kris100

Thank you very much Kirua, your a great help

lost in translation

Thanks alot Kirua, the tattoo turned out great and i love it. I'm wondering if you could get another translation for me. I'm wanting to put "destined to fail" on my other side. If there's a translation with the same amount of characters it would be great. Thanks for the help.

kirua

Glad you liked it, I hope you found a good tattooer. Here's my suggestion for "destined to fail" (with the same number of characters ) :

失敗が運命 (shippai ga unmei)、which precisely means "failure is (his, my, etc...) destiny".

On The Shelf

Hello, this is my first time here. I would like the kanji translation for the phrase: "My soul will have to wait." Thanks guys.

kirua

"My soul will have to wait."

There's a little nuance that I can't transcribe in Japanese with a concise sentence at least, so I'll just stick to plain "My soul has to wait" (well, maybe that's just me, but when you use the future tense, it has more this nuance of "[...] wait because I really don't plan on finishing [whatever] for now" or this kind of thing).

魂は待たなければならない (tamashii wa matanakereba naranai). If it fits better, there's another way of saying it that saves you three characters : 魂は待たねばならん (tamashii wa mataneba naran). The latter is less common in standard Japanese (more used in some dialects/regions), and/or sounds more formal, which may be better for a tattoo.

(maybe, if that doesn't fit, you could explain what you meant by that : it can mean many things, so it just makes it harder to translate to Japanese)

On The Shelf

Thanks for the response, Kirua.

"My soul will have to wait" is part of the lyrics to the song Santeria by Sublime.

The entire lyrics are "My soul will have to wait until I get back to find a "heina" of my own"

So basically what I meant is: My soul will have to stay in place and wait and I'll come back to it.

I don't know if that makes sense to you. It's for a tattoo, so if the phrase doesn't work in Japanese I'll just get it done in English. Thanks again.

kirua

The problem is that it's not really the fact that the soul has to wait that is important, it's rather what the "will have to" part implies (i.e you understand that there's a good reason), and it's hard to find a way to convey that precise nuance with a concise sentence.

However, I have another suggestion, that may be really close to what you want to say : 魂には待つしか無い. It means roughly "the only thing my soul can do is to wait". So it has indeed this sense of "there's another action going, and (my soul) will have to wait until this action is finished".