Eight Ways to Say You

 Sloane McLean

We've been talking a lot in class about whether or not we should translate certain idioms exactly as they are, or whether we should alter or even omit them altogether. Cathy Hirano's article touched on similar topics with the issue of translating jokes, and the example she gave with the child's use of 君 and her struggles to translate how that came across.

But, what was most interesting to me, even though it was barely touched on, was the description Hirano gave of how the structures of English/Japanese language themselves come across when translated directly into one another. I know that in English we address one another more directly, but never realized the actual structure of our prose itself can come across as "crude and abrasive, insulting the [Japanese] reader's intelligence with [its] bluntness." Addressing this issue seems like it would be the most difficult part of translation for me specifically, because I don't yet understand Japanese well enough to be able to pick up on what is the tone/voice of a specific character or author, versus what is just a common way to express a certain thought in Japanese. I'm afraid I would mischaracterize the tone of the original writing in a way that would be untrue to how natives interpret the source material.