Comic Strips

This reminds me of a translation I saw for a spring themed song. Not the mechanical spring, the flowering one.

Japanese has three writing systems 漢字 which are essentially Chinese characters, the traditional kind rather than the simplified ones, ひらがな and カタカナ. They each complement one another and offer context, but sometimes you can also use different sets as a stylistic choice, which can deviate from general practise.

So there is this one line in the song

人ゴミを掻き分けては

Typically you’d write that first word with hiragana, 人ごみ, meaning crowd. ゴミ is a different word meaning rubbish, garbage, trash, litter, etc.

Whoever translated the song must’ve been decently new to the language, and did a valiant attempt, but they separated words out too much, and read 人ゴミ as two words, and 掻き分け again as two words.

• 人 person/people
• ゴミ garbage
• 掻き arm stroke (like in swimming)
• 分 part/portion

And thus translated it to something like “the people rummaged through the trash.”

• 人ごみ crowd
• 掻き分ける push aside/push through

So the actual meaning was roughly “I made my way through the crowd”