Hello:
I am half Japanese, who regularly speaks Japanese with one parent, and have gone to school in Japan for short periods of time. I consider myself conversationally fluent, and self-assessed around N2 fluency.
While reading some textbooks in Japanese the other day, I came across an interesting phenomenon. Even though I can read and understand the Japanese in the textbooks, it takes me longer to translate it to English in my head than to just understand the Japanese. In short, I understand the Japanese and what the text is telling me, but it would take me longer to explain to an American friend what the textbook is talking about.
Is this normal? Or does this mean I don’t have a solid grasp on the language?
16 comments
That’s completely normal in my experience, understanding a language and being a good translator are entirely different things.
I think this is normal. The English language is hard lol and considering, for example, that Japanese text has usually a doing verb at the end of the sentence whereas English has it near the beginning.
Usually with any language it’s never going to be 100%
This is a sign you learned both languages naturally, which is infinitely better than having to translate everything.
Whatever you do, until and only if it happens naturally, don’t even think about trying to translate.
Let your “Japanese side” and “English side” function separately.
Perfectly normal. Understanding a language is a different skill than translating it. If you’re not planning to work as a translator/interpreter you shouldn’t worry about it
You’ve likely acquired Japanese as a first language. You know what sounds right, but not the linguistic (as a study) reason why.
On the other hand, your friend who’s a native English speaker would have to learn the reasons why A is A.
There’s also the fact that English and Japanese aren’t the same. You can do a direct translation (which may be unnatural) or a massaged translation, which may be more natural in the other language, but will lack nuance. The use of keigo or 〜てくれる is often glossed over in English, for example.
That is normal for languages once we reach a high level of fluency. There are schools to train professional translators for faster & better translations.
As you likely know, the JLPT principally tests input so is not a great measure of fluency. If you grew up conversationally fluent at home, your listening & speaking could be (well) beyond those of typical N1 passers, from a practical point of view (although I suppose you could be a bit short on tested vocabulary and grammar).
I think you would have a lot of fun working on your reading (and maybe writing).
It is normal. Basically, the brain connects concepts directly to the language, but translation is a separate skill of connecting a language to another language.
Agreed with all comments above!
To be a translator or interpreter, two different skills, by the way, is very complex and takes a lot of training in both languages, or more if you want to be certified in more than two… one must be highly literate in the languages for your certification. Translation, ie for reading/writing is easier. It is a slower process, as one has more time to work on the text. Interpretation is simultaneous, for listening/speaking, and can be highly stressful. It is very challenging even for languages relatively similar to one another, like English and French, for example. English and Japanese is even more challenging! One must take into account cultural matters, idioms, regional uses, and more. That is quite complex!
I am a native speaker of French and English, and also grew up learning Spanish. When I am asked to interpret, it is crazy! I took my wife and two sons to France to visit my cousine and her family. With eight of us at the table and me the one who is bilingual, it was a very hard job. Sometimes I would speak French to the English speakers, and then I would do the same thing in English for the French speakers. I would have needed a lot of training to know how to do interpretation for a career.
Still, by means of comparison, the average high school student is at about intermediate fluency in his or her native language. Getting to advanced, superior or distinguished requires intense college-level work and beyond. Lots to consider!
This is pretty normal. Translation is a skill all it’s own that people train for.
I’m also Bilingual. I’m a native English speaker and ethnically Korean. I’ve gone through undergrad in the US and graduate school in Korea and have lived in both countries for over 15 years each. It is completely normal for you to take longer to translate and not surprising if you require the use of a Japanese-English dictionary to find the best word for translation. The only way to improve the time it takes to translate would be to practice translating on a regular basis. However, unless your goal is to become a translator its really not necessary. Don’t try to become Google translate. Your strength as a bilingual is that you understand the nuances and cultural connotations that a speedy computer cannot grasp.
What you are describing is the goal of most language learners and what non-heritage learners are jealous of.
This happen to me too. I’m a native spanish speaker and I can understand, en/fr/jpn/and a bit of german and chinese, but when it comes to translate them to spanish it’s like if I wouldn’t know spanish or takes me a bit of time to put the idea into spanish although I perfectly understand the idea in the foreign language. It’s kinda funny because sometimes is just a word that I can’t fit into an spanish meaning.
That’s why I hate when people ask me to translate smth on the go even though I can speak them fluently (in the case of german and chinese, almost fluent).
I think, I can’t explain nuances and more detailed connotations to normal people because they can’t think out of their native language box. So I just do very simple and rough translations instead of deep and more polished interpretations.
That is a normal phenomenon. That is why there is a translation major in college.
If it isn’t your goal to be a translator, then why on earth would you be translating shit in your head anyway?
That’s individual. I naturally can translate between known languages, but this habit of mine sometimes hinders me, because I tend to use wording from one language in another and sometimes it’s not how it’s actually expressed there.
On the other hand, if you ask me why something is so in my native language, I will have to spend quite some time to analyze it, because I don’t remember majority of school rules and simply know what sounds good and what doesn’t. So it’s natural to be able to use without understanding, because you don’t think in rules, which can be applied to thousands of different situations, you know these thousands of different situations instead.
>Is this normal?
Yes. You haven’t built associations between languages and what certain things in one could map to in the other, so you end up stumped until you figure out what you’d say.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can learn to overcome that. Just heed the golden rule: do not mix and match languages, or you’ll end up unable to speak either (because you’ll want to slip words from one in the other).