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pullnosemans pullnosemans May 22, 2015, edited May 22, 2015 May 22, 2015 at 9:26:18 AM UTC, edited May 22, 2015 at 9:53:50 AM UTC link Permalink

**to all people that have some kind of business with mandarin and/or japanese**

(seeing as CK is an english and japanese bilingual, this was originally directed to him in a pm, but then I thought it couldn't hurt to just make it public to the community and include mandarin.)

I have a question about something that has been growing more and more odd to me here on tatoeba.

if an english sentence contains a constituent with the definite article "the" (or one of the german equivalents die/den/das/etc.), a lot of japanese and mandarin sentences are translated using the demonstrative "その" in japanese or "这/那" in mandarin. I used to think it's weird, but assumed that I simply did not know the two languages well enough to be able to judge.

japanese example: http://tatoeba.org/fra/sentences/show/208196
chinese example with "这": http://tatoeba.org/fra/sentences/show/793355

however, lately I've been noticing that my chinese tandem partner uses the demonstrative "diese/r/s" (the german equivalent of "that") where she should be using the definite article, so I've been wondering: maybe speakers of languages without articles are explained the usage of the english or german definite article by means of pointing to something, or explaining to them that unlike the indefinite article (english "a", german "ein/e"), the definite article refers to something specific. because of this, I've been wondering whether this could actually be the cause of all the translations of "the" by means of "その"/"这/那".


so, to finally get to the point: what do you think about translating something like

"The dog ate a carrot."

as "その犬はニンジンを食べた。"
instead of something like "犬はニンジンを食べた。"

or "那只狗吃了胡萝卜。"
instead of something like "狗吃了胡萝卜。"

Do you think these translations are okay and "その"/"这/那" can be used in japanese and chinese respectively in this way, or do you think it's actually an unfitting translation and that only german/english demonstratives ("diese/r/s", "this/that") should be translated using demonstratives in mandarin and japanese? if yes, do you think the mistranslations might be caused by a frequent misunderstanding of the nature of english/german articles by native speakers of languages without articles?

very curious to hear what you guys have to say.

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sharptoothed sharptoothed May 22, 2015 May 22, 2015 at 10:34:43 AM UTC link Permalink

I'm not sure about Chinese sentences but as for the Japanese, it seems that the most of "その-sentences" come from Tanaka Corpus (most of English and Japanese sentences with numbers lower than ~30000 come from that corpus, actually). Tanaka Corpus is full of literal translations and less-than-natural sentences we often can see in textbooks where they are being used in educational purposes to illustrate different aspects of foreign languages. My Japanese is not good enough to judge if all those "その-sentences" are unnatural so let's wait for some native Japanese opinion. :-)

tommy_san tommy_san May 22, 2015 May 22, 2015 at 12:15:57 PM UTC link Permalink

1. We sometimes do use その when we talk about something that has been mentioned before. Here are some examples. I guess some of them can be translated using a definite article. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/0...773_14560.html
私は再びそこで故郷の【匂い】を嗅ぎました。【その匂い】は私に取って依然として懐かしいものでありました。
或る時先生が例の通りさっさと海から上がって来て、いつもの場所に脱ぎ棄てた【浴衣】を着ようとすると、どうした訳か、【その浴衣】に砂がいっぱい着いていた。
兄妹三人のうちで、一番便利なのはやはり書生をしている【私】だけであった。【その私】が母のいい付け通り学校の課業を放り出して、休み前に帰って来たという事が、父には大きな満足であった。

2. Obviously その in Japanese is used far less often than a definite article in Western languages.

3. At school, we learn to "translate" English sentences into a weird and clumsy Japanese. I once "translated" the English translations of some of my sentences into "Japanese" for fun.

#3052927
"Is that Tom calling again?" "Yes. He calls every evening these days. I shouldn't have given him my number."
「また電話をしているのはトムですか」「はい。彼は最近毎晩電話をします。私は彼に私の番号を教えるべきでありませんでした」

#2441780
"Tom, your dinner's getting cold." "Just a minute. I'll be right there."
「トム、あなたの夕食は冷めつつあります」「ちょっと待ってください。私はすぐそちらに行くでしょう」

When you ask Japanese to translate something into Japanese, there's a high probability that their "translation" looks like this. At least that was the case for most of the students at Hyogo University and contributors on Tatoeba (including myself in my earlier days).

Some words are used markedly more often than the real Japanese, such as personal and demonstrative pronouns, and there are also many other differences.

4. Most Japanese sentences here are not wrong, but there are so many sentences that can only used in limited situations. Some of them are so stilted that you can use them only when you write, even if they look like an example of spoken language. Some of them sound too impolite or vulgar that you should use them when you're talking with close friends. So, if you're seriously interested in learning Japanese and not yet good enough at it to tell the nuance just by reading a sentences out of context, you'd better ignore Japanese sentences on Tatoeba.

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pullnosemans pullnosemans May 22, 2015 May 22, 2015 at 7:10:28 PM UTC link Permalink

thanks for the responses so far, you two.

tommy, I think your very first remark is actually quite interesting. definite articles in english and german are indeed used to refer to something that is already known in discourse. however, on tatoeba, we of course don't have discourse, so that might be a problem when translating them into languages without direct equivalents of the articles.
I'm right now guessing that you could say the translations with demonstratives for definite articles are acceptable if we interpret them all in this way (at least for me personally, because I use tatoeba mainly to boost vocabulary anyway).

still curious to hear more opinions.

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tommy_san tommy_san May 24, 2015 May 24, 2015 at 1:03:49 AM UTC link Permalink

犬, この犬, その犬 and あの犬 can all be a valid translation for "the dog". Honestly speaking, I have no idea right now how to explain the difference, but one thing is sure, it makes almost no sense to discuss it using out-of-context sentences.

> I use tatoeba mainly to boost vocabulary anyway
Many Japanese sentences here sound somewhat like "Er nahm ein Foto von dem Hunde." You can learn many words from it: nehmen = take, Foto = picture, etc. but the problem is not many German speakers "nehmen" pictures or say "dem Hunde" nowadays. If you don't mind it, just go ahead. If you're more serious about learning Japanese, you may want to take a look at http://yourei.jp/. It lists tons of real Japanese sentences.

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CK CK May 24, 2015, edited October 30, 2019 May 24, 2015 at 2:38:40 AM UTC, edited October 30, 2019 at 7:50:50 AM UTC link Permalink

[not needed anymore- removed by CK]

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tommy_san tommy_san May 24, 2015 May 24, 2015 at 2:49:57 AM UTC link Permalink

Unfortunately, it doesn't work when you search a word, but you can type a URL directly.

http://trans.hiragana.jp/ruby/http://yourei.jp/例文

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pullnosemans pullnosemans May 24, 2015, edited May 24, 2015 May 24, 2015 at 9:33:32 AM UTC, edited May 24, 2015 at 9:51:32 AM UTC link Permalink

hey, thank you two for your help and providing me with yourei.

I'm right now curious how accurate my sense of style in japanese has grown so far, and whether or not I can roughly rely on it in my selection of japanese phrases on this site, so just a very quick test for myself: am I right assuming that "熱をお計りになりましたか。", an orphan sentence from this site, would be an example of a less-than-natural sentence? it appears pretty weird to me. do you think that staying away from sentences with syntactic structures that appear overly cumbersome to me would be a good way to filter out unnatural sentences?

also, it would be important for me to know: can I dodge stylistically outdated sentences on here by avoiding orphans, or sticking to certain contributors?

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tommy_san tommy_san May 24, 2015 May 24, 2015 at 11:45:19 PM UTC link Permalink

> 熱をお計りになりましたか。

I'd write 測る instead of 計る and I'd say (熱は or お熱は) instead of 熱を.
お測りになりましたか is perfectly fine (it's by no means outdated), though it might be more common to say 測られましたか.

> can I dodge stylistically outdated sentences on here by avoiding orphans, or sticking to certain contributors?

Sentences added by native speakers NOT as translations are usually good.
Sentences added by non-native speakers are often bad.
All the other sentences are sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Take a look at this thread if you haven't read it yet.
https://tatoeba.org/wall/show_message/15743

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pullnosemans pullnosemans May 25, 2015 May 25, 2015 at 12:42:38 PM UTC link Permalink

again, thank you, especially for linking me to this very informative thread.

it seems that I'm still far from knowing idiomatic japanese well enough to be able to rougly judge whether a sentence is natural or not. I guess I will simply be staying away from orphans wherever I can now.

maybe I'll talk to my japanese tandem partner about this again. if I can get him interested in the tatoeba project, I'm sure he could contribute to making the japanese corpus more reliable.

what is the status quo in this respect anyway? are there any concrete plans how to get rid of the huge amount of japanese orphans? if the japanese corpus is that unsafe right now, hiding the orphans like you suggested back then might not be a bad idea. maybe havingthe number of japanese sentence indicated to be 60k instead of 180k would also lead to a greater motivation among japanese contributors to increase the number of good sentences.