Terry Response

     "In English, it would be insane even to try to put all this detail into one sentence, or even one paragraph. In Japanese, presumably the small points make the description seem more vivid, but in English t"ey are distinctly in the way" (Terry 29)

    What I felt while translating with this week's magazine is the same with this quotation. Of course, the text that Terry referred is far away from the magazine article, but the thing is that Japanese sentences are usually more dense than the English ones.

    For example, a sentence can be written without subject in Japanese. It's ok even if reader cannot know if something is singular or plural. In Japanese sentences, things those should be included in English sentences, are usually omitted, because the reader need to figure out based on the context. Taking off all the unnecessary parts, the rest words are full of meanings, and the sentence becomes denser naturally.

    I'm not saying which language is better. Such Japanese sentences can be more efficient in terms of conveying the point, and English sentences can be more kind and helpful in terms of conveying the context within the sentence. If the sentence and text is long enough to provide some context, it is a bit easier, but in unformal texts, it is super hard to fill up the necessities.  felt it desperately with this week's magazine translation. In fact, I've been feeling it desperately for over 3 years. I'd say Korean is way more closer to Japanese, which makes me so bad in English. This is my senior year but I still am having difficulties, which shows that it is not so easy to fill up the gap of difference between languages. 

 

Hyungsoo