Readme

Hello! Here are some things to keep in mind when reading my translations or requesting a translation.

I'm a native English speaker, and a fluent but non-native speaker of Japanese. I’ve been studying independently and in a mix of university and community language courses for over 15 years, and converse in Japanese regularly, in addition to being able to read over 2000 kanji. That being said, my major wasn’t in Japanese language, literature, culture, or history. I don't work as, or have any formal experience working as, a translator or interpreter. I’ve lived in Japan but didn’t grow up there; I have some familiarity with Japanese cultural and media touchstones, but there are obviously a lot of gaps in my knowledge.

In short, I feel fairly confident in my understanding of things these days, but I want to stress that I’m not a professional translator and don't really want to be. I'm doing this for fun, because I enjoy using the language and constantly learning more about it.

I have a background in writing - mostly that's analytical writing (essays, explications, literature reviews). I place a high value on fluency and rhythm. I want my translations to sound like something real people would actually say (or sing, or write), without straying too far from the underlying meaning. I want the words to feel good, but I also want to capture as much of the tone, emotion, and implication of the original text as possible. I want you to understand it like I do.

Often "accuracy" and "fluency" are directly at odds with one another. Often there are grammatical gaps that can only be filled through a subjective decision. I do my best in those situations, but the result is always going to end up skewed to one side or the other. Them's the breaks.

Language is cool. These are a few of the quirks of Japanese that will unavoidably influence how my translations sound.

Omission of Subjects/Objects - English is super strict about word order, and generally requires all relevant parts of speech to be present in any given sentence in order for that sentence to be grammatical.

But a lot of languages, including Japanese, frequently omit subjects or objects if those things are assumed to be known already. In Japanese, the most commonly omitted subjects are “I”, “you”, or “it”.

I’ll do my best to guess at subjects or objects while translating in order to make grammatically comprehensible phrases in English. I may translate active verbs as passive to avoid implicating a subject when it’s especially unclear. That being said, I’m always using some of my own interpretation here, especially when it comes to lyrics. There’s always a chance I’m giving a misleading impression of the message compared to what a Japanese listener might understand - though some lines end up being equally confusing in both languages.

Voice & POV - It’s not uncommon for Japanese songs to be written in a “voice” separate from the singer’s, or even to feature multiple “characters” that are distinguished by gendered personal pronouns, terms of address, and styles of speech. Quotes from unknown or implied third parties can also show up in lyrics. Most of these will probably be footnoted, since it’s pretty difficult to convey in English.

Artistic Spellings - Due to the language’s history, there’s no consistent or inherent connection in Japanese between how borrowed Chinese characters (kanji) are pronounced and what they mean. This has lead to a strong artistic tendency for words to be spelled with characters that emphasize the word’s double meaning or true meaning, while being pronounced as a different word - usually a word that's related and comprehensible by ear, unlike the “non-standard” spelling.

Sometimes characters are used phonetically, while still having inherent meanings of their own; sometimes homophones are used that wouldn’t change the meaning upon listening, but do change the meaning upon reading the official lyrics. This can lead to single words having meta-layers of meaning that are hard to convey in English.

I really love this trend. It's stupid hard to try to get across, but I will sometimes bend my translations to try to make sure the written English contains all the same information as the written Japanese did.