[Hmm. I got excited about this, and then discovered I don't have time to do it unless someone (some publishing company) fronts me the bread. Oh, well. It's the world's loss.]
O-Tsukare
零石
(Joel Matthew Rees)
Author's Preface
If you deal much with languages other than your mother tongue, you are probably familiar with words and expressions which just don't translate well without context. A fairly well-known example from Japanese into English might be tada-ima, which means literally, "just now", but, depending on context, should be translated as "I'm back." or "I'm home." -- or something else that might seem totally unrelated.
These expressions are derived from both cultural and mechanical context. If you're familiar with the context, you can understand them. But if you're not familiar with a similar context in your original culture, you may have a hard time translating them -- especially if you're translating for an employer that doesn't want to pay you to think.
Some of these expressions are considered beautiful, or especially meaningful. This work takes it's title from one of those especially expressive phrases in Japanese, which, in a previous era, might have been translaughterated as "(You are such an) honorifically tired person."
Having time on my hands and a need to use it constructively doing things I haven't done before, I decided to write up a bit of what I know about such expressions in Japanese and English (specifically, expressions I have bumped into when translating between Japanese and English).
Table of Contents
- 只今 (ただいま == tada-ima) => Just Now
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Published beginning January 2020 by Joel Matthew Rees in
Joel's Random Eikaiwa,
a personal blog hosted on Google's
blogger platform at
https://joels-random-eikaiwa.blogspot.com/search/label/o-tsukare
All rights reserved.
