN!” in English, as in, something very bad has happened or when you receive terrible news on the phone and immediately run to someone else in the house to inform them. I’m not a native English speaker either so I’m having trouble coming up with a suitable word or expression. I was thinking something along the lines of “big trouble!” or “disaster!” would do but I’ll be very grateful if you could help me with more options.
8 comments
You don’t try to use a singular word just re-write the feeling and idea to match the English. “Something serious has happened.” is one way you can phrase it. If said in a direct tone it conveys a sense that something potentially disastrous has happened without saying what exactly has happened and gets peoples attention.
That’s rough. That’s terrible. That sucks. That’s too bad.
there’s no single translation because there’s many uses
and limiting a translation to a single word is arbitrary
in general, single-word translations are not a good idea
the particular usage you’re looking for in this case might be “oh, no!”, though
In my British family it would be ‘… fucking hell!’
But that’s not appropriate for every situation obviously 😅
It’s very contextual. This is an unusual usage as well (not the first thing you’d learn) so by the time you need to use this, I imagine you’ll have intuition to help you out here.
That said, I’d go with something like “Hey, I’ve got bad news” or “Oh my god!” depending on the nature of the news and how you want to deliver it.
“How awful!”
(opinion) it is bad practice to try and mentally convert/translate words from one language to another language. Because you will end up spending more time mentally flipping back and forth mentally translating in your head, and slowing down your speaking and understanding.
Just understand it’s use case in the native language and only see and read and understand it as 大変
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It’s what I have to do when I’m speaking Korean with family or Japanese with my SO or English with other people on Reddit/America/etc.
an important thing to know about english compared to japanese is that japanese has a word for like, everything lol. and in english we mostly just describe something.
大変 is a great “catch all” kind of word because it can be used in a large variety of situations. but in english we don’t have that.
so we wouldn’t say “danger!” or “trouble!”.
we would say something sort of tailored to what the news is and how severe it is.
often as a response to someone telling you bad news about themselves you’d say “im so sorry!” or “that’s terrible!”
something not too serious you might say “that’s rough” or “im sorry..”
something very severe you might say “oh my god im so sorry” with a sympathetic voice. people sometimes say “im so sorry, that’s terrible, i dont know what to say”. and close and/or caring people would often add “if you need anything let me know” or “im always here for you if you need anything”.
for your specific question like getting a call of bad news and running to someone else to tell them, it also depends on what the news is and the severity. and who it impacts.
ill just come up with some examples.
(news that a celebrity died)
you’d probably just straight up tell the other person the news. just “i just saw on the news, Michael Jackson died” and then that would start a conversation.
(news that a friend or loved one died that impacts the person you are telling)
“im sorry but, i just got off the phone and Jerry was hit by a car, he didn’t make it”
anything not particularly personally impactful to the person your are informing, you just tell them what happened. maybe say “something bad happened” as an opener.
“something happened..”
“what?”
and then you tell them
if it is personally impactful, you speak with a more sympathetic voice and say “im sorry” before or after giving the news.
so in summary, you mostly just give the news. you dont need to alert them first with a word like 大変. as long as you have their attention you just tell them.
and say sympathetic things if it’s something likely to upset or cause distress.
edit: and as a general tip, if you dont know the word for something in english, just use descriptive words instead. in a lot of situations its not weird at all, especially if they know you are foreign (they are used to hearing foreigners talk like that). and also a lot of the time there is NOT a word for it in english an native speakers would describe it anyways.
this is why when looking at a japanese english dictionary you often see single japanese words with a full sentence or two of english to reflect the translation.
this is a totally over used example but its the first one that always comes to mind. 賢者タイム does not have an english word. the usual casual term in english is “post nut clarity”. we just describe the situation.