Link -> #8766042

How could you judge adding a link fra <-> jpn if you don't understand Japanese? Please refrain from adding this sort of links or justify the reason.

PS: If somebody can argue that the link holds correct, I won't delete it, if not, I will.

e.g. By asking someone who speaks japanese?

PS: If somebody can argue that the link is incorrect, delete it, if not, then just...

Désolé pour mon commentaire qui ne suffisait apparemment pas à sous-entendre que, moi, je remettais en cause son exactitude.
Puisque ce n'est pas moi qui ai ajouté le lien inexact, je ne vois pas pourquoi je devrais justifier de son inexactitude mais dans ma mansuétude, je vais tout de même donner une raison simple : le français n'éluderait pas le 当店.

Cette personne qui parle japonais devrait également parler le français, ça aiderait très probablement.

I totally get your point, and as you already have judged it to be an inaccurate link and you are the native french speaker you should definitely delete the link.

Sorry, for putting too great a strain on your leniency ;-)

And thanks for checking on my French, too - but I wouldn’t dare to answer in French and expose another incompetence of mine :)

However, don‘t forget to check first

• https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/8764247

And you could create a new sentence that includes ’This store’ and link that one to the japanese sentence...

All languages are equal on Tatoeba, and I will never ask anybody to refrain from speaking the language they want, quite the opposite. Especially if you're commenting on French sentences, if you're able to comment in French, it's even better, in my opinion (Because people looking at French sentences are likely to be able to understand French but maybe not other languages).

Thank you for the discussion you linked. I'm aware of the problematic part since I participated to the first part of the discussion you started on the wall. I realized that my previous comment was incomplete, the culprit is not 当店 alone but 当店 in this specific sentence.


Par exemple, 当店にお越しいただきありがとうございました。
se traduit naturellement par : Merci de votre visite.
On n'a même pas besoin du nous.

La phrase en question ici étant différente, je pense que l'équivalent naturel est
Nous avons un large choix de livres en magasin.

En particulier, puisque le japonais utilise le registre poli ございます。


Now, being native is not a wildcard and everybody can mistake. It's impossible to know every particularities of your mother tongue, even less of a foreign language. That's why I applied the two tags and that I will wait a certain amount of time (more than two weeks) before proceeding to my suggested change. In the meantime, if somebody comes with some good counter-argument, I will reconsider the question.

I was just about to ask whether you would mind sharing some thoughts about the french part in this equation, and here we are...

Thanks for your comprehensive answer.

And trust me, you wouldn’t wanna have to deal with my french writing although I totally agree with the point that on a french sentence the comments should preferably be in french, too.

Although, as far as I remember I linked the sentence from the japanese source to french, but I could be wrong, and as we, at least for the time being, are not provided with a facility to comment on edges we landed on the french side of the fence :-)

My main interest here is, as you already have correctly guessed, the correlation between Romance languages and - in the wider sense - germanic languages.

As the common origin of Romance languages as dialects of vulgar latin leads to so many similarities and correlations, not only in vocabulary but naturally also in grammatical concepts etc. I really wanna find out whether such a simple construction, at least on the Romance side, could split a pretty much 100% correlation IMO, just by translating from a source that is more sophisticated e.g. in terms of all those politeness layers that we for the most part lack in our languages.

In short - is it really possible that a spanish speaker would ‘feel’ this particular japanese construction as eligible for being translated to both version (we/this store) but a french speaker would consider one version as unnatural.

I hope I made myself clear, but if you followed the discussion on the wall you should have a good idea where I am going with this.

> In short - is it really possible that a spanish speaker would ‘feel’ this particular japanese construction as eligible for being translated to both version (we/this store) but a french speaker would consider one version as unnatural.

That's one thing that fascinates me in Japanese. I think that it's an equally difficult and interesting matter. And that's a very, very difficult matter. Especially that this sentence touches 1) everyday life 2) relation between people 3) relation between a customer and some undetermined staff (maybe?) of some undetermined shop.
In Japanese, all those three points are part of a VERY complicated set of obscure rules that are not limited to the use of the language. To be honest, my personal opinion is that if you're not born with it, you can never fully understand it, even if you spend 30 active years in the country. If it was only a societal matter, you could, but it's too deeply rooted in the culture and in the education, to be fully understood. But that's only my personal opinion :)

For example, Pfirsichbaeumchen said that they used 当店 to express "we". It is mostly exact but not fully exact. Thinking the opposite way, one may ask: But, isn't it the English that uses a simple "we" to express "our store / this store"? But if the English does so, since French and English are relatively close, wouldn't the French do so, as well?
And now, we face another problem. As a direct translation of the English "We have..." to express "Our store has", the French would have the same construction as the English, using "nous = we". However, as a direct translation of the Japanese, one has to consider how people behave in society, how the customer is put much above in one culture but not the other, etc. and think of the most natural way to express this in the target language.
Of course, one has to do the same thing when translating English, but the language AND the culture being much closer, the consideration happens much more rarely than when translating Japanese.

If we speak of Spanish, I can't say what is the natural way(s) of expressing this Japanese because I don't know Spanish culture and society. Of course, I don't know much Spanish but even if I did, I'm not sure I could translate the Japanese into Spanish, because I've never lived in Spain or a Spanish speaking country.

I think that's the main reason why you will see many triplets of jpn <> fra <> eng where two of the sentences will only be indirect links of each other. jpn <> fra is a good match, jpn <> eng is a good match, but eng <> fra isn't a good match. Said like this, it seems very odd because as you explained it yourself in different places, it seems that with the explanation I gave above, eng <> fra would make a good match. But that's without taking context into account, an important point, I think. Of course, we could extrapolate to the point where we can find a thread linking eng <> fra, but I and many others (and Tatoeba main advice / guidelines) think that going for the natural ways is a better approach.

But now, we're having the discussion from the wall, all over again! So I'll stop here :P

PS: Unfortunately, I can be of no help for germanic languages.

All that I’ve seen, read and learned about Japanese until now gives me the very same impression you have. Once I truly realized how tightly bound this language is to its cultural identity I decided not to continue learning it if I didn’t either live in Japan or there are at least some native speakers involved in my daily life.

I postponed this endeavor for a later stage in my life and decided to learn how to properly graph the 2000 basic Kanji and understand their composition, to at least have a good starting point in the future, because my current life style limits me pretty much to learning by reading. But under these circumstances, if you don’t keep practicing on a regularly base and brushing up your memory, you loose it faster as one might imagine.

Regarding “A=B, A=C but that does not necessarily mean B=C‘.

I would never link any B=C pair if I didn’t know both languages.

And I clearly wouldn’t make any assumptions or touch any cross related links between ’We have...’ vs. ‘Our store has...’ in all those B/C languages not knowing very well both languages either.

I was simply extrapolating from the relationship jpn-spa (that seems to be complicated merely by the japanese intricacies) that for jpn-french or jpn-eng the same solutions as for jpn-spa must be eligible, because of my knowledge of eng/spa/french’s very close cultural heritage and similarities in their grammar or structure in particular. Therefore I think we all would perceive those japanese intricacies in a very, very similar way - and hence our translations from japanese should be pretty close to each other.

That’s why I was very curious about your approach and I am really looking forward to seeing all results, whether English will eventually have both variants (we/our store) linked to the japanese source and also whether French will link both variants ;-)

And if they don’t, which of the two variants it will eventually be, and of course whether it will be the same single variant for all Romance and Germanic languages.

Maybe I will get in contact with CK or another jpn-eng user and have a little talk with adaycito about his splitting the sentence into variants that cannot be regarded as equal in Spanish.

So if I got you right then your preferable variant is the ‘We...’ one and the ‘Our store...’ one is not natural enough and wouldn’t be used in French.

And thanks for the nice and informative talk!
Hope you are not gonna be to harsh on me and
my making mistakes in the future :-)