As a person who grew up in Japan speaking Japanese, I can not sympathize enough about the struggles and frustration you get when finding the most adequate English word to translate English. When I come up with something to say in Japanese, I cannot precisely translate its spirit and nuance into English. The examples that J Carpenter described in the article, such as waku waku and doki doki represent how Japanese have various kinds of onomatopoeia to express emotions. As she says in the text, I agree with her take on translating these phrases "you play with the sound and ideas until something clicks. You try it, and sort of life with it a while, and then either accept it or reject it." I like how she states that translation is like coloring in a coloring book. It accurately describes the art of translating in a way because translators can give life to an already-existing art to change it in their own way and, at the same time, enable people to enjoy arts in different languages.
After reading J Carpenter's interview, I was amazed by how much work she put in order to translate the entire work of the novel. By closely working with the author, I can tell that she was able to accurately portray the author's spirit and message. I was fascinated by the progress of the translation they went through for each sentence. I loved reading and comparing the first draft and the final draft of the example sentences because we could see what they did exactly to improve the translation. It blows my mind how they put so much effort into accurately translating and illustrating the original text(sometimes adding more literal descriptions) to create a better translation for each and every sentence.
- Airi Hatori
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