# How can you translate your stories?



## Lunarez (Jul 20, 2008)

I've some problem in tranlate my stories to English language. Even that I'm not bad in English at all but it seem that my stories turn to be worse than in its original language.

Nowaday, I always ask my friend, Runefox, to translate and remake some of his word into them.

Anyone have the problem like this? And what is the way you solve it?


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## dietrc70 (Jul 20, 2008)

Translating literature is really tough  Ideally, you need someone who is expert in both languages, AND has some literary skill.  Good translators are pretty hard to find.

On the other hand, you know English well, and know what you're looking for.  Maybe you can get someone to help you with your own translation.  You could talk about the effect that the difficult passages should have in your own language, and work out ways to get the same effect in English.

What language do you write in?


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## M. LeRenard (Jul 20, 2008)

I had this problem when trying to write stories in French (which isn't my native language: English is).  You're always finding out that some creative phrase you put in to be poetic is unintentionally hilarious to a native speaker.
All I can say, though, is that you're just gonna' have to keep having someone else you trust translate, or completely master English.  There's really no other way to translate something well, since languages are all full of subtleties that only scholars and native speakers can pick up on.  I know your pain, in any case.  I don't dare submit any of my French writings even to FA.  Sounds like a freaking middle-schooler wrote them.


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## Lunarez (Jul 20, 2008)

dietrc70 said:


> What language do you write in?


 
It's Thai, the most difficult language(as it is said to be).

Well, I'm still lucky that I can translate them in English. So I can let my friend get rid of poetic part.


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## dietrc70 (Jul 21, 2008)

Lunarez said:


> It's Thai, the most difficult language(as it is said to be).
> 
> Well, I'm still lucky that I can translate them in English. So I can let my friend get rid of poetic part.



Wow!  That must be very hard to translate.

I love linguistics, but Thai is one that I know nothing about.  What issues to have particularly?

Out of the languages I know a little about, I've often thought that Japanese would be the hardest, since it does not put a strong emphasis on the subject of sentences, and does not have direct equivalents to English pronouns. Also, the sentence structure is completely different.  Japanese can make use of visual puns using Chinese characters.


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## tenza (Jul 21, 2008)

I think the perceived difficulty of Japanese stems from lots of reasons:

- 2 sets of standardized kana (2 X 46 = 92)
- Thousands of kanji (though 1,925 is the magic number to be considered native-level fluent)
- onyomi vs. kunyomi readings of kanji
- Subject-object-verb syntax (e.g. Ichirou wa biiru wo nomimasu -> Ichirou beer drinks vs. Ichirou is drinking beer)
- Politeness (by conjugation, keigo or both)
- Varying methods of romanization (Helpern vs. kunrei-shiki vs. nihon-shiki)

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