Sulphur on 25/8/2017 at 07:03
Fair enough if that's Murakami's actual style; it's a shame, since Japanese can be quite poetic. There's bits in 1Q84 that emphasise a character's tendency to ask things without a 'question mark', which refers to her tendency to omit the 'ka' at the end of questions in the original Japanese. It gives one the sense that there's a layer of linguistic feeling that's missing.
Starker on 25/8/2017 at 18:57
While I haven't read 1Q84, Murakami writes genre fiction, so it's not exactly supposed to be poetry in the first place. But the experience of reading in Japanese vs reading in English is certainly different -- that's just the nature of translation. For example, Jay Rubin has said that Murakami's sentences often feel like they have been translated from English and there is just no way to accurately reproduce this exact same awkwardness in English. The best the translator can do is to tweak the English sentences to sound awkward in a different way.
Sulphur on 25/8/2017 at 19:43
I suppose one could run the English text through Babelfish to Japanese and back again if that really needs approximating.
demagogue on 25/8/2017 at 20:55
Ha, this conversation came up in my work this week. We've been noticing how different the language is between writing natively in English and Japanese versus translating J->E and E->J, respectively. So we'll have debates about which language to write natively in and translate, or if it's worth re-writing the same thing natively in the other language, although that takes more time.
And there's also definitely a way you can write English-like in Japanese and Japanese-like in English (natively). Doubling up on Babelfish, while that might do a few things, doesn't really capture how deeply the differences go. It's more different outlooks on the world. One example I noticed recently, in Japanese-English you can refer to "this one" as a pronoun because it's not really a thing in itself, it's an occupation of time and space relative to you (it's not "it" as a poster on a wall, it's the "one" before you grabbing attention), and "come back" is a set verb because it's a set verb in Japanese that's different than returning (most words actually don't line up exactly), so you could say a sentence like "You must look at this one when you come back." which sounds plain odd in English. And it's sentence after sentence like that.
Well this has been a tangent. It's my day to day struggle though.
Starker on 25/8/2017 at 22:45
Yeah, I've started my first fumbling attempts translating from Japanese and it's quite a challenge to find the right balance. I just finished a short story by Banana Yoshimoto and it doesn't feel like the original at all. It's tough to make it sound natural yet feel Japanese.
Renzatic on 25/8/2017 at 23:28
Out of curiosity, what does it sound like when Japanese is literally translated as written and spoken into English?
Starker on 25/8/2017 at 23:45
Well, for example 仕方がない / しょうがない gets often translated as "can't be helped", whereas it would be far better to translate it as "shit happens" or "c'est la vie" or even "so it goes".
Or did you mean how would a sentence sound in a literal word for word translation?
Renzatic on 25/8/2017 at 23:54
Like a literal word for word translation, yeah.
demagogue on 26/8/2017 at 01:10
Yeah, it reads exactly backwards from English a lot of times. You often start with the verb at the end to get a handle of what's going on. And it's "head final", which means the noun or whatever you're talking about is at the end, and then you stack up qualifiers in front of it (I saw my old friend on the street walking with his sister this morning. => this morning street on his-sister-with-the-store-to-walking-old-friend I saw)
But more than anything, Japanese can just keep tacking on clauses so you get insanely long sentences that just meander all over the place, and it's often not clear what's the subject of particular clauses because they'll just leave it out. In English you'd want to break it into 2 or 3 sentences, and have a complete sentences, subject and predicate, for each clause, because even doing it as close to word for word as you can get (re-ordering it like that video example) still leaves you with a long and messy sentence.
My most complicated homework recently was we had to read a novel in Japanese, and I picked Stalker (Roadside Picnic). That was one of the most bewildering experiences of my life. If you've ever read it, or even if you just know the movie or game, it has all of these bizarre artifacts with crazy names that do crazy things. It's bewildering enough in your native language, but trying to understand it through a foreign language like Japanese was a whole other level of bizarre! Awful, awful decision at the time (in terms of giving a book report), but in retrospect it was a kind of awesome decision (in terms of the experience). Since then I've gone back to movies, tv, and comics. Shorter phrases, images, context!