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TRANSLATION GUIDE
As stated in the "About
the Library" page, all lyric translations found in this site
are done by me, but they are in no way perfect. I have a good
enough grasp of the language to get by, but I've received
very little formal training in the language so there are bound
to be mistakes and misinterpretations. If you notice any,
please notify me because I would be very happy to know.
Each lyric translation
is accompanied by a set of translation notes specific to the
song. These are indicated in the lyrics as superscript
numbers and an explanation for each can be found at
the bottom of each translation page.
There is also a broad
set of conventions that I have adhered to for all translations.
These are listed below:
- The translations are
very literal and should be quite faithful to the original.
I've tried not to interpret meanings. However, there are
some areas where I have had to take liberties. For example,
the pronoun (i.e., "you", "I", etc.) is often left out in
Japanese and I have had to guess in the more ambiguous instances.
- The English words
are written in upper case because that is how they are in
the Japanese lyrics. These can be read in two different
ways, depending on the song. In some instances, the words
fit perfectly with the Japanese to complete a full sentence.
example:
"...Feeling each
other's heartbeats with KISSes than with words..."
In other instances,
the words are more to mark the rhythm of the song or to
emphasize a point or theme. These words should be read separate
from the Japanese.
example:
"JUST WILD BEAT
COMMUNICATION Don't be afraid of anything..."
- The one peculiarity
with TWO-MIX lyrics is the use of "double meanings". What
I mean by this is that the lyrics will read one thing while
the singer sings something else. The discrepancy in meaning
between the written and the sung can be very close or very
different, depending on the intention of the writer.
This writing convention is actually quite common in Japanese
music overall, however Nagano of TWO-MIX has been noted
to use it quite extensively. So much that some fans refer
to it as Nagano-ese (i.e., it's a language on it's own).
I've presented both "meanings" in the translations by presenting
what is sung as part of the line but in italics,
and then adding what is written in [square brackets] after.
example:
"Because no-one
can take away the definite present [youth] in which
we can sense each other..."
- Katakana words
(i.e., words taken from other languages and "Japanese"-ized)
have been translated directly from their native language.
There are probably some mistranslated words because not
all katakana words are faithful to the original word they
were taken from. The problem is that most katakana words
aren't covered in Japanese-English dictionaries.
- Punctuation is presented
as found in the original lyrics, but I've had to add some
commas here and there to make the lyrics easier to read.
All "returns" and "double spaces" in the lyrics are based
on what is presented in the CD album booklets. They are
sometimes presented differently in the CD single notes.
- There are some instances
in which the English sentence structure may seem rather
strange to the native speaker. There are several reasons
for this. First, any parallel structure noted in the original
lyrics have been preserved as much possible. Second, I've
tried to keep the content of each line more or less consistent
with the line in Japanese. For those of you who don't know,
Japanese sentence structure is backwards from the point
of view of the English language so these things can actually
be quite tricky to do. The third possible reason for bad
sentence structure is me ^_^;
- Any word for which
there is no equivalent in English has been substituted by
a word or words which I feel most closely represent it.
For those of you interested,
I use the following resources for translating:
- Kenkyusha's
New College Japanese-English Dictionary
- Shinshojirin
Dictionary
- Roget's
International Thesaurus
- The
Gage Canadian Dictionary
2001.01.02
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