744
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
744 points (99.5% liked)
interestingasfuck
7790 readers
1 users here now
interestingasfuck
founded 2 years ago
I've often wanted a direct literal translation in the subtitles.
Like, I want my subtitles to read
Because then at least I can learn to understand "Watashi" is self-reference, and match up the phonetics with the words.
I love this idea!
The translation isn't as direct as the lines in the image imply though. "Watashi wa" becoming "I" hides that "wa" is a grammatical marker for the topic, kind of, of the sentence. More complete it's like, "I, as the topic of this sentence". You end up with a direct in place translation of "I, as the topic, a hotel's across the street, as a location, a shop, as a setting, exists, saw a suit, to which, wearing as a desire, is true"
Transliteration of individual characters is a surprising good way to understand/learn Chinese. A colleague of mine once read the whole Tao Te Ching this way.