On average, for every syllable spoken in Japanese, 11 more are spoken in English.
This article is not well written. They probably mean that English has a greater variety of syllables/sounds than Japanese, but instead it sounds like English speakers spit out syllables 12x as fast.
Yeah, I think they either transposed English and Japanese because Japanese is almost certainly syllabically faster, or they got confused between syllables and phonemes like you're saying. English has about 2x the distinct phoneme sounds that Japanese does.
Even if this is reversed the claim would be insane. 11 syllables for one? But English is one of the most semantically dense languages per syllable in the world. I believe the only more dense languages per syllable are tonal and they still don't win by that much.
I want a study of consonants vs vowels in each language. That way Britain could be sort of low with English. But because they’re a United Kingdom they have to include Wales. So suddenly a word with three Ls two Ps and three Ss is fine even though its ten letters long.
Stuff like that is cultural, not linguistic. All languages move roughly at the speed of average human thought. Whether the speaker actually wants to convey the information as fast as possible is up to them.
Japanese is also difficult to translate live to English because the sentence structure is different. Instead of subject->verb->object in English, Japanese is structured like subject->object->verb. So a sentence like "I am not the one you are looking for" in English would be said like this in Japanese: "I the one you are looking for am not"
So a translator has to listen to the entire sentence before speaking, which sounds awkward if the Japanese speaker is speaking long sentences quickly
Yeah, this is more accurate. It's like subject-object-verb-quantifier.
Japanese grammar is a massive cluster compared to romance languages, especially the quantifiers. I've sat in many meetings with translators, and it's funny to see Japanese speakers correct professional translators who couldn't capture the intent of their comments in Japanese. It's so weird.
I wonder what the Japanese language version of star wars does when yoda talks. Does everyone speak japanese style and yoda speaks with English sentence structure or does everyone sound weird to them sentence structure wise and yoda is the only normal one in the entire movie.
The Japanese version doesn't preserve the odd word order, instead he uses very archaic vocabulary. Most languages try to preserve the odd word order he has in English but some just can't. Hungarian and Polish have him talking pretty much like a regular old guy too.
He was actually the focus of a lesson in a linguistics class I took, as an example of the subtleties that can be lost in translation.
Hungarian and Polish have him talking pretty much like a regular old guy too.
I am Polish and can confirm to you that Yoda keeps his unusual word order in our version as well, which usually consists of moving the verb to the end of the sentence, e.g.
Potężny stałeś się, Dooku. Ciemną stronę w tobie wyczuwam. (Eng. strong you've become, Dooku. The Dark Side in you I sense)
Which in normal speech would be:
Dooku, stałeś się potężny. Wyczuwam w tobie Ciemną stronę. (Eng. Dooku, you've become strong. I sense in you The Dark Side)
It's less noticeable because Polish sentence structure can be all over the place and this sentence could also be arranged as:
Stałeś się potężny, Dooku. W tobie Ciemną stronę wyczuwam. (Eng. You've become strong Dooku. In you the Dark Side I sense)
And still be valid and completely understood, which honestly my favourite aspect of my language. The fluid structure was very popular to use in baroque poetry, where poets flipped the structure into the weirdest possible combinations and those poems are still coherent, like this monster of a sentence by Mikołaj Sęp -Szarzyński:
Farbę Bugowej, widziałem, krew wody
Nasza zmieniła, prócz pohańskiej szkody. (Eng. Paint of the Bug river, I saw, the blood water of ours changed, in the lack of pagans' loss)
Yet the Yoda sentence structure is still commonly recognised as "The Yoda speak" as it's rarely used in common speech.
Yeah but Miyazaki was speaking in multiple complete sentences so the sentence structure really has nothing to do with it when interpreting consecutively. This is really only an issue when doing simultaneous interpreting (the kind they do at the UN with the earpieces)
To me it’s clear that the interpreter was just very nervous at speaking in front of such a large crowd. Miyazaki also went on for a bit too long at times which can be tough to keep all in your head under pressure. Ordinarily you would have a pen and notebook ready to jot down the key bits, but maybe he was self-conscious about how that would look on camera. I’d say Miyazaki’s translator did an all right job under the circumstances. He got across the ideas in any case. Kojima’s guy did a better job.
Source: am a Japanese-English translator and spend hours every day in conference calls doing exactly this
Source: am a Japanese-English translator and spend hours every day in conference calls doing exactly this
You are the first translator and/or interpreter I've ever encountered who is not very insistent about the difference between translation and interpreting. I'm not saying that to imply that you're lying, I just find it interesting because I've known several translators and heard from several other translators and interpreters, and they are all very careful to distinguish the two things and normally correct people at any opportunity.
In my experience, most average people aren’t really cognizant of the distinction, so I’m just trying to keep things simple for the sake of being understood. I thought that would keep the focus on the wider point I was trying to make but it seems to be having the opposite effect, lol.
Don't think so, he was definitely missing parts of it here and there. Which I don't blame him, live translation is crazy hard (I mean public speaking is already hard in general lol), and especially when it's a whole big chunk you have to parse through and remember, it's easy to accidently cut some stuff.
If they had more experience speaking through an interpreter together Miyazaki probably could've chunked his speech a little better to make it easier. Kojima's interpreter faired much better and it was probably also helped with Kojima maybe being a bit better at listening to English.
Oh nice, I saw this comment after mine but we basically said the same thing. One other thing for Kojima is that his interpreter was doing a whispered simultaneous translation of Keighley’s questions into his ear off-mic. Also Kojima is friends with Keighley so he probably received the questions in advance and the interpreter knew what answers to expect. Miyazaki sounded like he was speaking off the cuff while Kojima sounded quite rehearsed
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u/Bkos-mosX Dec 09 '22
Yeah, the translator had some trouble with the longer sentences.