![]() (By the way, Takemori is a pretty experienced translator with at least 20 books under her belt, including a few other works from Sayaka Murata and a few from Miyuki Miyabe, another popular author). On the other hand, according to someone on an online forum this phrase was standard usage in British English.Īs it turns out, there’s an interview from the translator Ginny Tapley Takemori with the website Books on Asia. The English phrase actually seems to be a British phrase, but when I asked a British friend he told me it sounded very old fashioned, and even mentioned that it had the nuance of being something that might appear in a book from around 1840 (I think he was exaggerating a bit, but still). ![]() So I decided to do a little research to try and understand what was going on here. That’s why when I recently saw a tweet from someone saying the phrase “ありがとうございました” had been translated as “Thank you for your custom!” I was somewhat surprised––and intrigued.Īt the surface, this seemed suspicious because the Japanese phrase in question was as simple and everyday as they come, and yet the English translation of it was a phrase I had never heard before. While I felt the book was a relatively easy read, even for a non-native Japanese speaker like me, that experiment helped me get a taste of how challenging a good translation this work would be. ![]() “Convenience Store Woman” by Sayaka Murata (村田沙耶香) was a great novel that I thoroughly enjoyed, to the extent that right after finishing it I even tried translating the first few paragraphs as an exercise. ![]()
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