Lost In Translation
I recently hosted a friend of the family visiting from Japan and she sent me a lovely thank you email, including this segment:
お若くご親切でこの世の天使のようなトニーさんとトレイシーさんと赤ちゃん、どうか、いつの毎日も、楽しくおしあわせに。
Now, I can speak Japanese, but I’m not that great at reading it, so I gave it a whirl with Google Translate and it came out like this:
Tony and Tracy’s baby and, like the angel of death at younger you kindly, if, even when every day, and enjoy your happiness.
I think something was lost in translation.
September 8th, 2011 at 11:07 pm
That’s great, Mach! I’m sure you know about all the Japanese transliterators on the web. I often use romaji.org. They output that sentence as: “O wakaku go shinsetsu dekono yono tenshi noyouna toni santo toreishi santo akachan, douka, itsuno mainichi mo, tanoshi kuoshiawaseni.” So that might help you as a Japanophone!
September 8th, 2011 at 11:20 pm
Heh, I use rikai.com, which lets you mouse over the original Japanese to get a character by character translation. But thanks for romaji.org! I hadn’t heard of that one.
For the curious, a less literal translation would be something like, “May your youthful and angelically kind family somehow always and each day be filled with joy and happiness.”
September 11th, 2011 at 5:43 pm
When I read the ‘angel of death’ comment, I formed an instantaneous mental image of Mach on his motorbike.