“this sentence would be difficult to translate into Japanese”
この文は日本語に翻訳しにくい
Even babelfish gets that one right.
Admittedly there are other levels of formality and synonyms that could be used for difficult, but there are other sentences in English meaning the same thing as well.
Missing the point. The sentence’s nature changes when translated. Once it is in Japanese the sentence doesn’t make any sense. So something is lost in the translation.
Incidentally, Hofstadter ran into precisely this issue when the French edition of GEB was being written. In GEB he uses the version “This sentence would be very difficult to translate into French.” The problem then became what to do in the French version. They made instead a French sentence which declares itself to be difficult to translate into English.
“this sentence would be difficult to translate into Japanese”
この文は日本語に翻訳しにくい
Even babelfish gets that one right.
Admittedly there are other levels of formality and synonyms that could be used for difficult, but there are other sentences in English meaning the same thing as well.
Missing the point. The sentence’s nature changes when translated. Once it is in Japanese the sentence doesn’t make any sense. So something is lost in the translation.
Incidentally, Hofstadter ran into precisely this issue when the French edition of GEB was being written. In GEB he uses the version “This sentence would be very difficult to translate into French.” The problem then became what to do in the French version. They made instead a French sentence which declares itself to be difficult to translate into English.