by Zunu » Wed Oct 08, 2014 9:45 am
Not saying you're wrong, and definitely not claiming to know any more than you, but my own very limited experience with mottainai being translated as "too good for us" is that when so translated it's always in the context of daredare ni wa mottainai.
I feel like the simplest, level-0 translation would be something like "ah well, what a waste (that you're leaving), good woman." But for the feeling that they are trying to convey in exclaiming mottainaiyo, "We'll miss you" seems like it might be an accurate representation of that. This is going back to what someone was saying earlier to the effect that translations should elicit a comparable feeling in the listener as was originally intended, and not necessarily be word-for-word identical.
As I've mentioned before, I know a great many fluently bilingual people who work professionally as translators and such, and even after many years of full immersion, they routinely get very easily tripped up over the simplest idiomatic expressions. My impression is that translating *well* is a lot harder than it seems. It's a lot easier to snipe from the sidelines at the occasional off translation than to do it ourselves on a regular basis. That's not to say that some translations aren't point blank terribad, but this isn't one of them, I don't think.
tending to put ~ on song titles since 2002
