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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

If we're just trying to translate the literal meaning of this sentence from English to Latin, these are good answers. But I suspect that if we went back to ancient Rome and found someone experiencing the meaning behind these words (a guy talking about a girl who has said goodbye too many time, and he doesn't believe that it's going to be final this time either), the actual phrase he says may be completely different. Because while English speakers (specifically, American English speakers, or even more specifically wherever the songwriter is from, looks like it's Los Angeles) reach for this particular phrase to convey this meaning, this is very idiomatic when you think about it.

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The point you raise is one of the things most people -- professional translators, even -- get very, very wrong when translating (books, movie subtitles, game dialogue, you name it).

"How do you say 'phrase' in [target language]?" is more often than not a much worse approach than "What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?".

For anything remotely poetic (including song lyrics), I like to hear more literal translations, because the creative turns of phrase is is what makes them enjoyable.

Not only that but poetic things are more or less by definition things that a native speaker would not say routinely (otherwise they wouldn’t be poetic). Even when they are fairly colloquial (as here), there’s got to be some twist of rhythm or aptness of phrasing that is singular and memorable.

    "What would a native speaker of [target language] 
    say if they found themselves in the same situation?".

It gets even trickier if you are translating fiction. If you are translating, say, Japanese anime/manga with a Japanese setting for an English-speaking audience you don't necessarily want the characters to sound like Americans or Brits or Canadians or what have you.

So you may have to use language that Americans understand, but still make them sound Japanese. Somehow.

What's funny about it though is as an English speaker who knows no Japanese but often enjoys reading subtitles, I'd much rather see the weird literal translation so I know "oh, this is some cool idiom in Japanese" rather than translating it to boring English idioms. Like I get much more out of the meaning when I see the raw original idiom literally translated, and I prefer that.

I think we take for granted that idioms from other cultures/languages are incomprehensible... often they make a lot of sense when literally translated even if they aren't a "thing" in the language to which they are being translated.

10 years ago there was a big fight/shift in the anime translator scene about exactly this. More literal translations with long translator notes were common back then, but eventually the less literal translation won as anime became more mainstream.

ah that sucks, I really feel like idiom-transplants suck the soul out of whatever the thing is

all according to keikaku. TN: keikaku means plan.

There are several translations of Harry Potter books to Russian language. Some translations keep names a is - Longbottom or Ravenclaw. While others translate them to Russian. There is (or rather was) so much love and hate about both options.

Given this fact, one of the most amazing things to me is when a song can be translated relatively faithfully and while preserving the rhyme structure. It just blows my mind to listen to a song in another language with English subtitles and have it line up close enough to the English and still rhyming in their seperate tongue.

> the actual phrase he says may be completely different

That's also true in English, in my experience. I've never heard someone express this phrase (or a variation) in conversation, but the sentiment is common.

A typical phrasing in English would be more like "She always says she's done but she always comes back."

Ha, I've never really listened in to the rest of the words and kinda assumed the meaning was "she left many people" with "too many" indicating loneliness. TIL

yep, I somehow came up with ageless being saying goodbye to friends over the centuries

Given that this is meant to be poetic it is likely that a Roman would have said it in Greek, which was considered a more "cultured" language than mere boorish Latin.

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