The REASON Google Translate FAILS at Japanese

i want you to imagine you've just opened your very own restaurant and you've put everything into it time money blood sweat and tears and then a few weeks after the grand opening of your beloved restaurant you start to receive reviews online like this terrible the clerk is sticky i don't want to even have one star it is not worth the star all you can drink lasts without salads salads are scraps of sack i went there at 10 30 p.m but when i tried to replace rice it was said there was no more grass on the tenth day of every month we can eat puffy ramen with [ __ ] up on the 10th day of every month we can eat puppy ramen with 500 yen on pig bone day the store here is dirty and my parents don't love it should i clean the store if it's a proper store there is no meal at all it really is a scam level store impressive chemical ramen with a great chemical seasoning all of the pottery is delicious with delicate taste and cannot be said as a delicious category the sound in the store is too high even earplugs bang come in when i park to the next parking lot i was told by an old lady here and i didn't know what i was saying but i was angry very unpleasant uh yeah i think i'll uh i think i'll close my imaginary restaurant [Music] now these eyebrow raising remarks aren't the ramblings of the insane they are in fact japanese reviews they've been auto translated by google into english with often confusing and alarming results but clearly something has gone horribly wrong during the translation phase of the review which is hardly a surprise given translating between japanese and english can be notoriously difficult as any new learner of japanese will tell you admittedly in my first year of living in japan i relied on google translate a lot more than i'd care to admit though i soon discovered while it's fairly reliable for individual words or simple sentences the longer the sentences get the quicker they fall apart and the more you sound like a deranged madman so today in this video i thought we could go through some of these reviews and uncover where it went wrong and why translating japanese sentences into english leads to the specter of puppy ramen and sticky clerks a sentence i never hope to say out loud again we'll also hear the most common mistake that new learners of japanese make and because i wanted to include the insights of a native japanese speaker for better or worse we'll be hearing from my good friend ryotaro who's fluent in japanese and english having lived overseas in an extensive list of exotic lands including america the uk germany australia and narnia as a disclaimer it's important to point out that some translations are beyond all hope like this shirt i bought down 100 yen store today which says in big english words your comrades is glad your comrades is glad who are my comrades why are they so glad powerful philosophical questions for another time but i like to imagine that is the exact kind of phrase that a russian general would say to their troops to to get them fired up to get them motivated i'm starting to wonder if the 100 yen store just makes these weird english shirts just because they know there's a british weirdo that will come in and literally buy anything no matter what english you print on it clearly the strategy's working right then let's dive into some google translate reviews it was a pity that we quit smoking i managed to fill my stomach when i parked to the next parking lot i was told by an old lady here and i didn't know what i was saying but i was angry very unpleasant yeah i think my brain just crashed as you look through these reviews though it quickly becomes clear that they're all failing for the same reason and it's actually the same thing that trips up learners of japanese early on in everyday japanese you don't need to explicitly state the subject so for example if i want to say i went to tokyo i would say tokyo literally tokyo towards went notice how that phrase i didn't say the word i though i didn't refer to myself because you don't need to in japanese now you could do you could say watashi tokyo master but it's not needed because it's pretty obvious who's going to tokyo here i'm the one speaking i'm the only one in the room uh you can kind of understand it from the context right but this is one of the hardest things to wrap your head around when you first start learning japanese that you don't need to say i you he she they and this is where google translate has tripped up on all three of these examples so for the first one it was a pity that we quit smoking i managed to fill my stomach but the original japanese sentence actually says what a shame it became non-smoking somehow i filled myself up aka the restaurant in question became non-smoking but nevertheless our beloved reviewer was able to fill their stomach and stuff themselves with food but not before awarding only one star though let's face it any restaurant that ban smoking should at least receive one more bonus star now the sentence literally says became non-smoking what a shame somehow stomach filled up so there's no clear subject google translate had to take a guess had to fill in the gaps and in this case rather than choose the restaurant because it didn't have the context of where the review was left it just guessed that it was the reviewer or in this case we same goes for the next one when i parked in the next parking lot i was told by an old lady here and i didn't know what i was saying but i was angry very unpleasant i'll get a headache just reading that honestly but the original sentence says i parked in the car park next to the restaurant and an elderly looking woman said something that i didn't understand but she had an angry expression it was unpleasant in all honesty it sounds less like a review and more like the start of a low budget horror film why was she angry what was going down in that car park we'll never find out we'll never know but in the japanese sentence the reviewer doesn't say i once they don't say watashiwa or bakua the only subject she explicitly states is the old woman from here from the cafe and given it's a long sentence requiring a lot of guesswork google has unsurprisingly struggled to keep up though to be fair it did guess three out of five of the pronouns correctly so that's the first reason and arguably the main reason why these auto translations go so spectacularly wrong speaking japanese relies way more heavily on context one key tip to new learners of japanese is to avoid using pronouns altogether you he or she anata korea kannador they all kind of sound rude and impersonal and i wouldn't recommend using them at all for more on this important point though i'll hand you over to risottoro when i hear um someone foreign uh saying anata or watashiwa uh you i then i will say uh amateur [Laughter] in english you always have to say i do this or you do you or you we we don't really say that it's quite obvious that who you're talking to because if the person is in front of you it's quite quite clear that you're talking to that person you can so you can drop you or you can drop i so be like um do you speak english but if you're a first time learner of japanese you tend to say anata then like so i could easily see that person is just learning japanese because he doesn't drop he didn't drop the um the subject so what if the tip is that you always that you drop the subject if you're talking if you clear that like who you're talking to and also do not use pronouns such as she don't use that we always use the name like you know kriswa just use the name and that's the tip i got a lot of belly terrible the clerk is sticky on the tenth day of every month we can eat puppy ramen oh an utter train wreck but why i got a lot of belly and i can't exactly help it given i can't go outside at the moment so bloody hot actually it says which means i had a good meal but literally interpreted it does say a full stomach i received the japanese language is ripe with metaphors particularly your stomach when it comes to hunger for example if you're hungry you'd say literally stomach empty and if you're full after a nice big meal of puppy ramen you would say pie stomach is full and it seems google tripped up on that metaphor even if it is an everyday japanese phrase which takes us to the second point while these translations go wrong the vocabulary the words themselves maybe it's a word that doesn't exist in english or a metaphor or concept that can't literally be translated uh example terrible the clerk is sticky i don't want to even have one star to be fair who could honestly say they'd award any stars to a restaurant if they encountered a sticky clerk the good news is judging by the original review they might not have been so sticky after all terrible it says the staff tried to look cool i don't want to give them a single star the reason this went wrong is the verb doesn't really exist in english the verb is character which means to make oneself look cool which doesn't really exist in english we don't have a single word that can that can explain that concept how do we get from that to sticky well if you look up the word character there is a kanji you can use for it and that kanji can mean to adhere to or to stick to hence the word sticky and thus we've solved the mystery of the sticky clerk thank god however the really scary translations are the ones where google has just conjured up words out of thin air on the 10th day of every month we can eat puppy ramen with 500 yen on pig bone day pig bone day why does that conjure up images of david cameron oh yeah now this is sinister because at no point in the sentence is there any mention of puppies or dogs or animals where did the word puppy come from the sentence literally says on the tenth day of every month on pork broth day you can eat open ramen 500 yen open being the name of the restaurant now somehow google turned opesham into puppies and i don't know how and i've even sent this to a professional translator a friend who's not reactor but another native speaker of japanese and they don't have a clue either they just think it's a glitch with google it just pulled the word puppy out of nowhere terrifying is it a sinister conspiracy by google to create puppy ramen definitely it definitely is for me though one of the most interesting aspects of learning a new language is discovering words and concepts that don't exist in your native tongue and in the case of japanese there are quite a few everyday words that can't literally be translated into english for example whenever you meet someone in japan for the first time you end your kind of personal introduction with the phrase yoroshiku onegaishimasu which means please have favor upon me that's the easiest way i can say it but imagine going up to someone in the uk or the u.s and saying hi there i'm chris please have favor upon me might be a quick way to lose friends but it's a testament to the sheer politeness of the japanese language that you're either apologizing or saying thank you to someone in advance of something that may or may not even happen in the near future let's see if we can break ryotaro by getting him to translate it what about the words for the phrase um it's um um i don't know how do you say that in english uh nice to meet you i'm the person who's playing a game with you and i'm honored to see you here or something like that but it doesn't exist in english i'm a tour on the flip side there's also words that don't exist in japanese like brother how do you say in japanese do you have any brothers the kyodai means siblings siblings yeah so what's the word for brother uh depending on which brother you're talking about elder brother or younger brother just my brother there is no there is no such word for just a brother how many words are there for brother in japanese i think like four or five i guess i mean i can think of to be honest as much as we've mocked google translate today and kind of exposed its shortcomings it is surprisingly good a lot of the time and at the very least you're able to have a rough idea of what's being said and that's what most people want or need at the end of the day but google translate is able to do something effortlessly that most new learners of japanese really struggle to do which is flip the japanese sentence around and reconstruct it to make it sound like english in english we have subject verb object i went to the station in japanese they have subject object verb i station went and honestly it took me months to wrap my head around this and to kind of rewire my thinking it might look easy on a simple sentence but it gets more complicated as that sentence gets bigger for example the person eating ice cream walked towards the station now in japanese that would be ice cream literally ice cream eating person regarding the station in the direction of walk towards and that is why your brain will crash if you try to think literally between japanese and english if you translate it in your head and it's why thinking fluently in japanese early on is pretty difficult to do but fortunately as the weeks and months roll on and you keep studying you keep practicing speaking your brain does start to rewire itself and it's one of the most stressful and rewarding experiences you can have but it's a tough thing to explain and that is why we've got ryotero when you when you're translating between english and japanese yeah what's the thought process like what there is no thought pluses at all because it's like a drawer when i speak japanese my japanese drawer is open and my english drawer is closed and when i speak english the japanese draw is closed then english draws opens but when i speak the language i'm not so confident of for instance when i speak german or when i speak italian um both languages i'm not really confident um chances are that two drawers open at the same time and it gets all mixed up so what have we learned today we've learned that google translate isn't that bad at translating as long as it's a simple sentence and as long as the subject is clear and we've learned that ryotaro has an obsession with drawers if you have any more questions on learning the japanese language do far away in the comments below and do check out the playlist on the abroad japan channel of all the japanese learning content there's quite a lot of useful stuff there for new beginners and learners for more behind the scenes content check out the abroad japan patreon but for now guys as always many thanks for watching i'll see you next time as for me it's pig bone day so i'm off to a scam level store to get some chemical ramen with my comrades they're all very glad because they love pig bone day i love friday action one two [ __ ] there's still a shadow okay all right ready what three two one waving one two three four five six seven eight nine

Channel: Abroad in Japan

Views: 1,083,844

Rating: 4.9812069 out of 5

Keywords: japan, japanese, learning japanese, study japanese, google translate, abroad in japan

Id: 4J4id5jnEo8

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/StevenTL]

Very enjoyable! I don't really care for learning Japanese but this was very interesting. I wonder if they'll do more like this in the future, love the format with the chalkboard and everything

[u/[deleted]]

I love the wicked British Humour Chris has. Makes the video enjoyable. I binge watched the entire channel in lockdows

[u/roastbeeftacohat]

so anyone here know what bablefish kept translating to "Milk Daughter" in the 90's?

[u/TFFTN]

That was a great intro, I could listen to him read out hate comments and crappy reviews all day in his "serious" voice.