I’m mainly speaking from the viewpoint of translating (non basic dialog) from Japanese > English or Mandarin > English which often or not gets the results wrong or the translation is terrible (that is something you barely hear when you translate let’s say from German > English), you know the mistakes upon learning any language when you translate from the target one to your native tongue alongside the nuances, grammar and sentence structure.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
    5·
    9 minutes ago

    I think this doesn’t have to do with the writing system, but with how heavily a culture relies on context to convey meaning. In general, East Asian cultures do it way more than the ones from Western Europe and the Americas, so Japanese/Mandarin/Korean/etc. speakers are way more likely to omit contextually clear words than German/English/French/etc. speakers. And if the translator is inexperienced they might try to translate the sentences word-by-word, or even get the context wrong, and in both cases you’ll get issues.

    EDIT: crafted a cute example based on… well, weeb knowledge. Consider the following situations.

    1. Your friend stumbled and fell down, and you’re worried they might have hurt themself.
    2. You stumbled and fell down. You didn’t hurt yourself, but a friend is worried you did.

    Your typical English speaker would answer #1 with “are you alright?” and #2 with “I’m alright.” Or similar. They might perhaps clip the verb from #1, or replace “alright” with “okay” from either, but the subject will be always there.

    And yet that’s exactly what Japanese does with “大丈夫” daijōbu. Sure, you could phrase it as a question in #1, like “大丈夫ですか。” daijōbu desu ka?, but for most part you don’t need to; and you’re certainly not including the pronoun, it’s kind of obvious that the word refers to whoever fell down.

    Now. Imagine you’re translating that “大丈夫” into English. A noob translator might translate it with “alright”… and it gets hella confusing — what is supposed to be alright? Or they might pick the context wrong, and translate it as “I’m alright” when it’s supposed to be “are you alright?” or vice versa.

    Except Japanese won’t do this just with the pronoun, or the “hey, this is a question!” mark. It’ll do it pretty much all the time — why two words, one enough?