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>You could host a dinner party with eight people at the table speaking eight different languages, and the voice in your ear will always be whispering the one la

• deleted 11y ago
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• kazinator 11y ago
  Itadaku is simply the honorific verb for receiving some items, or a benefit, toward the speaker, from a conceptually higher place above the speaker. Though used as an idiom before meals, it is quite literal, and so a brief, literal translation into English serves excellently: "I humbly receive". In fact, we could just about adopt that in English. The English speakers upon nearing "I humbly receive" from their earpiece could just echo it and it would go back to "itadakimasu". :)
• jcranmer 11y ago
  «Bon appétit» would be an adequate translation for most English speakers (even though it's French). A more "pure" English translation would probably be a grace of some kind, which serves more or less the same purpose (although I can also see some atheists bristling at a grace where they wouldn't bristle at いただきます or bon appétit).
  • kazinator 11y ago
    A pure translation would be some sort of grace that is either ambiguous or directed at the host who provides the meal, rather than a god. See my other comment about itadaku.
  • xiaoma 11y ago
    Not really. My Japanese roommate would say いただきます when by himself at his desk before eating a candy bar. It would be surprising if even one English speaker in the world regularly says "Bon appétit" in that situation. The question isn't, "How do you say いただきます in English." The better question is, "Do English speakers have a set phrase they say right before eating." And the answer is no they don't.
    • kazinator 11y ago
      In context, the question is in fact what should come out of the English-speaking listener's earpiece to explain the "itadakimasu" utterance from the Japanese speaker, whether or not the English speaker has a custom of uttering anything before any meal or snack. Suppose English speakers did always say "Bon appétit", even when eating alone and just a snack. It's still not the meaning of "itadakimasu". Wishing for gusto in eating is not the same thing as humbly receiving the meal/snack.
• rpgmaker 11y ago
  > Some words just don't have a translation in other languages. Generally speaking I'm inclined to agree with you but you chose a bad example. The earpieces could translate it as "time to eat!" or "thank you for the food.". It's not a literal translation of course but a lot of the work involved with translations is about finding the right substitutes for these kind of phrases. In japanese there's a lot of mundane phrases that could better illustrate your point, for example how would an earpiece translate 好きです。 as a stand-alone phrase? It could do so literally but it would probably sound very unnatural. To do a natural translation the device would need to be understanding the conversation as a whole and that would be way more difficult to implement since it will involve some actual intelligence :)
  • xiaoma 11y ago
    懐かしい is another that comes to mind. It's like nostalgia but it's way more positive and can be used as an interjection. Or 我慢する. In fact, I'd say there's a huge array of words that really just don't translate well on their own and yet are often spoken as stand alone sentences. Meaning just isn't chopped up along the same word boundaries in different languages.