Hi. I’m pretty new to Japanese learning, but I’ve learned just barely enough at this point that I can start to see patterns in the kana that I see.
Everyone familiar with this title knows that the English translation of 四月は君の嘘 is ‘Your Lie in April’ but I must be missing something, because the Japanese title doesn’t seem to line up with that at all. In fact, the Japanese title doesn’t even make sense to me. It could be that I just don’t understand the grammar or inflection, but I was wondering if someone could help me out.
四月 = April
は = subject/topic?
君の嘘 = your lie
There’s nothing in there that seems to imply that the lie is ‘in’ April. I feel like a total idiot asking this question, but I cannot figure out how anyone could go from that to the translation. It seems to take a big illogical leap to get there. Help. <3
P.S. I haven’t actually seen/read this series, I just saw the name while browsing.
Your break down of the title is correct. A literal translation would be “About April, it’s your lie”.
So, yeah, there was a big leap there.
I also haven’t seen that, but my guess is that the translator has context that we don’t.
Another possibility is that they just wanted to keep the general idea/structure while making the title grammatically correct in English.
In both cases, I wouldn’t think too much about it.
Japanese expresses things quite differently to English and often you can’t simply translate the words and hope to get an understandable sentence in English. I often struggle but I assume that with time understanding gets better.
By the way, if you haven’t watched the anime it is worthwhile (well - I loved it!)
The thing is localisation is more about adapting the product to the given audience, should you alter it, rather to translate it as closed as possible (and that makes me sad…)
あの日見た花の名前を僕達はまだ知らない。become “Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day” and not “We still don’t know the name of the flower we saw that day” because why not or 千と千尋の神隠し become Spirited Away instead of “Sen and Chiiro spirited away” because “Please oh my god hide these Japanese names !”.
It’s only natural that different languages will have different sensibilities when it comes to expressing things, and that comes to naming things as well. There’s no reason to think that a good title in Japanese should sound like a good title in English if translated character for character.
To me this is like being sad that Japanese has one word ways to express things that appear in phrase form in English.
I don’t see how “Spirited Away” loses anything that 千と千尋の神隠し expresses except for a connection that English speakers won’t understand unless they can read kanji.
Especially in titles, I understand that the priority for the translation is to sound appealing instead of keeping it close to the original. In the case of “Your Lie in April”, I think they did a good job. At least it’s better (in my opinion) than the German version: “Sekunden in Moll” (seconds in minor).
This is false. Sen and Chiiro add meaning, especially with the name stealing thing. And even non Kanji reader would understand after seeing the movie.
Imo there’s no reason to have a good English title, a faithful one is way better, but this is highly debatable with the marketing side of things.
This isn’t really important, but it shows a mindset I dislike: the original work is distorted to fit the target viewer instead of the viewer making an effort to get closer to it.
When it comes to most things, you don’t just translate, you also interpret said translation to fit the language you’re translating in.
Personally, I would hate to only have word for word titles and translations everywhere.
Also, strictly about 四月は君の嘘, I think it’s a very good translation. Just like you mentioned, 四月は represents the topic, so we’re talking about April. What else? 君の嘘. So we’re talking about “your lie” and more importantly, about “April”.
Therefore, “Your lie in April”. It’s quite simple, really.
Why even have an English title at all? Why even bring it to English speaking countries? Get up and go see the movie in Japanese in Japan you lazy bums.
I guess I probably should have made my confusion more clear. I’m not confused as to why they changed the literal translation to be more palatable to an English reader.
My issue is that I don’t understand the title as it is written in Japanese.
To me, in my (very limited) experience, reading this title makes it seem to say:
“April Your Lie”
Does the は imply additional meaning (other than “this is the subject of the sentence”) that should be taken to mean a literal association with the rest of the sentence, like:
“Regarding April, this is your lie?”
All those words just aren’t explicitly in that sentence, so it makes me very confused as to how you would understand what is trying to be conveyed there. Maybe I’m just asking this question too early in my development with the language. This is the clarification I’m really looking for. I was under the impression that は just denotes the subject of the sentence, similar to how の makes something possessive.
が is the particle marking the grammatical subject; は only marks the topic. So with 四月は, you state that you will now talk about April. 君の嘘 - your lie… so this results in “As for April…” + “…your lie”. Since the topic “April” is a time span, I think it is logical to interpret the intended meaning that there was the mentioned thing (your lie) within that time span.
I suppose I’ll have to get used to the idea of filling in the blanks. I hope that’ll just come with time and experience. This is exactly the answer I was looking for.
