Are shite kureru?

Ponder the following sentences:

The bird of the hand is a value of 2 of the bushes

The wood falls with the forest, if everyone inquiring about that it is not there, is sound made?

Which rank wood if as for the woodchuck the woodchuck can install the wood with the chuck, is installed with the chuck?

The idiot and your that money divide directly

For those a little slow on the uptake, those sentences are English sayings and expressions translated into Japanese by babelfish, and then translated back to English again. Now, I'm not saying that the comical outcomes are entirely the fault of Japanese- of course electronic translators are not going to be perfect. But, just for fun, let's try that last one with some other languages.

Russian: Fool and his den'g will be soon divided
Greek: One fool and his money are separated shortly
Korean: The fool and his money are disjointed quickly

Just something to think about.

Actually, my initial results from Japanese are probably more accurate than they should be since they were translated from translated, not natural Japanese. Natural Japanese would probably translate into something completely unintelligible.

Japanese is basically impossible to translate mechanically. It is a prime example of what they refer to in linguistics as a “high context” language, that is, a language wherein the interlocutors need to have copious amounts of shared information in order for the conversation to run smoothly. The beginnings or ends of sentences- ie the subject or main verb- are regularly omitted, meaning that at times the actual thing or person being talked about is never mentioned. For example "iimashita ne" would be a natural sentence. Basically iimashita is "to say" in the past tense, and "ne" is a particle that seeks agreement from the interlocutor. So, a literal translation could be "Said, right?", and a correct translation could only be done after listening to the entire conversation, maybe even from the very beginning, in order to find out who did the "saying". And that's only half the battle- that "ne" is pretty tricky to nail down. Depending on the inflection it could mean all kinds of things. As a non-native speaker, just off the top of my head I would say that "Iimashita ne" could mean "Oh, that's right, he said that didn't he" (being reminded), or "I guess I did say that didn't I?"(accepting correction) "Yeah, he said that"(confirmation), or "That's what you said, isn't it?"(accusation).


To compound matters, while Japanese has an overwhelming amount of vocabulary to deal with, a shockingly small amount is used in daily conversation. Mostly they repeat the same phrases and adjectives over and over, until the meanings of those words become so nebulous and heavy with connotation that they become entities in themselves. A good example of this is the phrase “Shou ga nai”, which means, ‘it can’t be helped’, or ‘there’s no way around it’. This is not an expression people use when they have carefully weighed all their options and determined that there was simply no hope. This is a label people affix on any situation they don’t want to deal with, for whatever reason, but there is absolutely no rebuttal for it. You can’t say “Shou ga aru” (trust me- I tried; they laughed). You don’t need any reason for using the phrase except for that you use it; it’s a reason in itself. Once when I questioned my boss’s quick surrender on an issue he actually said “Shou ga nai kara shou ga nai.” –‘Well, there’s no way around having no way around it.’ Or, more precisely ‘There’s no way around my having to say shou ga nai.” Once something has been branded Shou ga nai it is tossed forever into the landfill of things we just have to learn to live with, and there’s no fighting it once the shou ga nai axe has fallen. That’s how powerful the phrase has become- and there's certainly no way to explain all that in a dictionary.

Sometimes, when my co-workers are feeling exceptionally lazy, they’ll completely dispense with entire words, phrases, or concepts and just say are, which means “that”. As in Are deskara, ikanaidesne – "Well, there’s that so he probably won’t go". Or Are desu ne. "Oh, that’s that isn’t it?" Confused yet? Sometimes my co-workers hand me things and say “Are shite” which means “Do that”. And I’m just supposed to know which “that” they mean. And I do... now.

One of my favorite games to play as I'm walking down the street is to imagine someone incredibly booksmart who studied Japanese in their home country for several years. This person (in my imagination, for some reason, a slim brunette), has managed to memorize the dictionary definition of every word in the Japanese language and has a technical knowledge of all the grammar, but has received no cultural training in the slightest and has never interacted with a Japanese speaker before. As I'm walking or riding the train I listen to the snatches of conversation around me or read the advertisements on the walls. Most of what I hear and see wouldn't make a lick of sense to the brunette, as it requires too much background information to understand- even assuming what would technically be called "fluency".

Now, I hate to buy into nihonjinron, but it does seem to me that Japanese is a language more married to its culture and context than others. Of course, language divorced from its context will always be absurd- or at least not totally understood, but its my contention that Japanese is especially absurd. If you disagree with me- great. I'd love to hear some examples of context-dependent features of other languages. If you disagree with me without any examples, that's fine. After all, as they say, "It is not possible to do the beverage in him who can lead the horse to the water"!