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KyleGoetz (Offline)
Attorney at Flaw
 
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Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Texas
08-26-2011, 08:36 PM

Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnBraden View Post
As part of my ongoing Japanese lessons, I was given a reading exercise and had to answer questions from the text. I translated it the best I could and i was wondering if anyone here would be willing to grade me on this task.

The text is as follows:

ジョンミルズさんはABCフーズのしゃいんです。 ミルズ さんは日本の食べ物が大好きですが、そのなかでおにぎ りがいちばんすきです。かいがいではおにぎりよりおす しのほうがゆうめいです。 ABCフーズはかいがいむ けのおにぎりのかいはつプロジエクトをつくりした。  ミルズさんはそのプロジエクトのチーフです。

Let's see how close I am to the actual text:

John Mills is an employee at ABC Foods. Mills-san likes Japanese food and onigiri the best among them. For foreigners, though, sushi is more famous than onigiri. ABC Foods produced foreign-oriented onigiri in a development project. Mills-san in the project chief.

I know I didn't do it word for word, or as close to that as possible. I took what I understood and translated it to what would make the best sense in my view. How correct was I?
Here, I don't think "for foreigners" is a good translation. I know you said you weren't translating literally, but there really is a difference between the ENglish and Japanese. Foreigners living in Japan count as "foreigners," but wouldn't in the original because the original is talking about "outside Japan." A foreigner living in Japan would be "foreigner" in your English but not 海外で like in the original.

"Outside of Japan, sushi is more famous than onigiri."

Also, 開発 is development, not production. You might try something like "ABC foods is making a project to develop onigiri for foreign markets."

Also, did you mean to type をお作りする instead of を作りする? Just curious because I didn't know you could just do 作りする by itself. I'm assuming the blurb was written by someone within the ABC company, since otherwise using 謙譲語 wouldn't make much sense.

But, in general, I think you got all the important parts. (But why did you use "-san" in your English translation?)