Cloud Cuckoo

[steepholm]

I thought I might try my hand at translating English poetry into Japanese, taking "Daffodils" as a test text. (This is just a literal translation, note - no attempt at anything beautiful or subtle.)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills

Becomes, as far as I can render it:

丘と谷の上高く浮かんでいた雲ほど寂しく彷徨ういました。

But it amused me to see what I was forced to do to the word order. This, my friends, is left-branching syntax at work:

[I] hills and dales o'er on high floating cloud as lonely wandered

Now, proof of concept fluttering in the breeze, let us away to The Prelude!

Comments

[cmcmck]

Wonder how it works in the strangeness that is German?

[steepholm]

Time was, I could have told you that - but I find I only have room in my head for one foreign language at a time (as I discovered last year in Luxembourg, when I heard myself thanking a shopkeeper with "Arigatou gozaimasu!").

[cmcmck]

I have a tendency to thank people in Italian in France so you're not alone! :o)

[calimac]

1) Does that actually read more intelligibly in Japanese than it does re-translated back into English? Based on what I know of German, it probably does.

2) If the poem were in Japanese, would an actual translator into English reverse the word order to normal English?

3) Is failure to do grammatical translation like that responsible for the unintelligibility of the English-language instructions for Japanese electronic products?

[steepholm]

1) I hope so! That was my intention, anyway.

2) I would imagine so - that's usually part of what translators take to be within their remit.

3) To an extent, but in some ways what I've done there is the kind of thing that computer algorithms can handle quite well. If you tell a machine translator that, for example, in a language A we use post-nominal relative clauses ("a cloud that floats on high") but that language B uses left-branching syntax ("a high-floating cloud") then, as long as it correctly identifies the parts of speech, it shouldn't have too much trouble. Put my sentence into Google Translate, for example, and you get "I wandered as lonely as the clouds floating above the hills and valleys", which isn't at all bad. (Japanese doesn't have plurals either intrinsically or in terms of verb conjugation, so I can forgive Google for getting the number of clouds wrong.) The real problems kick in with differences in cultural context, ambiguous grammar, and what's left implicit. In Japanese that's often a lot - see the "[I]" in my translation above, for example, which I omitted from the Japanese, even though I could have included it, because most Japanese people would do so, unless there were danger of people misunderstanding who was doing the wandering.

[larryhammer]

2) Speaking as a sometimes translator of Japanese poems, I routinely use standard English word order, unless the original is out of standard Japanese order or there's a specific suspensive effect that feels important to capture. If the original isn't strange to a native speaker, the translation shouldn't be either.

3) No, that's usually just lack of fluency.