Intro
I am not great at translating or at Japanese or Chinese specifically. I do, however, have some layman’s understanding of both, and my family background helps a lot with that (since I’m Chinese). So when I noticed that a certain Yorushika song wasn’t translated, I hopped on the chance to get some practice in and translate it.
As it turns out, no one had ever translated it before, and the video has become somewhat popular, getting 820k views at the time of writing. It has buoyed me into trying other translations, and I’ve made 2 more, one for an advertisement (yes, an advertisement) whose animation I found particularly compelling, and a nao song. They’ve been incredibly interesting, and I wanted to talk about the benefits of doing song translation and how I did it.
What I think
It turns out that learning language without practice is incredibly difficult. And as it turns out, living in a completely different country (the US) to either language you’re trying to become more familiar with is not helpful at all. It helps greatly, therefore, to try to translate something that has a wide range of vocabulary as practice. This helps with keeping things fresh in your mind, and frequently in learning new words, since songs and books have all sorts of crazy vocabulary that you’d never see anywhere else.
It also helps that if you’re translating something, you probably have a lot of interest in it, and thus it’s far more engaging than reading a textbook or grinding Duolingo lessons/online quizzes.
So translating music has been incredibly fun for me. In the working of the nao song, I spent many hours trying to think of the best equivalent english to translate it to, and how to best communicate the emotion that nao wanted to get across. An accurate translation doesn’t just have direct accurate vocab translation, but also brings across nuance. This is particularly hard to do in a song with little understanding of slang, so I spent a lot of time googling sayings in order to get an accurate idea of what nao was trying to represent. In fact, I was actually kind of surprised by my final translation, since it was actually slightly different than my prior impression of the song while just casually listening to it (of course, I maybe only truly understood half the song before).
I started translating the song 3 hours before one of my college classes… I accidentally ended up skipping it with how engrossed I was with the TL. Fortunately, the class wasn’t particularly important, although I’ll never admit that to the professor in question. But I did find it incredibly gratifying and a great learning experience.
I strongly encourage any of you reading this who are trying to learn a new language to try translating a song or novel. They push you to understand quirky words (if you just look at textbooks, they’ll only try to teach you the standard language) and help you understand slang and nuances you’d never see anywhere else. It’s also fun! That’s not to say that you should ever replace standard models of learning like the classroom or textbooks with soley hobby translation like I am. I am not remotely serious about learning Japanese or Chinese to their fullest, and I don’t plan on moving there soon. But it’s a great way to practice.