Hokkaido Entrance English: English-to-Japanese Translation at Paragraph Level

English-to-Japanese translation (paragraph level)

The translation item gives one or two underlined sentences inside a full paragraph, and the marker wants contextual, natural Japanese - not word-for-word substitution. Read the whole paragraph first: the paragraph, not the sentence, decides the meaning of polysemous words (issue = 論点/発行; develop = 発展させる/発症する; figure = 数字/人物).

Procedure

1. Bracket the skeleton: 主語・動詞・目的語・修飾関係.
2. Fix each content word's meaning from the paragraph's topic.
3. Make pronouns and demonstratives concrete (it, they, this, such) - Japanese needs the noun supplied.
4. Handle English-style inanimate subjects with 〜によって / 〜のおかげで / 〜が…させる.
5. Relative clauses and participles: translate from the back, or split into two clauses with が/そして.
6. Check negation scope: not ... because, all ... not (部分否定), fail to, cannot ... too.
7. Mark special patterns: 強調構文 (It is X that ...), 倒置, 仮定法, 比較 (no more than, not more than).

Worked example

「What makes the plan attractive to city planners is not its cost but the flexibility it gives to residents.」 Step 1: the What-clause is the subject of is; the complement is not A but B. Step 2: it gives to residents is a relative clause with omitted object, modifying flexibility. Model: 「その計画を都市計画者にとって魅力的にしているのは、費用ではなく、住民に与える柔軟性である。」 Reasoning: the What-clause becomes 「〜するのは…である」; not A but B becomes 「AではなくB」; the omitted relative pronoun is restored as 「住民に与える」.

Traps

• Grabbing the first dictionary meaning of a word.
• Leaving pronouns as 「それ」 when the referent is obvious.
• Dropping the relative clause, or splitting it off so the link to its noun is lost.
• Turning 部分否定 into 全否定: Not all students agree は「すべての学生が同意しない」ではなく「全員が同意するわけではない」.
• Adding information not in the source just to make the Japanese read smoothly.