Fractured Japanese-to-English translation on amazon.com
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From Paul Shore:
I don't know whether the item below, an Amazon translation of an Amazon customer review, is Language-Log-worthy; but I thought that at the very least you might be amused by its sublime anti-logic. The January 1, 2017 review, written by "横川いずみ", is of Freedom Betrayed, Herbert Hoover's massive, radical critique of U.S. foreign relations from the thirties to the fifties, which wasn't published until 2011, roughly a half-century after Hoover completed it. In the heading, 横川いずみ rates the book five stars out of five and "[v]ery good". The Japanese original of the review text is as follows:
Watanabe Sōki yaku de, jōge 2-kan ni wakete Sōshisha kara shuppan sareru to kiite, genbun dewa ikaga kaitearu* ka shirabetaku naru koto mo aru ka to, kōnyū shimashita. Mada, yakuhon wa dete inai tame, parapara to mekkutte yonde miru to, yomenaku mo arimasen. Tadashi, nichibeisensō bakari dewanaku, yōroppa sensen ni tsuite mo kaitearu node, mada yomikirete imasen. To wa ie, motte irubeki hon da to omoimasu.
[*These two words for 如何書いてあるか might also be read as "ika kaitearuka", but either is possible without changing the meaning.]
渡辺惣樹訳で、上下２巻に分けて草思社から出版されると聞いて、原文では如何書いてあるか調べたくなる事もあるかと、購入しました。まだ、訳本は出ていないため、ぱらぱらとめっくって読んでみると、読めなくもありません。但し、日米戦争ばかりではなく、ヨーロッパ戦線についても書いてあるので、まだ読みきれて居ません。とはいえ、持っているべき本だと思います。
The English translation, summoned up by clicking on "Translate review to English" and generated by whichever translation software Amazon uses, is as follows:
WATANABE Sōki translation, I heard that it is published from Soshisha divided into two volumes, and I also want to find out how it is written in the original text, I purchased. There is no translation yet, so if you try to read it, you do not have to read it. However, it is not only written about the Japan-US War, but also about the European Front, so I haven't read it yet. Nonetheless, I think it should be a book.
I'm thinking of sending this to some relatives of mine who've expressed the opinion that nobody needs to learn foreign languages anymore because translation software has it all in the bag.
Here's a quick human translation of the customer review:
I have heard that the translation of this book in two volumes by Watanabe Sōki would be published by Sōshisha. The translation hasn't come out yet, but when I went through the original, I realized that I could manage it, so I purchased it thinking that there might be a few occasions when I want to check the contents in its original language. I haven't quite finished it since the book covers not only the Japan-US War, but also the European Front. Nonetheless, I would think that this book is worth adding to your collection.
The Amazon link (American edition of Amazon) is here. If you scroll down to "Top International Reviews", and then after the fifth of those reviews click on "Load more international reviews", you'll find that the ninth international one overall is the one in question. It's by 横川いずみ, and is entitled とても良い.
Regarding George Nash, he's the Hoover scholar and biographer who persuaded Hoover's family to finally let Freedom Betrayed be published in 2011, and who's the book's editor. Apparently, in one of those misattributions that are all too common in the age of Amazon, he's listed as an author of the book on certain webpages.
[Thanks to Frank Chance and Nathan Hopson]
Bathrobe said,
April 30, 2020 @ 4:35 pm
My interpretation of the Japanese is:
"I heard that a translation of this book by Watanabe Sōki would be published in two volumes by Sōshisha. I bought it because I thought there might be occasions when I would want to check it against the original. The translation hasn't come out yet so I flicked through the book and found that I could actually manage to read it. However, the book covers not only the Japan-US war but also the European front, so I haven't read all of it yet. At any rate, it's a book worth having".
The Japanese itself is a bit disjointed because the writer seems to have the habit of giving reasons for every statement, and you have to figure out exactly what the relationship between the reason and the statement is.
My interpretation is that the book was bought to check the translation against, and that having bought the book, the reviewer decided to see if she (I think it's a woman) could read it in the original, which she could (although she states this rather tentatively). The reviewer is most interested in the section on the Japan-US war, so she hasn't actually read the whole book.
Bathrobe said,
April 30, 2020 @ 4:44 pm
(Please note that mine is not a scrupulous translation, merely an attempt to rejig the logic. I made liberal use of your human translation and I also restated some sections in different terms — e.g., " there might be a few occasions when I want to check the contents in its original language" more accurately reflects the original Japanese than " there might be occasions when I would want to check it against the original".
Bathrobe said,
April 30, 2020 @ 5:12 pm
Rather than not being "scrupulous", mine is actually a confusing translation. That second sentence should actually be: "I bought the book because I thought I might have occasion to check what the original said".
Victor Mair said,
April 30, 2020 @ 5:52 pm
The Japanese is difficult even for a human to render in a fully intelligible fashion because it is rather disjointed. I feel sorry for the translation software and for human beings who are trying to make a smoothly flowing English translation.
Jim Breen said,
May 1, 2020 @ 12:40 am
I see from his Wikipedia page that the translator, 渡辺惣樹, is a modern history researcher and has written a number of books in the area as well as having done a number of translations.
Bathrobe said,
May 1, 2020 @ 1:42 am
The Japanese is a little more disjointed than usual but it's not really THAT disjointed.
The problems with the Google translation are:
I heard that it is [to be] published from Soshisha [in/as a] WATANABE Sōki translation divided into two volumes, and I
also[maybe] want to find out how it is written in the original text, [therefore] I purchased [it]. There is no translation yet, soif you tryI tried to read it,you do not have to read it[I was not unable to]. However, it is not only written about the Japan-US War, but also about the European Front, so I haven't read it [all] yet. Nonetheless, I think it should be a book [one should have].Google Translate has major problems with Japanese, which does not map well to Standard Average European.
For a start, it is notoriously bad at interpreting pro-drop languages, being unable to choose the correct pronoun in strings of sentences where the pronoun is not spelt out. (This can also be found with Vietnamese).
This forms part of a larger problem with coordinated sentences in languages like Japanese, since interpreting the meaning requires understanding the thrust of the sentence without the clear conjunctions that are typical of European languages.
In this sentence Google Translate has also consistently misinterpreted と, although this is understandable given that と has several different uses — two of which are exemplified in this passage.
Google Translate is notoriously bad at double negatives, as in this translation.
It is also poor at understanding the nuances of particles (postpositions), as with the も in this example.
Google's vaunted AI doesn't seem to have helped much in interpreting the meaning of the Japanese.
Steve M said,
May 2, 2020 @ 10:33 am
DeepL manages a bit better than Google Translate on this one, though it gets the translator's name wrong:
"I bought this book because I heard that it was translated by Sokyu Watanabe and published by Soshisha in two volumes, one upper and one lower, and I wanted to check how it was written in the original. The translation has not yet been released, so if you skip through it, it is not impossible to read it. However, I haven't been able to finish reading this book because it is not only about the US-Japan War but also about the European front. Having said that, I think this is a book to have."
M. Paul Shore said,
May 4, 2020 @ 8:39 pm
While I haven't been able to find an exact acknowledgement of this yet, on amazon.com or elsewhere, I would think that the automatic translation of customer reviews on amazon.com, including the translation that's the subject of this thread, is almost certainly done by Amazon Translate, not by Google Translate.
Bathrobe said,
May 5, 2020 @ 7:45 pm
@ Paul Shore
You are right, and it was my mistake for assuming that it was.
Google Translate yields:
"It was translated by Satoshi Watanabe, and I heard that it would be published in two volumes, one from top and bottom, and I bought it as I wanted to find out how it was written in the original text. A translated book has not been published yet, so when I read it quickly, I can not read it. However, not only the US-Japan war, but also the European front is written, so I have not read it yet. However, I think it is a book to have."
DeepL is still better. Notably, Google Translate gets the double negative wrong ("I can not read it"), and "I haven't been able to finish reading this book" comes out wrongly as "I have not read it yet".
ktschwarz said,
May 6, 2020 @ 1:22 pm
You can also compare Bing, Watson, and Yandex, which are all about as bad. Amazon's translation, though bad overall, is the only one that gets both the translator's and publisher's names correct; perhaps Amazon is using a database of authors and publishers.