On imabi the translation for いいんじゃない！ is ‘Thats great!’ There is another sentence that I thought would have a similar meaning to it - いい んじゃないですか 。which imabi translates to ‘isn’t that fine’. I thought いいんじゃない！ would translate to something like ‘isn’t that good?’ too, but I’m having trouble understanding why it means “thats great” here and would appreciate some help in understand this.
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That’s just a matter of interpretation, it’s pretty versatile and can be used to portray emotional responses too — maybe check out Maggie Sensei’s explanation and examples to help solidify it in your mind a bit more
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There are multiple reasons to translate something. There are literal translations and natural ones.
I don’t think I hear “isn’t that good” very often at all in English in the way the Japanese mean it there with the exclamation mark. But “that’s great” is normal.
Sometimes a translation is just “the thing said in the same circumstances in another language” and not a word for word swap.
And the reason for imabi’s translation being different could be as simple as the missing exclamation mark.
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In my experience (as a native English speaker in California), saying “Isn’t that great?” pretty much means “That’s great!”
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i’d translate it depending on context. it could be as simple as “that’s all right, isn’t it”.
there’s no one correct way to translate japanese into english.
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