I thought it would be interesting to revisit texts I read for LJ350 a couple of years ago, the first being a tanka by Tawara Machi, which contains the title of the collection it's from, 「サラダ記念日」.
「この味がいいね」と君が言ったら七月七月八日はサラダ記念日
Google translate: "'This tastes good,' you said, so July 6th is Salad Day.
The grammar of this poem is straightforward, so I wasn't expecting any strange results in that regard or with the general word choice. I do think that 「サラダ記念日」 shines much more as 'Salad Anniversary' (which is the official/accepted English title) since the poem is about the mundane joys of life specifically in romantic relationships, which the word anniversary directly points to.
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Just out of curiosity, I tried to put the beginning of 「鍵」by Tanizaki (https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001383/files/56846_58899.html), a novel told in alternating diary entries of a married couple, where the wife's chapters are in kanji/hiragana and the husband's in kanji/katakana (for historical reasons).
ニシタ。僕ハ自分ノ性生活ニ関スル、自分ト妻トノ関係ニツイテハ、アマリ詳細ナハ書カナイヨウニシテ来タ。
Google translate: Starting this year, I have begun to write down things that I had hesitated to write about in my diary until today. I have tried not to write in detail about my sex life or my relationship with my wife.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that the translator would be able to handle the style even without (コト・事）which is an image and couldn't be pasted in, both because Tanizaki is a very well-known author and because machine translation seems to have advanced significantly in recent years from the articles we read. Admittedly, I hadn't heard of DeepL until class this week and reading the AI/MT articles. The main thing I noticed were the tenses in the first sentence. The husband has "starting this year... begun" writing but also "had hesitated... until today," which is contradictory. The Howard Hibbett translation combines the 2nd and 3rd Japanese sentences into one for a more natural flow, so I think this version ending abruptly is not so bad. It's also a bit dry, but I haven't read the rest of the book to get an idea of this character's voice.
Sydnee
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