The Top 100: Utada Hikaru and Tools for Your First Translation

Good morning, and welcome to one and all. Today we're talking about what is for some an exciting goal and will be for all a treasured memory: doing your first translation.

Original Lyrics / Romaji / Phrasal Translation / Poetic Translation

About the Artist

If Happy End was #1 for being the first true JPop band, Utada Hikaru is my #1 for a different, more personal reason. Going through the entirety of Utada's career would require more time and space than this humble section allows, but simply considering the length of her career should give pause.

Born in Manhattan, Utada Hikaru grew up surrounded by music from an early age - her father was a producer and her mother was an enka singer. Her first album experience came on a CD released by the three as a sort of family album. Her first solo album was actually released in the US under the name "Cubic U," though it failed to gain much traction.

Having floundered in the American market, Utada released her first Japanese album First Love under her own name - and it was an instant success. While Utada has occasionally dipped her toe back into the American market with (Exodus and This is the One), her true success has been in Japan. After 24 years in the recording industry, she has racked up 12 #1 Oricon hits and has only had one album fail to reach #1 (This is the One).

And while Utada never achieved mainstream success in the US, she does have her diehard fans. Hikari was the first Japanese song I sang at karaoke, and will always have a special place in my heart (even if I'm terrible at singing it!)

[Today's Topic: Tools for Your First Translation is after the jump]

Today's Topic: Tools for Your First Translation

Whether it's as part of a class assignment or part of a personal challenge, at some point every person studying Japanese is going to arrive at their first translation project. Today, we're going to look at two tools for making your first translation as painless as possible.

Tool #1 Japanese Lyric Websites

As we've discussed multiple times in the past, Japanese songs often have a disconnect between what's written (kanji) and what's said (furigana). So if you really want to get a mental grip on a song, you're going to need to find the original lyrics.

Now, there are English-language websites that have lyrics for Japanese songs, but they're usually just romaji. That's a bad place to start if a word is a homonym with multiple possible meanings. Animelyrics.com is the only English-language site I've found that has kanji lyrics - but then, they don't have everything.

There are plenty of Japanese-language websites that will  have whatever song you're looking for, but they don't let you copy and paste lyrics. This can be annoying if you don't know how to read a kanji or three! We'll discuss getting around that in a moment, but first, here are three good Japanese-language lyric sites:

-Utamap (technically also has an English language section, but only for English songs)
-Mojim (technically also has an English language section, but only for English songs)-Uta-net

Or, of course, you could just Google "「Name of Song」歌詞"

Tool #2 Kanji Radical Dictionary

Okay, so Japanese lyrics websites won't let you copy text. No problem, we can just type it out ourselves! But what happens when we come across a kanji we haven't learned yet?

One option is to just listen to the song and type out what we hear. That's fine for most songs, but what if we're in a furigana situation where the word being sung isn't a real reading of that kanji?

Enter the jisho.org radical dictionary. Simply click the elements that appear in the kanji you're trying to find and you'll be fine in no time.

For example, let's say you're trying to look up the following kanji:

The first thing we need to do is break up this kanji into its separate parts. Click this link if you want to follow along.

Our mystery kanji is made up of three radicals, all three of which are circled in red above. You've got two little legs on the bottom, a horizontal line in the middle, and three lines on top. Click these radicals one by one:

First we'll click the little legs, which narrows down the list on top to only kanji that have that radical.

Next we'll click the three lines, further narrowing it down to kanji that have both the two little legs and the three lines (you may have already found our mystery kanji, but let's keep going for practice).

Last, we're going to click the horizontal line, narrowing the list down to kanji that have these three radicals. Our mystery kanji is now circled in red. Let's click it!

Clicking a kanji from the list will add it to the search bar. Searching our mystery kanji gives us its definition, reading it hiragana and a bunch of other options and information. Our mystery kanji is
hikari, the title of today's song!

By this method, even the most complex kanji can be broken down and searched out. Here's a more complicated kanji if you want to try this out for yourself:

We've looked at a tool for finding songs and a tool for finding kanji, but even the most sophisticated tools in the world need someone to use them. Even the most intelligent translation software in the world can't deal with ambiguity and nuance.

Your first translation is going to involve overcoming uncertainty, ambiguity, and general messiness - but dealing with those is what what lets you rise above the tools and machines. Frustration and difficulty are simply steps, the levels you must grind to improve.

We've introduced you to these base tools so that there is nothing between you and your first translation. Everything from here on out depends on you sitting down and using them. Pick a song. Read its lyrics. Copy its lyrics down. And think about what messy things it means.

That's all for today. Keep stepping up, and keep StudyOkeing!