Portal talk:En-literal

Regarding phrases of Japanese origin
How literal are we talking when it comes to phrases with an idiomatic meaning? Why/Why not? "Bird-eyed" being an example here.

Also, regarding labels, would it be preferable to forego translating words simply because they have honorifics in them without being proper names themselves?

--David Jones (talk) 19:41, 13 January 2020 (UTC)


 * I translate 「鳥目」 as "night-blind" because that's how monolingual Japanese dictionaries define the word. The only mention of birds is in the etymology notes. If it were an idiomatic expression of multiple words, each of which had a meaning unrelated to night-blindness, I might translate it literally (and leave an explanatory TN), but 「鳥目」 is a single word, and as a word, it means "pathologically poor night vision", not "having the eyes of a bird". If we applied the same logic to English, we would have to treat the word "pathetic" as meaning "of or relating to emotion", and "emotion" as "outward movement".
 * I haven't mentioned this on the portal page yet, but judicious use of monolingual dictionaries should be made when deciding the translation of a word. Kotobank is a gold mine; it aggregates definitions from multiple monolingual Japanese dictionaries and lets you query words by the text of the definition instead of just by the word itself.
 * As for honorifics, I would lean toward leaving them in only when appended to names and treating things like 「お嬢様」 as a single words to be translated like any other word. I want to minimize the amount of untranslated text in the dialogue itself. If something is not directly translatable, do the best you can and leave a TN explaining how your translation differs from the source text.
 * --VIVIT (talk) 22:34, 15 January 2020 (UTC)