Some Pointers for Traversing Interlingual Hell – Cheryl

 I think both articles touched on differences between English and Japanese writing and speaking conventions which barely occurred to me when I was first learning Japanese but which I was realising in subtle ways: for example, in a Japanese speech or presentation you often hear the person say 「〇〇について話したいと思います」 which directly translated would be something like "I think I would like to talk about X" and sounds extremely wishy-washy in English. Inversely, when I'd first learnt Japanese I was also always slapping 「と思います」at the end of all of my sentences to approximate how often we use "I think" in English until I realised no one else was talking like that. 

While everyone knows that there are these notoriously untranslatable or mistranslated phrases like 「よろしくお願いします」or 「お疲れ様でした」it isn't always highlighted that even when a relatively precise literal translation is possible it isn't always natural. In Terry's methodology, we might translate 「〇〇について話したいと思います」as "I'd like to start by talking about X" or have the speaker just start talking about X.

In a world where translators are sometimes paid by the word, it seems a dangerous thing to concede that the best translation for something might be silence—and while I agree that this in some situations could be strictly speaking the most "accurate", would a foreign audience really be able to stomach it? For example if in an anime a character says 「いただきます！」or 「ごちそうさまでした」and for those lines of audio no subtitles appeared, would the audience dialled enough to realise that in fact, that is what an English-speaking person would have said (or not said) or would they be confused and assume that the subtitle file was missing a few nano-bytes of data? Or in a simultaneous interpretation scenario, if the non-Japanese speaker turns to their interpreter and is met with a stony wordlessness? (The interpreter might say something in explanation along the lines of "you wouldn't say anything here in English" but that is not silence.) It could be that the option of excising a phrase or sentence entirely is only available to the translator in the slightly more removed position of written text and even then only when they are able to do it discreetly. 

It seems to me that both articles were pulling at the thread that communicating in a different language is not just changing the words you speak or write, but they way you think.