Translation is slow and painstaking work. Not my favorite, but I’m faced with an e-mail full of Japanese answers to my English interview questions.

It’s easy enough to get the general meaning of text by reading for the nouns and verbs. but the nuances are in all of the joining phrases and particles. Using ga instead of wo casts the entire sentence in a different light. Conjugations are key, too. “Can not know” and “do not know” are close but not exactly the same, are they?

I need to quote this interviewee for my current article but in English, not in Japanese. So I’m sitting here with my dictionaries, grammar books and online translation aids trying to get the shades of meaning right. I will never be a professional translator, that’s very clear! Posted by kuri at May 08, 2002 10:40 AM