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Comment by euske | Hacker News Reader

There's a more elusive issue in translating English into Japanese that's often overlooked: the two languages have very different "axes" of freedom. One of such examples is honorifics. Japanese has a massive variety of words in different politeness, and it's very common for Japanese novels to exploit its freedom. But English has little varity in it, so this freedom is often not utilized in a translated Japanese. Another type of freedom is the creative use of Chinese characters. On the other hand, Japanese has almost no concept of rhymes (because its phonetics is not based on syllables), so it's very hard to convey the feel of rhyming in Japanese text (as a native Japanese guy, I still don't quite get it either). I don't think these "axes" are comparable in one way or another, and it probably adds another layer of difficulty.

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Do you mean "meter" when you say rhyme? Because there's two things I can see here. First, one of the things that English poetry does is the tones and lengths of syllables are meant to be read in a certain way to create a certain rhythm, almost like creating a song (or more accurately, a rap). Then again, Japanese rap does exist so maybe not?

The second is that there are only five Japanese vowels and each one creates a single syllable nucleus, so every character rhymes with 20% of every other character, so there's no real skill, and hence, no real point in rhyming? (Whereas English has far more syllable nuclei and words can vary between one to many, many syllables, so certain words are quite hard to rhyme)

He means rhyming as in words ending in the same vowel+final consonants. Japanese syllables are very simple, and typically lack final consonants (except for the nasal phoneme n/m).

There are two aspects to meter; the placement of stressed syllables and the placement of syllables of different lengths itself. Actually English as opposed to Greek and Romance languages that are not French has stress patterns that are highly dependent on the phrase rather than on syllable position in words, and so traditional forms are felt to be quite artificial in English, and perhaps this encouraged the development of free meter in modern English poetry.

Anyway, the stress aspect of meter I don't think features greatly in Japanese poetry. On the other hand, meter still features prominently in Japanese standard poetic forms; are characterized as having a set number of syllables in each line, but renku looks instead at the number of morae (short syllables have one; long have two).

> Japanese syllables are very simple, and typically lack final consonants

So do Italian words, but we still have plenty of rhymes. From my almost non-existing Japanese knowledge, I don't really get what you mean.

I'm sorry, I didn't intend to make a case for Japanese not rhyming with what I mentioned. I intended to illustrate how rhyming looks like in Japanese, but rereading my comment it does indeed look like that.

I just wanted to establish that Japanese poems were characterized primarily by # of syllables or # of morae, and were quite free in their distribution of stressed syllables or long/short (heavy/light) syllables, as opposed to most European forms.

I'd also like to address a misconception of the original comment I was responding to that rhyming in poetry is prevalent in a language because it takes skill. It's primarily a matter of poetic tradition whether a language's poetry cares about rhyme. As darkwater's comment points out, Italian has plenty of rhymes and its poetic forms use rhyming extensively.

This is very strange to me. Isn't Japanese supposedly to be very easy to rhyme due to its very simple phonetics?

It's not so much a matter of ease or difficulty; rhyming just isn't really a thing in Japanese. I mean, there's a term for it, which I've heard people use when discussing haiku (to refer to internal rhyme or even consonance), but for the most part it's not a thing and people aren't aware of it.

Several times over the years I've had the "hey, were you aware that virtually every English song rhymes from start to finish?" conversation with a number of native JP speakers, and in every case so far they were very surprised. And even when the person is quite fluent in English, although they get the concept intellectually they always have a lot of trouble discerning the rhymes unaided.

This is correct. In Japanese it's so easy to rhyme things that rhymes just aren't interesting or unusual.

Japanese rap tries to make the rhymes more interested by rhyming multiple syllables instead of just one.

I suspect the issue is with the overall rhythm of the sentence - Japanese has its own conventions for intonation, formal rhyming in Romance languages requires an internal structure that may not be agreeable with that.

It might well be that it's easy to the point it's unremarkable.

I think this issue is kind of an opportunity. It teaches people about how different another culture can really be. I personally notice some of the nuance in translated works (into English though) and enjoy it. Based on these kinds of differences and word choice, it's sometimes possible for me to tell what the original language or cultural background (CN, KR or JP) of the translated work is. This kind of thing enhances the experience for me.

They give a good example of a problem with translating politeness into English, and the different ways translators (mis)manage it, in one of the linked articles: https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-iv/damcyan/#...

I don't have an example off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure I've heard rhymes in Japanese (mostly rap) songs. They are rare, though. But they also can span more than one syllable.

A lot of English-language rap songs have complicated rhyme schemes (much more than single-syllable) as well!

Rakim (of Eric B. & Rakim) was one of the first to take this to new heights.

An example from "Lyrics of Fury", with the rhyming words emphasized in caps:

    The SCENE of the CRIME every NIGHT at the SHOW 

    The FIEND of the RHYME on the MIC that you KNOW

https://genius.com/Eric-b-and-rakim-lyrics-of-fury-lyrics

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