I apologize if this is the wrong reddit to ask this in… I’ve been trying to learn japanese for years but feel I still know little and some things still greatly confuse me.
Recently at work I’ve had an opportunity to work on a japanese translation of an english e-learning (we sent the script to translators and then i pasted said script into the course.) I thought it went smoothly… until one of my coworkers wanted me to remove a bunch of line breaks and have large portions of text all on one line. This will break the layout visually as it was not designed to hold long horizontal lines of text.
My original assumption was if you don’t break words from thir particles the text should roughly keep its meaning… But my coworker says it changes the meaning of the sentence entirely.
Let’s say I have a button on screen that is supposed to say ‘properties of hazardous chemicals” which the translates to:有害化学物質の特性
But due to the graphic it is on I had tried to wrap it to:
有害化学物質
の特性
But I’m being told this removes its meaning…
I tried finding apps online hoping I could find some automated way of making legible text wraps quickly, but have had no luck. And trying to google how word wrapping and line breaks work in japanese has only made me more confused… some things I’ve read say because japanese has no spaces, word wrapping/line breaking isn’t an issue and there aren’t many rules for it apart from punctuation… Then other things say it completely changes the meaning of what you are saying…
Please help X_X
5 comments
I just alway break after a particle if I can. It looks and reads pretty clean that way to me. I think most people can carry context over to the next line. I mean manga bubbles have some hecking weird breaks sometimes.
If you must break a longer text, do it after particles. Particles are placed at the end of what they are marking, so starting a new line with a particle not attached to anything is a bit weird, especially if it’s just a sentence fragment that’s obviously trying to be concise. In your case, 「有害化学物質の 特性」 would have been more acceptable.
With something like prose which gives a lot more context than a concise sign, there’s more leeway to cut in the middle of a word and things like that.
I’ve been wondering about this too, because I’ve seen – in books – line breaks *in the middle of words.* I’m honestly not sure what to think anymore. I’ve just begun to assume that perhaps there are no line-break rules I’m particular… but there have to be, surely?
Always split after the particle. You tend to take natural pauses to breathe after particles and punctuation marks when reading out loud so it facilitates that as well.
It’s the same as english. You wouldn’t randomly take a breather in the middle of a clause or before the word in front of a comma/full stop so you don’t do that in Japanese either.
There aren’t really any rules regarding line breaks. Native texts regularly break lines in the middle of a clause, even the middle of words.
I have to really drill it into my students that you can’t split an English word between lines like you can a Japanese word because they do it all the time.