Translation: Two Into English, One Into Japanese
Takumi's translation section has three items, and he has twelve minutes.
(1) 英語を学ぶ目的は、試験に合格することではなく、自分の考えを世界に伝えることにある。 His answer: 'The purpose to learn English is not to pass the examination, but to tell my opinion to the world.'
(2) もしあのとき彼が一言も発しなかったら、私たちは今も友達ではなかっただろう。 His answer: 'If he did not say a word at that time, we are not friends now.'
(3) The plan is anything but cheap. His answer: 「その計画は何よりも安い。」
He feels most confident about (1), because the English 'looks like a sentence I have seen before', and least confident about (3), which he has never met in a textbook.
1. Correct all three answers and label the type of error in each.
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(1) 'The purpose of learning English is not to pass the examination but to express one's own ideas to the world.' Errors: 'purpose to learn' → purpose of -ing (a purpose is of doing something; 'purpose to' is not idiomatic). 'tell my opinion' → express / convey one's ideas ('tell' takes a person as object: tell someone something). Keep the not A but B frame parallel: not to pass ... but to express. Types: grammatical complement + collocation.
(2) 'If he had not said a word then, we would not be friends now.' The Japanese is 発しなかったら…ではなかっただろう: unreal past cause with a present result, i.e. a mixed conditional - if + past perfect, then would + base verb with 'now'. Takumi used a real-conditional frame, which asserts as fact that they are not friends now. Type: tense and mood.
(3) 「その計画は決して安くはない。」 anything but X means 決してXではない. Takumi read it as nothing but (ただXにすぎない) and reversed the meaning. Type: lexical idiom.
2. Rank the three errors by how much they damage meaning, then say which would most likely be penalised in a section that marks structure.
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By damage to meaning:
- Most: (3). It reverses the proposition. A reader of his Japanese concludes the plan is cheap, the opposite of the source. Meaning is the first criterion everywhere.
- Second: (2). The topic survives, but the mood is wrong: a real conditional asserts a present fact, whereas the source is an unreal hypothesis. The logical relation is lost.
- Least: (1). 'Purpose to learn' and 'tell my opinion' are errors, but a reader recovers the intended sense without effort.
By likely penalty in a structure-marked section: (1) is the most exposed. Two separate structural points are tested - the gerund after a preposition, and the parallel not...but plus infinitive - and both sit visibly in one short sentence. (2) may be scored as a single tense error; (3) as a single vocabulary error.
The lesson: rank by meaning for your own checking order, but expect the marking scheme to reward the structures the item was built to test. Takumi's confidence ranking was exactly backwards.
3. What single twenty-second step, applied before writing, would have prevented (1) and (2)?
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Identify the frame before writing any content words.
- For (1), find the two slots joined by ではなく…にある and decide their form first: both must be the same part of speech, and both follow 'purpose of'. Write the skeleton 'The purpose of ___ is not ___ but ___' before translating anything. Ten seconds.
- For (2), mark the tense of each clause in the margin: cause = past perfect (had not said), result = present unreal (would not be). The ending ではなかっただろう carries the unreal signal; 今も carries the present. Two annotations, ten seconds.
Then fill in vocabulary. Doing it the other way round - writing words first and patching grammar afterwards - is precisely what produces 'purpose to learn' and 'we are not friends now'. The translator writes the frame the Japanese words suggest rather than the frame the Japanese syntax requires.