Does “A Girlfriend or Two” Turn Someone into a Playboy?—The Trap of Literal Translation and the Limits of AI

The other day, I heard a story that reminded me just how fascinating language can be.

In the story, people say this in Japanese to an overly serious young man. Rendered literally, the line reads:

“Why don’t you get yourself a girlfriend or two?”

To a Japanese speaker, the original line sounds perfectly ordinary.

Stop doing nothing but work and enjoy a little romance. Relax and take life a little less seriously.

That is what it means.

But when that wording was carried directly into English, it apparently gave readers a rather strange impression.

You should get yourself a girlfriend or two.

Translated literally, it means, “Why don’t you find one or two girlfriends?”

In English, it sounds as though the speaker is recommending having two romantic partners.

The young man was supposed to be receiving encouragement to try dating, but somehow he ended up being encouraged to become a playboy.

In the Japanese expression, “one or two” is not really about quantity. It carries the implication that the young man should allow himself at least that much room in his life.

The numbers have been translated correctly.

But the meaning is wrong.

Why Movie Subtitles Differ from the Original Dialogue

When watching an English-language film, I sometimes notice that the Japanese subtitles differ considerably from what the characters are actually saying.

The English dialogue says nothing of the sort, yet the Japanese subtitles use a completely different expression.

I used to think, “That is a remarkably bold adaptation.”

But examples like this one make the reason easy to understand.

Translation is not simply a matter of replacing words one by one.

You must also consider the situations in which an expression is used in that country, the feelings it conveys, and how the other person will interpret it.

The Japanese phrase meaning “a girlfriend or two” would actually be more faithful to the original if rendered simply as a girlfriend in English.

Translation is not the work of replacing words accurately. It is the work of conveying meaning accurately.

AI Translation Has Become Smarter, but We Still Cannot Let Our Guard Down

Modern AI translation has become astonishingly capable.

With older machine translation, it was not unusual to get unnatural English that seemed to have been produced by mechanically substituting one word for another.

Today’s LLMs, however, can read context and produce quite natural adaptations.

I use AI routinely when translating my own Japanese blog posts into English.

To be honest, its capabilities help me enormously.

There is, however, one troublesome problem.

The problem is not that AI makes mistakes, but that we do not know where it will make them.

An obvious grammatical error is easy to notice.

But sometimes the grammar is flawless and every word has the correct dictionary meaning, yet the sentence gives an English-speaking reader a completely different impression.

That is the most frightening kind of mistake.

And the more fluent the finished English sounds, the more likely we are to relax and trust it.

What We Ultimately Need Is a Sense That Something Sounds Wrong

That is why, whenever I read an AI translation, I investigate any expression that gives me even the slightest pause.

Does this expression sound natural in English too?

Has a joke in Japanese become offensive in English?

Will the irony I intended actually be understood as irony?

No matter how advanced AI becomes, I am still the person who ultimately publishes the text.

Of course, detecting AI’s translation mistakes requires a reasonable command of English on my part as well.

When you think about it, that is rather ironic.

We now live in an age when people can write in English without knowing English. But to determine whether that English is correct, they still need to know English after all.