A place to learn Japanese.

新しい思い (あたらしいおもい) ; NEW IDEA

I've recently had a brain fart. (As well as the regular kind, I eat alot of veggies lately...) I've spent a great deal of time translating from Japanese to english, in song lyrics that is. I decided yesterday that I also want to translate songs from english to Japanese. In the past translating from Japanese to english is HARD. It might take anywhere from an entire afternoon to several days to translate an entire song, depending on how many breaks I take. (I have a husband, dog, kids, and a house too..)

As you may already know, in Japanese sentence structure goes as follows. Subject-object-verb. However, in romance languages such as spanish, french, and my native tongue english it is subject-verb-object. This frequently makes it difficult for me. Cuz, not only you translate word for word, but you must rearrange the order of the words in the phrase entirely.

Also, in Japanese, at times the subject is omitted from the sentence. In english I might say, "I am tired." However, in Japanese it would be, "Nemutai desu, " or "Nemutai." You could say, "Watashi wa nemutai desu," however, I think most native speakers would say, "Nemutai desu," or "Nemutai". Is this understandable?

Also, sometimes in Japanese, the phrase feels longer to express the connotation. Like here;

"Furidashita yuki ga atari wo somete," <--15 syllables in Japanese (snow fell to begin a new) <-- 7 syllables in english

In a song this poses the challenge of having both phrases fit into the same section of the song when that phrase is sung in a particular stanza. When this is the case, it might be plausible to alter the pharse so that the translation is not exaclty a "literal" translation.

BTW, that example I used is from 雪の足跡 (Yuki No Ashiato) by L'Arc~en~Ciel.

Anyhoo... I have a lot of work to do...