English translation of the Japanese dialogue

[judithsinclair]

The English translations give us the meaning of the Japanese sentences, but what I'd like is a word-to-word literal translation even if the words are "backwards" to our English way of speaking. Then after the word-for-word, the more conversational translation. I don't get anything from just the conversational translation the way it is. I think that's why I didn't resubscribe. I felt I was listening to a lot of wordy conversation when I needed a real translation of each word in the Japanese way of speaking.

Does anyone else think my way?

Judy

[gucharu9345]

you are right! that's exactly what i thought not while ago... this way if would be MUCH better and easier to understand meaning of each word! I hope they at least try this in their new lessons.

[Yamanchu]

While I agree that the translation should be as close as possible to the Japanese, I don't think a word for word translation is the answer.

[Taurus]

I half agree.

I guess the point of the dialogues is to teach a particular grammar point or piece of vocab, so I don't think it's necessarily essential to understand, precisely, every single word in any given dialogue.

But I like going through the dialogues and adding any sentences that I don't understand to my Anki deck, and there have been several occasions where I've had to look up a word in the dictionary to get the precise meaning, because it isn't listed in the vocab list, or to check the usage.

But but... I don't mind doing that so much - I have to do it a lot more with other sources that I'm using (I'm currently using parallel texts mostly, and a lot of those take a lot of liberties with their translations). And since I don't think that is necessarily the way that the dialogues are supposed to be used, it doesn't really bother me that it isn't included.

In an ideal world, though, yeah, it would be nice to see something like the approach used in Wayne Lammers' Japanese the Manga Way (or whatever it's called), where he breaks down every sentence word-by-word, and then gives a more meaningful translation.