Today's japanese lesson.

[elfs]

Today's phrase is 間違い, (まちがい)、meaning "mistake." I learned it while reading a manga and saw it used several times in rapid succession. As a verb, the spatial kanji at the beginning is chopped off: 違う (ちがう), and although the English is usually written "That's wrong," the correct translation is "That is a mistake," or "You are is mistaken." The word "wrong" in Japanese is 悪 (わる), and often comes across with a connotation of deliberate mischeif or maliciousness.

The sentence that caught my eye and made me look this all up is this one:

こりゃ何かの間違いだ。 間違いない！
I'm sure this is some kind of mistake. No doubt about it!

I especially liked the way 間違い was used twice in the same word bubble: once to convey its commonplace meaning, and in the second used colloquially. A better translation of the second sentence might be, "No mistake about it!"

Comments

[dossy.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that you translate the second sentence 間違いない into an English idiom by adding "about it" ... my gut translation of that sentence is more like "There is no mistake."

[elfs.livejournal.com]

"No doubt about it" was one of the idiomatic translations provided for 間違いない in EDICT (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/j_edict.html), which is why I made the comment about another translation could be "No mistake about it!"

The context of the scene (where the character is running his fool head off trying to reassure himself) also adds to the preference for colloquialism. I've discovered that, at least among manga scanlations, I prefer liberal translations over painfully exacting ones.