Eric Margolis in the Japan Times has the kind of close look at hard-to-translate words I love, Translator trip-ups: What do they mean for learning Japanese?:
In the recent issue of the literary magazine Monkey, which publishes new and old Japanese writing translated into English, a dozen literary translators dished out their thoughts on the hardest words to translate from Japanese into English. These choices ranged from the omnipresent いらっしゃいませ (irasshaimase), which is used as a greeting when entering a store, to sentence endings like the emphatic よ (yo) and the interrogative かしら(kashira, I wonder?).
Examining the words chosen by these translators can shed light on why communication between languages requires so much more than one-to-one translation. It also demonstrates how important it is to have a high level of cultural understanding for speaking fluent Japanese.
I want to take a look at five of these words and dive into why they’re significant and how Japanese learners can embrace and grow by using them. These words are: いらっしゃいませ、おじさん/おばさん (ojisan/obasan, mister/missus), 懐かしい (natsukashii, nostalgic), はあ(hā, an interjection) and 心 (kokoro, heart). Why did translators choose these words as being hard — even impossible — to translate? As we’ll soon see, the parenthetical definitions are woefully insufficient. We’ll need to dive deeper.
I’ll just quote a couple of passages:
Takemori’s choice points to how some words truly do only exist in Japanese. While specific cultural terms like こたつ (kotatsu, a heated table used in the winter) don’t have English translations, these types of words can also extend into the social realm. This is an important realization for a Japanese learner, they will need to know いらっしゃいませ not for signifying a certain universal term in English, but for being its own set phrase used in specific situations.
Looking at おじさん and おばさん expands on this important language-learning concept. Unlike いらっしゃいませ, which is used in one specific social situation, おじさん and おばさん apply to countless situations. They are the terms for someone who is older than an お兄さん or お姉さん (onīsan/onēsan, older brother/older sister) but younger than a お爺さん or お婆さん (ojīsan/obāsan, an old man/old lady), so somewhere between 30 and 60. They’re also the terms for uncle or aunt, literal and figurative. You can use it when talking about someone, or as a form of address.
As pointed out by Polly Barton, who chose the words for Monkey, it’s common practice in many Asian countries to refer to people as the term indicated by their age and gender within the family structure. Not only is this simply not how people refer to some middle-aged man or woman in English, おじさん and おばさん often carry all sorts of cultural baggage, “the associated behaviors of people this age … which can imply a modicum of eyeroll,” Barton says. Translators will have to substitute a variety of words for it when converting into English. A Japanese learner will have to take the reverse approach: They will need to adapt to using おじさん and おばさん as blanket terms for strangers and acquaintances alike.
[…]
Lastly, there is the beloved 心. Jay Rubin chooses this word because it doesn’t map well directly on to the English nuance of the word “heart.”
“‘Mind’ is too exclusively cerebral and ‘heart’ too tipped towards the emotional for kokoro, which straddles the full territory, including the moral,” Rubin writes. This intricate nuance won’t come up much in navigating everyday conversation and Japanese, but it drills in a consistent theme throughout these five words: Exact English language concepts and conventions don’t transplant themselves well directly into Japanese.
These translation trip-ups point to the way culture intertwines with language. In some of these examples, the Japanese meaning is broader than any convenient English equivalent (おじさん), other times more specific (いっらしゃいませ), and sometimes simply different (心). Translators need to take a dynamic approach that considers the broader tone and context of a passage when choosing a translation, avoiding one-to-one equivalency. And Japanese learners need to embrace the fact that moving straight from English into Japanese won’t produce fluent, natural Japanese. Instead, learners need to consume context and experience in the form of movies, books, songs and actual visits to the country when possible. Put simply, it’s necessary to live in Japanese in order to speak it.
Visit the link for the rest; it’s all interesting!
Tsotsil also has a similarly difficult to translate version of “heart”, so much so that there is an entire book more or less written on it: Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language by Dylan Fitzwater.
A snippet:
Fascinating! I love that stuff.
In Kusaal, sunf “heart” is the location of emotion (e.g. M sunf pɛlig nɛ “My heart has gone white” = “I’m angry”), but the location of sense and wisdom is the ya’am/yam “gall bladder.”
This may be a historical accident: there is good reason to think that “gall bladder” and “sense” were actually different words in Proto-Oti-Volta, and that they have fallen together due to secondary, originally purely phonological changes; cf Farefare yɛm, Nawdm rarm “sense” versus Farefare ya’am, Nawdm raɦm “gall bladder.” However, the identification of the gall bladder as the site of wisdom seems to be a settled thing in the local culture, however it originated.
One of the Kusaal booklets produced by the literacy programme features a young girl called Amɔryam “Has-Common-Sense.” (“Prudence”, I suppose.) Good name, anyhow. I’ve often wondered if it represents a reanalysis of the Arabic Maryamu, but there are parallel names elsewhere in WOV. (The excellent Burkinabe film Yaaba has a traditional healer called A Taryam, which is the same thing in Mooré.)
In Tsotsil and Tzeltal
Zohzill und Zelltal. I believe it’s in Central Switzerland.
Nah, it’s in Bavaria, like Thurn und Taxis (the home of Uber.)
Reminds me of Egyptian notions of the heart.
Zillertal!
In Sumerian, wisdom is somewhat famously* located wisdom in the ear, ‘ŋeštug,’ which is where your personal god whispers helpful words. A wise man has ‘ŋeštug daŋal,’ or ‘wide ears.’
The heart, ‘šag,’ is also a general word for something’s insides or meaning. When Gudea has a mysterious dream, he declares ‘šagbe nuzu’—I do/did not know it’s inside. Kings are often called the ‘šag pade’ of their favoured god, or the one chosen by the god’s heart. I’m not sure if the metaphor at play is that the heart makes decisions or that it’s where the emotions live that prompt a god to choose a king. Hearts seem to be the main place where thinking/feeling happens. Your šag is involved when you’re considering a proposition or disgusted.
Bravery or anger live in the liver. When Gilgames steels himself to face down Huwawa, he is ‘lipiša guba,’ or ‘standing in/with liver.’
*Emphasis on ‘somewhat.’
However, the identification of the gall bladder as the site of wisdom seems to be a settled thing in the local culture, however it originated.
I do like the idea that some basic, pervasive cultural metaphor may have started out as a pun. Reminds me of heraldry.
kokoro
Compare күңел:
Bashkir (Tatar)
Etymology
From Proto-Turkic *köyŋil (“heart, mood”).
Cognate with Old Turkic 𐰚𐰇𐰭𐰠 (köŋül, “heart; wish; feeling”), Kyrgyz көңүл (köñül), Kazakh көңіл (köñil), Uzbek ko’ngil, Turkish gönül, Yakut көҥүл (köŋül), etc.
Pronunciation
IPA(key): [kʏˈŋɪ̞l]
Hyphenation: кү‧ңел
Noun
күңел • (küñel)
1. a person’s inner self, soul; emotional mind; heart
Ижад минең өсөн — күңел талабы ул.
Ižad mineñ ösön — küñel talabï ul.
Creative work is for me a necessity of (my) soul (=what my soul requires).
Күңелем тыуған йортома тартыла.
Küñelem tïwğan yortoma tartïla.
My soul is attracted to my home place.
Бала күңеленә асҡыс табыу мөһим.
Bala küñelenä asqïs tabïw möhim.
It is important to find a key to a child’s soul.
Минең күңелем тыуған Уралымда ҡалды: муйыл сәскә атҡан туғайҙарҙы төшөмдә күреп йыш ҡына уянам.
Mineñ küñelem tïwğan Uralïmda qaldï: muyïl säskä atqan tuğayðarðï töšömdä kürep yïš qïna uyanam.
My soul has remained in my native Urals: I often wake up dreaming of river meadows with bird cherries abloom.
2. mood, emotional state
Йырлап асыла күңел.
Yïrlap asïla küñel.
The mood is brightened by singing.
3. favor, liking, sympathy
Минең күңелем күптән һиндә.
Mineñ küñelem küptän hindä.
I have long had a liking for you.
Тора алмайым мин уның менән, күңелем уға ятмай.
Tora almayïm min unïñ menän, küñelem uğa yatmay.
I cannot live with him, I don’t like him (he’s not my type).
I often have difficulty finding a suitable translation for ‘heart’ in Korean. From what I understand, Korean 마음 ma’eum maps pretty well to Japanese 心 kokoro but doesn’t quite correspond to ‘heart’ for much the same reasons given in the article. Ma’eum also encompasses the cerebral, so it doesn’t always get used metaphorically in the same way that ‘heart’ is in English. I often have to reach for 가슴 gaseum ‘chest’ to emphasize the emotional dimension of ‘heart’.
The liver is the seat of emotions in much of Papua New Guinea. Comment threads in response to photos of loved ones often contain Tok Pisin “lewa” along with heart emojis. There are liver emojis, but it looks like they’re not free and relate to physical health, not emotion.
A correction to my comment (look, I know y’all are anxious to call me out on my miscited Sumerian):
‘Lipiš’ is more ‘guts/innards’ than ‘liver.’ And Gilgames is described as ‘gud lipiš-tuku mea guba,’ A lipiš-having bull standing in battle.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder about the ambiguity of ‘šag’ in Sumerian cognition–organ mapping. When ‘šag’ is contrasted with ‘bar,’* it means ‘inside’ as distinguished from ‘outside’. Courtyards, houses, and other inanimate things have a šag. In this sense, the metaphor in an expression like ‘šag bala’ (to ponder, literally, to turn over (in**) one’s šag) would place cognition in the inside/unseen part of a person, not in any particular organ.
In fact, I wonder if there are any Sumerian sources where ‘šag’ unambiguously refers to ‘the organ that pumps blood.’ The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary lists 20,257 attestations of ‘šag,’ so I’ll save that project for another day. Šag’s purely anatomical sense seems to come from its equation with Akkadian ‘libbu,’ which has a similar range of metaphorical meanings but also an anatomical one, and the fact that there aren’t any other contenders for ‘anatomical heart.’
*Ironically, ‘bar’ comes to mean ‘liver’ in second-millennium and later texts. I’m guessing this is because of the liver’s place in divination as the outer text from which the inner meaning is read.
**The exact role of the noun in these noun-verb compounds isn’t always clear.
Of the five words mentioned in the article, I think natsukashii is the most interesting, and it is the only one I am ever tempted to borrow into my own English. I think this is because it expresses a reasonably common emotional state, but one that doesn’t have a convenient label in English. (As the article points out, it is more unusual in English to call something “nostalgic”, whereas the Japanese word feels normal and natural.)
I rarely stop to think about it much, but it is rather fascinating that Japanese has this group of adjectives ending in -shii (whose inflection pattern in classical Japanese was slightly different from the usual adjectival pattern), that carry particular emotional weight. Are there any other languages that have a similar semantic/morphological category?
‘Lipiš’ is more ‘guts/innards’ than ‘liver.’
Kusaal pʋtɛn’ɛr “mind” seems to be etymologically, at least, connected with “guts” too: the second element is certainly the root of tɛn’ɛs “think”, and the pʋ- part seems to be the stem/combining form of pʋʋg “belly, insides.” (And pʋpiel, literally “having white guts” means “virtuous, upright.” You don’t make a “clean breast” of things in Kusaal: you pie pʋʋg “clean the belly.”)
Mind you, pʋʋg is pretty polysemous: it’s the usual way of expressing “inside” of anything (e.g. daka la pʋʋgin “inside the box” (“at the inside of the box.”) Also as in O mɔr pʋʋg “She’s pregnant” (“She has a belly.”)
I’m not sure that pʋtɛn’ɛr actually maps too well into our “mind”, on reflection; it’s more like “thought”, really. Not so much a part of a human being, as something a human being has/does.
Kusaal sɔɔnr “liver” seems to have nothing to do with thoughts or emotions at all, as far as I can make out. It seems to be connected via some sound changes I haven’t got to the bottom of yet with sɔb “darken” and sabil “black.” [Actually, scratch that: I was being misled by the Dagbani and Mampruli forms sabili, sɔbri. The tones are wrong, and the “liver” word has a nasalised vowel, unlike the “black/dark” words. Not related after all.]
How is sɔɔnr pronounced? Is there an epenthetic vowel between n and r?
No, it’s [sɔ̃:ɾ]. The writing of nasal vowels is probably the least satisfactory thing about the traditional orthography (and the 2016 revision has actually made things worse: previously it was only counterintuitive, but now it’s counterintuitive and ambiguous. But it’s their language … they can write it how they like.)
The b/zero alternaltion (probably b/w in fact) is not unparalleled in Oti-Volta, but I haven’t been able to work out just what’s going on with it so far. The issue is confused by levelling: Agolle Kusaal nɔbir “foot, leg” has quite certainly introduced the -b- into the singular from the plural nɔba, for example (the Toende singular is nɔ’ɔt), and I strongly suspect something similar has happened with tʋbir “ear” (a very venerable root, reconstructable all the way back to Proto-Volta-Congo, at least. Without any -b-, moreover …)
I didn’t know you did in English. What does it mean?
We might yet get there: “Mind is what the brain does.”
In Danish you can lette sit hjerte, that’s at least related to the clean breast thing. (There is a dissonance with the possessive determiner there, in a Danish “generic” sample sentence it would refer to a 3p subject man, not 2p you). You can also gøre rent bord, but that’s more like a clean slate.
Kuyashii has always struck me as hard to translate into English, although the feeling is familiar to English speakers.
make a clean breast of: to speak openly and honestly about (something that previously has been lied about or kept secret)
OED:
some basic, pervasive cultural metaphor may have started out as a pun
an absurdly large part of yiddish works that way, including (if you find alexis manaster ramer persuasive, which i often do**) some notoriously thorny etymologies*. he talks about the phenomenon more generally, in a number of jewish langauges, here*.
.
* warning/apology: hellsite links, because that’s where the texts are.
** and not just because i appreciate his absolute refusal to write politely.
(From the first paper)
Preach it, brother!
“We do not know” and “let’s stop” are not the same. Publishing parallels and similar forms is a whole genre. Some day when we will have more data, maybe we will be able to make sense of them. If no one publishes anything, it will never happen, the idea is that someone who knows the missing link will have this collection of parallels at hand, will recognize that what she knows is a link, and will be able to link them with that link.
I do like the idea that some basic, pervasive cultural metaphor may have started out as a pun
I think there may be another one in Oti-Volta: “God” and “sun.”
Some Oti-Volta languages actually do have the “same” word for these, but in WOV the stems are unequivocally distinct, e.g. Kusaal Win /wɪ̄n/ “God” *ŋ͡mɪn-rɪ (original H tone root) versus winnig /wìn:ɪ̀g/ “sun” *ŋ͡mind-ga (original L tone root.) It’s not totally out of the question, formally, that the “sun” stem might be derived from “god” (a suffix *d does figure in nominal derivation, sometimes with no very clear meaning), but the tonal difference would then be very unexpected, and in general the reflexes of Proto-Oti-Volta *ɪ and *i vowels stay distinct (with the exception of the Mampruli-Dagbani subgroup), though in many languages the difference disappears when the vowel is nasalised (as often happens after nasal consonants.)
A further problem is the actual meaning: win doesn’t only, or even usually, mean “God” as in “Supreme Being”: it means the spiritual individuality of anything, including people, animals, trees, and places. The use for the Creator looks like a specialised secondary usage of much more general term.
The distinctive Kusaal word for “God” is Wina’am, which has the oddly impersonal literal meaning “spiritual chieftancy” and is also phonologically peculiar, both segmentally and tonally, almost certainly because it’s borrowed from some other WOV language; “God” in proverbs and greetings and so forth is just Win. I’ve often wondered whether the “Supreme Being” concept in these cultures is ultimately diffused from Islam.
Nobody in those parts seems to actually worship the sun … and when they tell the anthropologists tales about the Creator Sun, I suspect that there’s a pun behind it – in the languages where the pun actually works, anyhow.
Reminds me of…
…so, not from *ǵʰutós, but from *ǵʰutóm. I should actually try to fix that.
Edit: fixed it. Took a while because I hadn’t understood the template for PIE reconstructions.
Actually there are dieu-déité/divinité (f), god-deity/divinity, бог-божество (n).
I do not know how-when-why the meaning “a deity” and “the Deity” (or even ‘your Deity”) developed, but it did:)
And Russian and English distinguish between them:
I can take божество as a noun for a quality based on the suffix (вещество “substance”, существо “1. essence [of the matter] 2. being”) but no one uses it this way. We use божественность, neuter too.
It still feels like an abstration.
Wiktionary says deitas (cf. divinitas) was coined by Augustine of Hippo. I wonder why…
In Songhay “sun” is wayno – suggestively similar to winnig, but not enough so to convince me really.
No, I agree. The Proto-Oti-Volta form certainly began with *ŋ͡m, for one thing (as did *ŋ͡mat- “moon/star”, come to think of it, but there isn’t really any way to make those two stems related as far as I can see.)
While you’re on the line, are there any Songhay-ish words along the lines of *yamb- “slave”? (It’s another one of those odd stems in -mb, and although it’s very widespread in Oti-Volta, the forms in various languages suggest borrowing rather than common descent.)
are there any Songhay-ish words along the lines of *yamb- “slave”?
I guess it could be treated as related through metathesis to banya “slave” (seemingly a diminutive in -ya).
The Proto-Oti-Volta form certainly began with *ŋ͡m
Nasality spread could do that to w (I think it did in Dendi).
Nasality spread could do that to w
A possibility for Proto-Oti-Volta itself, in fact: initial *w is reconstructable, but only in words without a nasal vowel or a nasal consonant after the root vowel. Mind you, I’ve only got a princely total of two etyma with initial *w (“cloud” and “cold weather”, as it happens, so the speakers’ noses may have been bunged up), so it might easily just be coincidence.
Until recently I assumed that vowels were nasalised after nasal consonants in Proto-Oti-Volta and that that was all there was to it with those sequences, though contrastively nasalised vowels occur in other contexts too (and in fact, that is how it worked in Proto-WOV), but I recently noticed that the Oti-Volta languages which have a contrast n/l word-internally don’t have nasal vowels after word-initial l-, which suggests that nasalisation of initial consonants may be secondary to emic nasalisation of the root vowel, at least sometimes. This is definitely a thing in the Atakora Sprachbund, but there it’s all tied up with the hostility to voiced stops (e.g. Boulba nuõbu, Kusaal duan /dũã/ “Parkia biglobosa tree.”)
The Proto-Oti-Volta 3rd sg human-class pronoun is most readily reconstructable as *ŋ͡mʊ, which is a problem inasmuch as there seems to be no reason to reconstruct emic nasalisation on clitic words of the shape CV; but the *ŋ͡mʊ there might be from *ŋʊ, with secondary rounding before the rounded vowel. Word-initial *ŋ is well attested, and *ŋV turns up in noun class suffixes too.
Mind you, none of this makes wayno ~ winnig exactly plausible …
Mottainai (Japanese: もったいない or 勿体無い) is a term of Japanese origin that has been used by environmentalists. The term in Japanese conveys a sense of regret over waste; the exclamation “mottainai!” can translate as “What a waste!” Japanese environmentalists have used the term to encourage people to “reduce, reuse and recycle”, and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai used the term at the United Nations as a slogan to promote environmental protection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mottainai
もったいない ローマ(mottainai)
1 〔おそれ多い〕 impious; irreverent; profane; sacrilegious.
▲もったいなくも graciously
・もったいなくも水戸のご老侯であるぞよ. This is no less a personage than the venerable Lord of Mito.
・もったいなくも陛下からお言葉を賜った. I felt deeply awed at having been spoken to by the Emperor. | The Emperor deigned to address me.
▲そんなことをしては神仏に対してもったいない. It would be a ┌sacrilege [sin against Heaven] to do a thing like that.
・今の生活に満足できないなんて言ったらもったいない. It would be ungrateful of you to say that you are not happy with your lot.
・あの人にそんな仕事をさせてはもったいない. He is worthy of a better job.
2 〔過分である〕 be more than one deserves; be too good 《for…》; be unworthy 《of…》.
▲このズボンは普段着にはもったいない. These trousers are too good for everyday wear.
・この会社で彼女はもったいないくらい優遇されている. This company pays her a better salary than she deserves.
・おほめのお言葉をいただきもったいないと存じます. I think ┌I hardly deserve your praise [your praise is too high for me].
・そんなにご親切にしていただいてはもったいない. I am unworthy of your kindness.
・彼にはもったいないほどの奥さんだ. His wife is too good for him.
3 〔無駄な・惜しい〕 wasteful; wasting.
▲まあもったいない. What a waste!
・この靴はまだはける. もったいなくて捨てられない. These shoes are still wearable. It’s a waste to throw them away.
・必要がないものに金を使うのはもったいない. Spending money on things that you don’t need is just like throwing it away.
・そんなに紙を何枚も使ってはもったいない. It is ┌a sheer waste [simply a waste, bad economy] to use so many sheets of paper.
・時間がもったいない, すぐに仕事に取りかかりましょう. Time is precious. Let’s get down to work at once.