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Why are translations from a logographic language to an alphabetical one bad? (piefed.social)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Shadow79@piefed.social to c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz

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I'm mainly speaking from the viewpoint of translating (non basic dialog) from Japanese > English or Mandarin > English which often or not gets the results wrong or the translation is terrible (that is something you barely hear when you translate let's say from German > English), you know the mistakes upon learning any language when you translate from the target one to your native tongue alongside the nuances, grammar and sentence structure.

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 7 points 1 week ago

I think this doesn't have to do with the writing system, but with how heavily a culture relies on context to convey meaning. In general, East Asian cultures do it way more than the ones from Western Europe and the Americas, so Japanese/Mandarin/Korean/etc. speakers are way more likely to omit contextually clear words than German/English/French/etc. speakers. And if the translator is inexperienced they might try to translate the sentences word-by-word, or even get the context wrong, and in both cases you'll get issues.