In English I can tell immediately that the structure is wonky, the author needed some extra editing, etc. But in Japanese, there’s always that doubt in the back of my head—what if it’s *me*? Am I a bad languager??
The happy thing here, though, is the more I read, the more I translate, the longer I live with all this Japanese in my head, the better I get at seeing that no, the Japanese really is poorly written. I'm actually a good languager!!
I submitted a translation recently where I got the nuance slightly off from what the Japanese person editing it wanted (which was an easy fix), But in addition to that feedback, he also gave me half a paragraph about how the sentence in question actually wasn't written that well 🤣
Is it poorly written or is there something I haven’t understood is one of the key challenges of translation! It can depend on the author, the subject matter and so many other factors.
Yes! Subject matter is a big factor. If you're not familiar with it, the text could read as poorly written, but to someone in the field, it reads as standard.
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