Now the photographer’s perceived silence on his work almost seems fitting given the content, and to me it makes the imagery all the more captivating.

I think, fortunately, the most important aspects transcend words and culture boundaries.

Thankfully so, because as you noticed, online translators wreak havoc on any language that doesn’t have a word-for-word equivalent.

And Japanese, not only has few word for word translations and many context-based meanings where words are left out entirely, but also many sentence patterns that defy even advanced speakers to translate them directly.

It would be monumentally difficult to make an accurate automatic software translator of Japanese, but if anyone can do it, Google can. Maybe someday….

Take for instance a sentence in a newspaper article I was reading in class recently:

ネズミにA地点からB地点に行くとエサが貰えると覚えさせた直後に睡眠をとらせて脳の活動状況を調べた実験があるの。

To literally translate this would come out something like: a rat to point A from point B to upon go feed can receive when made to learn immediately after make to sleep and brain’s activity state of being investigated experiment exists it is.

Google says: When it goes to the B position from the A position in the mouse, immediately after making remember that you can receive the feed, making sleep, there is the experiment which inspected the activity circumstance of the brain.

What it really means is basically: There have been experiments conducted in which mice were taught that if they went from point A to point B they would receive food. Directly after being taught this, they were made to fall asleep, and then the state of their brain activity was examined.

So Google does try to switch things around a little bit, but it’s still impossible to affect an accurate translation without modifying the sentence structure a lot or adding your own words.

On the other hand, if you know some Japanese grammar and can read kana, it’s possible to discern meanings much more clearly with the use of Rikai, than with any automatic online translator.

This is all much more than you want to know I’m sure, but thanks for dropping by

My favorite thing is to have google translate his captions and try to figure out why they come out so terribly translated and utterly beautiful.

Hopefully he’ll e-mail you back, I’d love to know what this kid thinks of all of us drooling over his pics (not to mention have English translations available).