Translation bridges words and cultures. The difficulty of translating “I love you.”

Here’s a phrase in English. How would you all translate it?

I love you.

This is a really simple phrase that we learn in middle school. Based on the meanings of the individual words and the subject-verb relationship, it literally translates to “I - love - you.” Very simple.

There’s an interesting anecdote that made me think, though I’m not sure if it’s true or not. It’s from when Soseki Natsume worked as an English teacher. He’s a novelist and one of the greatest writers of the Meiji era, ending up as the face of the 1,000 yen bill. When one of his students first translated the phrase as “How I adore you,” he responded, “Japanese people don’t say that kind of thing. Translate it as ‘The moon looks beautiful, doesn’t it?’ instead.”

Today, you might translate the phrase as “I am in love with you” or “I love you.” You hear this phrase a lot in Japanese songs, but is “I love you” a phrase you all actually use in your daily lives? Even if it’s not regularly, is it a phrase you’ve used in the past? Do you think the phrase used to express love in the distant future will still be “I love you?”

I wonder, do Japanese people really not say “I love you?” I can’t be sure either way. But here is where the difficulty in such a translation lies.

If you just look at the words and grammar of “I love you” when converting it into Japanese, it’s quite easy. With that train of thought, the majority of English literature could be converted into Japanese with just the English we learn from middle and high school. But “converting text to Japanese” and “translating” are two very different things.

Why did Soseki Natsume say, “Japanese people don’t say that kind of thing. Translate it as ‘The moon looks beautiful, doesn’t it?’ instead?” How do you derive talking about the moon from the original phrase “I love you?”

In short, I think it has to do with cultural differences.

It’s hard to give an all-encompassing definition for the word “culture,” but it includes factors like a language’s traits, ideology, food, clothing, housing, religion, history, business customs, design preferences, and more. And all these factors affect the subtle differences in translation.

When going between languages, you can’t just take the surface meanings of terms from the dictionary or textbooks on grammar. With Japanese utterances for example, you have to look closely at the special traits of the Japanese language, and the mindset and culture of Japanese speakers who grew up in Japan. And then you have to choose your wording carefully.

Soseki Natsume said to translate “I love you” as “The moon is beautiful, isn’t it?” because he understood that Japanese has a refined nature, as it doesn’t use straightforward expressions. He wanted to emphasize that love is expressed by having a shared experience of gazing at something beautiful, that this concept is unique to Japanese and Japan, and that it should be reflected in the word choice.

It’s a stretch going from “I love you” to “The moon is beautiful isn’t it?” and it’s probably a bit hard to see how culture influences translation, so here are a few more examples.

Say your family is talking about what to do for New Year’s and your child says, “过年吃饺子吧.” In Chinese, this means, “Let’s eat some dumplings on new year’s.” In China, people generally eat dumplings or tangyuan (a dessert with small balls made from rice flour) on New Year’s. However, it’s not the norm in Japan to eat dumplings on New Year’s, and to keep people who’ve grown up in a Japanese language setting from having a “sounds like a lame New Year” type response, it would be like switching out dumplings and saying, “Let’s eat some soba noodles on New Year’s” instead. This is translation that keeps cultural differences in mind.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Sister Act”? It’s a movie title. “Sister” refers to nuns and “act” refers to a performance or pretending, so the phrase “sister act” implies “a girls group made up of sisters.” The film follows a female vocalist who witnesses a crime and is then pursued by the organization, so she takes refuge at a convent, is appointed to lead the choir, and then helps the choir improve. So it’s a play on words, since it involves a group of “sisters” who sing + a woman pretending to be a nun.

The Japanese title of the movie is “A love song for the angels...” Just translating the English title would make for something like “Nuns who act” in Japanese. When people with a Japanese cultural upbringing hear the term “nun,” it’s a hazy concept and it’s hard for them to imagine what Catholic nuns even look like, so a title like that would make it hard for them to imagine what the movie is even about.

Which is why even though English speakers hear the term “sister” in the title and understand the pun, the translator probably decided that it would be hard for a Japanese audience to make those connections. I’m sure they wanted to make a simple and catchy title in Japanese, which is why they went with “A love song for the angels...”

Puns play a big role and though translating them might take linguistic factors into account, if the speakers of the target language can’t connect, then you might need to add or take something, generalize the wording, or change the wording to make it more understandable without just directly translating it. That’s what a translator does.

Note the cultural factors, and if those factors aren’t necessary, try generalizing, adding or removing things, or switching out text to match the culture. Translating isn’t as simple as just reading the text and converting it into something rigid like in a textbook. You need a three-dimensional understanding of both cultures involved and to be able to convey that in your word choices. You not only need to understand a culture, but you also need to keep text length in mind as you translate when you have a limited amount of space. You need to possess an immense vocabulary and expressivity. That’s not an easy thing to do.

Translation not only involves converting the text, but keeping in mind the mindset and culture as well so that the message is properly conveyed to speakers of the target language, which can be quite a challenge. Translators are bridges between two languages and cultures. The next time you read something translated from or into Japanese, I hope you take a moment to ask yourself - how was the original text formatted? How are the mindset and culture of Japanese or other language speakers reflected? I think you’ll enjoy the process.

(Dante Takahashi)

Reference material:
https://shiomilp.hateblo.jp/entry/2016/07/08/012959
http://released.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-7.html