Lost in translation

A look into the Japanese language

written by Lex Mundy

Whenit comes to communication, nothing is more beautiful than language. The language people use to discuss the world has a direct impact on how they perceive it. Language experts are always on the lookout for words and phrases that could inadvertently affect us. By becoming more aware of the impact and influence of language, people can make the decision to express themselves and comprehend others in more intelligent and thoughtful ways.

As one of the fastest-spoken languages in the world, Japanese is the ninth most-spoken language globally and the most learned language, alongside Korean, according to Duolingo, a language-learning platform. In contrast to other languages, the Japanese language uses three distinct alphabets: Hiragana (ひらがな), Katakana (カ タカナ), and Kanji (漢字). Hiragana means “flowing” or “simple” and appears the most out of the three alphabets.

“If you studied a European language, there are tons of irregular verbs. In Japanese, there are two-like two point five-in the whole language,” says assistant professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Florida, Christopher Smith. In Japan, people don’t use phrases like “God bless you” and are less likely to say no. Smith shared this is more cultural because there is a Japanese word for no (いいえ). “However you come off as very rude if you just say no.” When speaking Japanese, someone is more likely to say, “that would be a little difficult” instead of no because the manners are different. There is a type of respect language when speaking Japanese. “You’re expected to use extra suffixes that get attached to verbs when talking to your boss or talking about your boss,” says Smith. Whereas in the United States, people can speak about their boss in any way. inevitable. Assistant professor of Japanese, Matthieu Felt, shared that the word “PasaPasa,” which means chalky or dried out in Japanese, makes it easy to describe the taste or texture of particular food while dining with his wife. Since some words and phrases lack a precise translation, some contexts may be lost during translation.

“Translating what characters are saying is one step, and for the dubbed version, you are adding another step with English voice actors, so you could lose more,” Felt mentions the ways voice actors are viewed in Japan versus America can also attribute to a loss in translation. “There’s this problem that in Japan voice actors are like a job, and people are famous for it.” He continued, “You might even notice that there’s the same voice actor who’s in multiple anime and often they even do different characters, and I feel like in the U.S. there isn’t as much of.” Animation in America tends to utilize famous celebrities. For example, in the popular Disney movie “Moana”, the Rock was the voice of Maui. “Pixar stuff, we get actors to be voice actors rather than having it be its own kind of specialized job, so I think also part of what’s lost.” explains how Old Japan never had a word for the color green because it was so close to blue, so Ao (青) represented both blue and green. It wasn’t until Japan gained contact with Korea and Chinese that the language started adding different words to represent colors. The same thing applied to the color orange in Japan, they didn’t develop a word for the color until after making contact with the English.

The difference between English and Japanese is often discussed in relation to anime when series are transitioned from subbed to dubbed. Anime is a Japanese animation style and is widely popular valuing $28.61 billion in 2022, according to Grand View Research, a market research company. Anime is originally created in subbed (spoken in Japanese with English subtitles), while dubbed is translated and spoken in English. When asking Professor Yasuo Uotate (魚立康夫), a Master Lecturer of the Japanese language at the University of Florida, his thoughts about it, he shared, “You have a limited amount of time and space on a screen to show subtitles. If you don’t understand Japanese and watch Japanese anime, you cannot avoid losing some emotion, meaning, content, etc.” People tend to watch things they can relate to; not understanding cultural upbringings or puns from different languages can alter personal opinions regarding shows, movies, and music. Uotate shared these Japanese phrases that “don’t have a direct translation in English.”

お疲れ様: Thank you (for your hard work); good work お世話になりました Thank you for helping me よろしくお願いします: Thank you 仕方がない: It’s no use

Japanese tends to use one word or phrase to describe things, whereas English requires more. 愛 means love, but Koi No Yokan: 恋の

予感 expresses love at first sight, which is

“There are historical reasons that the language is developed differently, but different languages have a different kind of set of possibilities for what you can express.”

- Dr. Matthieu Felt

Another thing that makes the language unique is its use of onomatopoeia. As Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary states, onomatopoeia is “the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it (such as buzz, hiss).” Felt says, “There’s so many onomatopoeia that they’re classified into two different types.” He mentioned that he had heard that, because of the use of onomatopoeia in Japan, European nations, particularly France, tested their cosmetics there. “It’s completely anecdotal,” he said. “They’re kind of used as adjectives to describe the way you know makeup feels on the face, and so there’s this added dimension of explaining why something is like.” The Japanese language has evolved over the past few years. This is seen in the way Japan developed words for colors over the years. “There are historical reasons that the language is developed differently, but different languages have a different kind of set of possibilities for what you can express,” says Felt. He

“In English, ‘play’ can be used for both an instrument and a game. In Japanese there’s no word that fits this description, you ‘do’ games, and you ‘blow’ wind instruments.”

- Dr. Matthieu Felt

Words can be tricky. Translating the word play is a good example. Felt states, “in English ‘play’ can be used for both an instrument and a game. In Japanese there’s no word that fits this description, you ‘do’ games, and you ‘blow’ wind instruments.”

Learning the Japanese language can be fun and different. Like Federico Fellini, Italian filmmaker says, “A different language is a different vision of life: 違う言語というのは、違う人生の ビジョンである。”