To use the allegorical example of English/Rusian/English translation
of the English phase"the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"
rendering back as "the vodka was good but the meat was spoilt"
machine translation is very very hit and miss at best and woeful
where difficult context derived meaning is concerned.
As you may have found out there are certain grammatical structures
that make it impossible to literally translate many phrases English
to/from Japanese.
Complex cultural idiomatic phrases, silent pronouns, words having
honorific directionality (first person perspective one receives by
having great things passed down and gives by passing trivial things
up, this is reversed for second person perspective, and becomes and
absolute mess of politeness problems in third person perspective and
all is different if between a student/teacher or other formal
senior/junior relationship) ow yeh and throw in the old "warning:
this language works backwards" renders literal dictionary
translations in to unintelligible mess.
The best advise might to "do and become" - use your Japanese to the
best of your ability and let them use their English to the best of
their ability and between the two you will both benefit faster than
you think - be polite and understanding of their linguistic
shortcomings - I'm sure they will be of you.
I have had very little practical (conversational) application of my
basic Japanese but others who took the same course around the same
time and have frequently used it are now reasonably fluent in
colloquial and polite Japanese.
As for use of electronic communication.....
if your friend is willing to read everything in Romaji then it would
be best to use this. note that no all Japanese can read/write Romaji.
if they can't read Romaji but are willing to use just hiragana
rather than hiragana & kanji then you can use OSX's international
keyboard settings to type in using your standard western keyboard.
But both of you must use a program that will display kana characters
correctly .... also be aware that simply using hiragana will make for
some interesting puns in Japanese some of which might be a bit ... um
... risque! ie careful how you phrase around one of the words for
father (chi chi ) as with out it's unique kanji it might be
misinterpreted as the colloquial for "breasts".
Apologies to Bart but the only way I can post to wamug is by
replying to another's post. I
keep getting an error message from the wamug site.
Can anyone assist please.
I have a friend in Japan who has little English and I have little
Japanese. Is there a program
which will convert my English e mails , or word docs to Japanese so
he can read them and vice
versa, so that I can convert his Japanese e mails to English so I
can read them. If we need to
load the program both in Aust and Japan that can be arranged, as the
wife & I am going to Japan
to visit mid April, but it would be great to converse more fluently
before I go, to get the
travel arrangements right.
Windows based program would be needed as they are using windows in Japan.
Many thanks if you can offer me any advice.
Regards,
Ted Burbidge.
regards
--
~
Mark Secker Computer Support Officer
ph#6488 1855 (ECEL) <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
University of Western Australia - CRICOS Provider No. 00126G
~
"Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible."
- Miguel de Unamuno
"It takes an idiot to do cool things.... that's why it's cool"
FLCL
<http://ecel-mark.ecel.uwa.edu.au/~marksecker/index.htm> (sometimes works)
