Accurate translations vs. context based translations

[TimTimTimmey2]

Lately I’ve run across a bunch of translations on bunpro that I dont agree with. Not because theyre wrong, but because that specific meaning isnt necessary, as the japanese is more ambiguous.

For Example:

Thats not what that sentence means. “As for this, even if its not finished by tomorrow, its okay” is a lot more accurate I think. It could also mean “This specifically, even if not finished by tomorrow, is okay” if I am not misstaken. However, both of these obviously sound really weird in english, which is probably why the team went their translation. Given appropriate context (which bunpro doesnt and cant have for every sentence) the translation offered by bunpro may also be the only correct one. (Theres also a real possibility I am just missing something here, but I think in general my point stands.)

Since I dont really like anime and rarely find japanese TV Shows that I enjoy, I watch a good amount of VTuber clips on youtube, often times with english subtitles. And they do the exact same thing, and translate a sentence like “kawaii” to “Oh you sounded so cute just now”. However, i feel like fan translations and bunpro are trying to achieve different things: One is trying to make a piece of media as enjoyable as possible by translating it into another language, the other is trying to teach a foreign language by providing translations. I cant help but wonder if the bunpro way of “translating context into the sentence” isnt ultimately counterproductive as it tries to make english sentences out of japanese sentences, when sometimes thats just not really possible.

I dont consider this to be a huge issue by the way, I am just curious what the teams thoughts are on translations and allowing ambiguity in english. Have you considered having more jarring, literal translations and decided against it for the sake of readability or do you just go with context based translations, because thats what the real world is like?

Also this post reads like the ramblings from a madman but I am too tired to rewrite it in a better and more structured way. I am sorry, but thank you for reading anyways Also If anyone has an idea for a better title, feel free to suggest it

[Sidgr]

I’ve thought about this a lot as well. But honestly the less your rely on the English sentences the less it matters honestly. I think what the team has done is good to exceptional 90% of the time.

Translating and transliterating have pros and cons but I lean towards translating for the examples if it explicates the nuance of the grammar better, and vise versa.

[nekoyama]

The word-for-word translations just give me a completely different vibe.

“As for this, even if its not finished by tomorrow, its okay” gives me the idea that we were discussing a bunch of projects already, and now there is one where the default expectation is that it’s finished by tomorrow, but we’re still somehow okay even if it’s not.

But the Japanese gives me the impression that my boss wants me to take a break, go home, or just not do a task in a hurry, because it’s not urgent.

Anyway, the bunpro translation also has some literal stuff, and your word-for-word translations also don’t account for から. On in other words, it’s not word-for-word vs. natural, it’s just a matter of degree.

[Jose7822]

I was just about to comment on the missing から not being accounted for in the OP’s translation, if being literal is the point. In my opinion, the more accurate translation would be:

“It’s because it’s fine if you don’t finish it up by tomorrow.”

I’ve never liked the “As for…” translation for は because it doesn’t always work. Personally I think it’s much better to simply think of は as a topic marker, and not as something that should be translated.

BTW, I do agree with the idea of having more literal translations since BunPro is a teaching tool, so to me it makes more sense to try to translate sentences as close to the Japanese meaning as possible without sounding too weird. That way is less confusing for the learner, AND you get the benefit of actually understanding what the Japanese is saying. I’m not gonna lie, it’s a hard task, especially when you consider the sheer amount of sentences they already have, which I think it’s in the hundreds of thousands, but it would make BunPro that much better.

[imsamuka]

You will always lose something one way or another. It would be good to have both “natural” and “literal” translations available, one to understand the nuance, and other to understand the rationale, both to a certain degree of error. But I think it’s not worth the massive effort it would take.

I probably like literal translations more, however, there’s nothing more literal than reading the actual Japanese sentence at face value. As a learner, you can’t generate great representation of nuances yourself most of the time, so I’m glad to have natural translations, at least when nuance is very important on their particular grammar point.

But either way, no sentence will ever be translated perfectly (transmitting the same exact information in both languages, nuances, implications, expectations, tone etc), even very simple ones. So it doesn’t matter too much which translation is displayed at the end of the day, because we must always maintain attention to possible discrepancies in meaning, keeping your utmost attention in the Japanese, and not the translation. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t.

[Curnan2]

I also would actually appreciate more literal translations. When I relied on Anki decks, I would modify them accordingly. I found it way more helpful to learn how to “think” in Japanese this way.

[Jose7822]

Also related to the topic, and let me just say that I do appreciate when BunPro gives the literal translations of grammar points in their explanations. That always helps me understand them better. Thank you .

That said, I have issues with how one grammar point can have several translations, some of which are just there to make the English more natural. Example:

Yet, when you look at the prosed translations, “For your” is not one of them:

This is obviously very confusing and thus not very helpful.

Another one is when in English the same word can be used to say what requires different words in Japanese. Take for example:

• (Verb in Past Tense) + 方がいい
• べき
• はず

These have specific use cases in Japanese, yet they can all be translated as “Should” in English. I know that it can be tough to avoid this, but I think there are ways that this can be taught which could potentially avoid confusion. One way would be to translate 方がいい literally as “It’d be better if…”; べき could be translated as “Should”; and はず is more of a “Has to”.

I know it’s not perfect, but I think that having distinct translations like this would help the learner, not only better understand the actual meaning of the Japanese, but also memorize the grammar much easier. As a compromise, the BunPro team could add a “Common Translations” box that includes the various ways a grammar point could be translated into English. They already kinda do this, but not for every grammar point, so it’s not consistent.

Anyway, this is my main complaint about BunPro that I hope it at least gets seriously considered , since I think it would make the user experience much better by avoiding potential situations like this one .

[LoneFish]

I honestly would prefer more literal, especially because of this,

“This specifically, even if not finished by tomorrow, is okay”.
The “context” translation is on a different level of vagueness compared to a more “Direct” vagueness. They both give off different enough meanings that I would consider them to be different topics.

“It’s okay, this specific issue doesn’t have to be finished by tomorrow”
“This stuff doesn’t need to be finished by tomorrow so its alright”

[hx9]

You said it yourself! You don’t enjoy anime - and this is where pedagogy gets so interesting! Everyone’s learning styles, goals, hopes, dreams, likes, dislikes heavily influence what sticks and what doesn’t. What’s useful and what isn’t!

I want to be able to translate Japanese and communicate that in English in a way where the context isn’t lost or is a reasonable facsimile! Bunpro works well for me in that regard. This doesn’t diminish your desire for a more literal breakdown of sentences, though!

https://ichi.moe/ is pretty good if you need to break up the sentence a bit more, but I don’t have a great tool to suggest for more literal translations.

[nminer]

I feel like for me, it depends on the situation. I personally really enjoy seeing less literal translations, because it helps me connect the dots between how I could express myself in Japanese in a way that is similar to how I would say something in English. Or, if translations are too literal (and therefore unnatural/robotic sounding) it can be difficult to imagine how I would use that grammar in a real-life situation.

However, I do see the value in literal translations when it comes to comparing similar grammar/vocabulary terms, where translating it literally may better showcase small nuances.

[NeoArcturus]

You shouldn’t think of it as Japanese that you have to translate into English the most literal way, you should ultimately end up thinking of it as Japanese that you read in Japanese, and get away from English. I’ve recently read a very intersting post regarding this on the WaniKani forums. The post doesn’t adress excactly the same, but it mentions that “in order to be able to read, write, listen or speak reasonably smoothly, you need your brain to be working purely in Japanese”, and in my opinion, this applies to English → Japanese (or production) as well as to Japanese → English (or consuming Japanese).

Of course, in the beginning, you’ll have to use English to be able to understand any Japanese, but based on that post, I don’t think you should try to make translations as literal as possible. In my (very little) experience, Japanese is a very context based language, which is one of the reasons why you should be careful when trusting a translator when you use Japanese (it you really, really need a translator for some reason, though, I highly recommend DeepL)

Since I’m rather new to the language (started three months ago), it might be better to just ignore my post haha, but I thought I’d drop my thoughts here as well.

(Edit: Just realised that I basically didn’t adress the actual topic lol, I guess I just started smashing my keyboard after reading the literal translations )

[Jose7822]

@NeoArcturus

Japanese is a very context based language, which is one of the reasons why you should be careful when trusting a translator when you use Japanese (it you really, really need a translator for some reason, though, I highly recommend DeepL)

While I do occasionally use DeepL, it sometimes suffers from translations that are more liberal, and thus not really accurate. People frequently diss it , but most times I get better translations from Google, believe it or not.

For this reason, I would recommend using both (DeepL and Google Translate) to compare and see which one gives the best translation. Their accuracy varies, so it’s good to use both, IME.

[Juz]

@NeoArcturus

(it you really, really need a translator for some reason, though, I highly recommend DeepL)

DeepL mainly seems like a better translator than others because it’s pretty good at producing translations that sound good - what it tends to do for that is to just more or less make stuff up to fill blanks. Google Translate’s result will more sound like quite a mess at times, but personally I prefer that because it doesn’t even give the illusion of being a good translation. Though either can be helpful, of course, but should always be taken with a grain of salt.

As for the actual topic - I’d favour more literal translations as well. Most of the time I make mistakes, they’re of the “this is correct, but we’re looking for something else”-type. It’s not that I don’t know the point that’s asked for in those cases, I would perfectly understand it in the wild, it’s just that I don’t have the connection between Bunpro’s translation the way it’s presented and that exact point in my mind. Especially given that there is no context for the sentence either way, I think a more literal translation could help more to produce the specific point Bunpro is asking for in that review.

I think overall it’s a matter of personal preference which type of translation someone finds more helpful to properly work with, and I don’t think any is generally better than the other.

If we’d disregard the amount of work that’d go into it, from a user’s perspective, I think the most ideal would be to offer both options and let users decide which to use (A, B or both) so that everyone can get the best learning experience for them specifically in that regard. Though with how many sentences there are as well as it being a new feature, as much as I’d prefer more literal translations (even if they’d sound awkward or unnatural in English), I don’t really think it has a high priority or anything.

[RegicidalManiac]

I’ve had this issue with Bunpro for a while now and it actually really bugs me sometimes. I’ve reported some sentences over this. A lot of the times the translations will be sentences that would be absolutely correct if you were to find them translated from a novel, but here we’re trying to learn how the grammar works. I’ve seen some English either completely omits some ideas that exists in the Japanese sentence and some where the English includes grammar points/nuance that doesn’t exist in the Japanese.

I like the way that Satori Reader does things much more. If the contextual translation doesn’t capture the full “meaning” of a sentence then they include that more literal translation along with it.

[casual]

FWIW I think BunPro already has literal translations in some of those yellow correction hints. Of the style “your answer would work, but think more about a different point with this literal meaning”. Pretty useful, right?

Reading too many unnatural English sentences during reviews would probably just make your head hurt more, and it’s not clear if it would help to understand and recall Japanese better or not.

As for ambiguity, I think it would be helpful for each question to have a specific situation in mind. For example “A boss is telling an employee to take it easy today”. Even if the situation is not specifically stated, and Japanese sounds more vague/flexible than English, it’s all good as long as both sentences are consistent with that situation.

The questions that bug me are the ones where even after re-reading both JP and EN, I still have to scratch my head “when and why would anyone say this?”

[Jose7822]

@casual

Reading too many unnatural English sentences during reviews would probably just make your head hurt more, and it’s not clear if it would help to understand and recall Japanese better or not.

I don’t think anyone here is suggesting having unnatural translations, at least that’s not what I’m advocating. You can still have completely natural English translations that still capture the meaning of the Japanese. In the cases where a nuance doesn’t sound natural in English, BunPro could add them in parentheses, like they do with 「ておく」 for example, where the “in preparation” nuance is sometimes put in parentheses.

The problem, in my opinion, are those English translations that use English sayings that, while they capture the spirit of what the Japanese is saying, are still inaccurate. However, I’ve seen translations where there’s extra information not mentioned in the Japanese (perhaps to add context), as was mentioned. These are approximations, not actual translations, which are fine in consumable media, but I don’t think it should be the case in a platform where you’re learning a language.

As I said before, having more literal translations not only will make the meaning of the grammar being studied easier to grasp, but it should also minimize confusion (especially for people who are not native level English speakers). It also has the added benefit of shifting your mindset into a Japanese one, without having to learn concepts strictly in Japanese, which I don’t think is a great idea (at least not at first, unless you’re a baby who is yet to acquire concepts in any language).

[ultigonio]

Except から doesn’t necessarily translate straight to “because” and is often used for emphasis or implication - in a sentence devoid of context, this could mean that someone is answering a “why” question, but it could also mean that they’re trying to be heard by the other person in the conversation that it really is ok if it’s not done by tomorrow - or it could be implying a litany of other things, e.g. “so you can stop working for right now,” “so you don’t need to be so hard on yourself” etc. By forcing a “because” into this sentence, you close out those other possibilities, thus making the translation ultimately less accurate.

Literal translation is a fake concept anyway because someone had to interpret the Japanese and how it’s used, and put it into whatever dictionary we’re referring to, we’re just trusting their interpretation over anyone else’s - but Bunpro’s translations are already pretty direct, regularly to the point of the English sentence being considerably more awkward than the source Japanese. Early on, this was somewhat confusing for me because it made me question whether the provided Japanese was that stilted, but I acknowledged that certain learners benefited from this style and let it be. Nowadays, I can recognize all that just fine myself, so I don’t really care very much, but saying that Bunpro isn’t literal enough is sort of a confusing statement for me imo. Maybe that’s just because I’m used to it and used to translating things out of Japanese using context

[ultigonio]

I think you mean something more like “This doesn’t need to be done by tomorrow,” or “It’s fine even if this isn’t finished by tomorrow,” rather than what you wrote, but ultimately the から is doing some of the lifting that turns this sentence into a “You don’t need to finish this by tomorrow (so go home and get some rest)” - this sort of nuance, easy to miss at first, is why Bunpro adds that extra bit of flavor to some of these translations. I could see value in the team going through and explaining choices like this within the examples themselves, but that also sounds like an immensely time-consuming task. Ultimately, the thing is that this sentence in Japanese has context we’re not fully privy to - so it makes sense that the English translation carries on from that.

[Scyamntic]

I find literal translations to be more useful for “tinkering”. As in, when I really want to pry a grammar point open and don’t care about the meaning of the sentence but rather the construction and its English analogues.

Typically, this means I learn next to nothing about its functional usage in natural situations.

What the context aware translations help you with is getting you into the metal model of expressing your base language sentiments within a new framework of verbal articulation and mental concepts.

これは明日までに終わらなくてもいいから

Does not express the following English sentiment

Because it’s fine if this does not get done by tomorrow

It expresses the following:

No worries if it’s not done by tomorrow

When trying to convey the meaning above no-one “thinks” in the former. And we use language to express what we think.

In fact, my dearest ambition is to stop thinking of から as “because” even if that’s its closest English analogue used in translation. Instead I want to think of it as “marker of provenance”, but in a wibbly wobbly, feely kind of way. This is not something I can achieve if I primarily have literal translations rattling about in my brain.

What we all want to be able to do is take the latter sentiment and express it in Japanese. Therefore in our minds we need to associate all the nuance of the English sentiment with the construction of the Japanese.

That model needs to be second nature, there can’t be an additional mapping along the way; we’ll never achieve the goal if there is a “transliteration layer” in between or if we only have a mapping to the transliteration.

To put it another likely even more convoluted way,

Knowing that this is a 3 x 5 brick does not let you express that you want to build a cockpit

The magic, is knowing that a cockpit can be built from a 3 x 5 brick and that lets you make it reality.

[Jose7822]

@ultigonio

Except から doesn’t necessarily translate straight to “because” and is often used for emphasis or implication - in a sentence devoid of context, this could mean that someone is answering a “why” question, but it could also mean that they’re trying to be heard by the other person in the conversation that it really is ok if it’s not done by tomorrow - or it could be implying a litany of other things, e.g. “so you can stop working for right now,” “so you don’t need to be so hard on yourself” etc. By forcing a “because” into this sentence, you close out those other possibilities, thus making the translation ultimately less accurate.

I agree.

I simply translated that sentence into one of the interpretations you just gave in the above paragraph. It would be impossible for me to give an actual accurate translation when there’s no context.

@ultigonio

Literal translation is a fake concept anyway because someone had to interpret the Japanese and how it’s used, and put it into whatever dictionary we’re referring to, we’re just trusting their interpretation over anyone else’s

Sure, there are concepts in Japanese that don’t exist in English, or perhaps even in other languages. However, the vast majority of them do exist in English, so I don’t find it far fetched to trust the “official” interpretations given to us by the BunPro team, so I think is hyperbole to call it “fake concepts”.

Also, I do consult other sources when I’m not grasping the nuance, or I need clarification of a grammar point, so I don’t just rely on BunPro in order to understand something.

@ultigonio

, but saying that Bunpro isn’t literal enough is sort of a confusing statement for me imo.

I give examples of what I mean here (in case you missed it): Accurate translations vs. context based translations - #7 by Jose7822

These are just basic examples, but I run into them almost daily, especially with vocabulary sentences (which to be fair could be mistakes, some of which I have reported to the team). This is not the first thread bringing up issues with translations, btw. There have been a few others I’ve seen, and they all boil down to the same issue as pointed out in this thread.