Buririggu deshita. Suraibi tōbu
Wēbu de gairu to gimburu shite,
Nante mimuji na borogōbu,
Mōmu rassu autoguraibimashita ne.
If this looks familiar, it’s not surprising. This is the first verse of ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll, translated into Japanese by Noriko Watanabe. Ms Watanabe is a translator of children’s books living in Sendai, in the north of Japan, and she is working on a new translation of the two Alice books. I met her in a bar called Come Here.
Is translating Lewis Carroll, which is already nonsense, into another language, a near-impossible task? I asked her. ‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘Actually it’s easy because Japanese is about 15 per cent English. So we can just take a word like “brillig” and turn it into wasei-eigo [Japanese-made English]. So it becomes buririggu. “Mimsy” becomes mimuji. There’s not much need for translation in this case.’
In fact, Japanese contains so many English loan words that Japan feels closer to the UK, linguistically, than it would to, say, China (Mandarin Chinese is unrelated to Japanese), or indeed to any other Asian country.
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