People don’t always express what they’re thinking or rather there are some things which just cannot be expressed in words. Last week I happened to see a calligraphy exhibition displayed in the lobby of the Ministry of Education where the calligraphy was of children who had been afflicted by the Great East Japan Earthquake, and I was struck by the difficulty and depth of conveying feelings in words. One work showed the word “chichi” and another said, “hitori ni shinai de”. The first had been written by a child who had lost his father and the second by a nine-year-old girl whose mother was still missing.



The exhibition left such a haunting impression that thought I’d tell my British friends about it. I wondered how to translate “chichi’ which can mean father, dad or daddy. I first thought “Daddy” would be the best translation, but the word “chichi’ in Japanese isn’t used to address the daddy directly but is only used in the third person. I then thought of translating it as “Father” but that seemed to be a bit too formal and created distance between the child and the father he had lost. I decided to go with “Daddy” in the end.



Similarly, with “hitori ni shinai de” I wondered whether to translate it quite literally as “Don’t leave me alone” or to add a “Please” at the beginning to make it sound like a plea. But would that be taking poetic license? How far can you go in interpreting what the writer intended? That’s what makes communication and, by extension, translation so difficult.

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