CATDOLL: "Your Name." English translation sparks heated debate, few expressions confuse people

The animated film "Your Name." will be officially released in North America on April 7, 2017, but the film is now available for on-demand viewing on American Airlines. Recently, a Japanese netizen shared a picture of the English version of "Your Name." on his Twitter, and the various translations of "I" in it also made everyone confused. Because of the soul-swapping plot in the movie, the male and female protagonists have different ways of addressing themselves, but there is only one way to express "I" in English, so they added a note of Japanese transliteration at the end, but even so, the audience there probably didn't understand what it meant.

When Mitsuha first entered Taki's body and talked to Taki's friends, she tentatively said four "I"s in succession, namely, 私(watashi), 私(watakushi), 僕, 俺. The complexity of the first person is a major feature of Japanese, and it is divided into male-only and female-only words. However, in English, there is no such complicated first person. English can only translate it into "I" and then add phonetic symbols. For Americans who don't understand Japanese, this scene cannot feel the real laugh point, but instead becomes a hilarious laugh. In Chinese, there will be no problem translating these four "I"s. They can be expressed as "人在、在下、本身、我".

The "inability to express the meaning" of English words quickly attracted heated discussions among Japanese netizens: "I laughed at this scene, but the joke was completely different from theirs.", "Japanese is so complicated that English is trembling!", "English is indeed a defective language, but it is precisely because of its simplicity that it can be used all over the world." However, seeing such comments, I guess Chinese netizens would also laugh. However, it is true that English has fewer ways to express.