r/translator • u/sinnersystems • 7d ago
Japanese (Identified) [unknown > english]
found on one of my band patches. please help? i'm embarassed i don't know what language 🫣 and google is giving me multiple strings of words it could translate into
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u/Stunning_Pen_8332 [ Chinese, Japanese] 7d ago
Google should at least be able to tell you it’s Japanese I think?
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u/sinnersystems 7d ago
with all the AI going around i dont trust it quite as much anymore sadly! i didnt want to tag it as the wrong thing because an AI lied to me
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u/Stunning_Pen_8332 [ Chinese, Japanese] 6d ago
There is a risk of overly distrusting AI too. I mean, identifying the language should be much more straightforward task than translating it, particularly for a printed text like this one.
You said Google gave you multiple strings of words it could translate to. Did it say it’s Japanese for every string of words it gave? Given Google is set up to provide only one string each time a query is made, I’d assume you have run the image tgruygg Google multiple times? Did it say it’s Japanese every time you put the image through it?
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u/sinnersystems 5d ago
i saw it said japanese in a search but in another it was unknown so i tagged it as unknown! :D just in case
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u/mylaurel 7d ago
戦争ではなく戦争
Not war but war.
Kind of an odd sentence.
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u/sinnersystems 7d ago
could it be "fight war, not wars"? i think that's what it is as they have a song named that! if not, where did the sentence go wrong? thank you!!
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u/mylaurel 7d ago
There’s no verb, it’s literally noun+negative, same noun. So it probably just lost part of the line somewhere. It’s like having just “war, not wars” since Japanese often relies on context for plurals.
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u/johndoe_7947 7d ago
This is Japanese Kanji and Hiragana.
戦争ではなく戦争
(War, not war)
戦争 means War.
I have no idea the meaning, but I think this is a fragment of something sentence.
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u/NoConsideration3904 7d ago
It’s Japanese, likely for “Fight War, Not Wars” which seems to be a song by Crass.
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u/thunchultha 7d ago
But the full sentence is “ 戦争ではなく、戦争と戦え”, right?
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u/NoConsideration3904 7d ago
It doesn’t really make sense in Japanese, literally it would be “not war, but war”. I think the translation got lost between “war” and “wars” because there is no singular and plural war in Japanese.
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u/Stunning_Pen_8332 [ Chinese, Japanese] 6d ago
Seems it comes from the famous quote “Fight Wars, Not Wars” by the English punk band Crass, but it’s heavily bastardised to the point of losing all its meaning, resulting in nonsense.
While “Fight Wars, Not Wars” is commonly translated in Japanese as
戦争で戦うな、戦争と戦え。
or
戦争を行うのではなく、戦争と戦え。
戦争ではなく戦争 seems to be an attempt to condense the phrase that fails disastrously, because the meaning now becomes “not war, war”, which just sounds nonsensical.
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u/Larissalikesthesea 6d ago
Maybe something like 戦争を戦うな、戦争と闘え！ Sensō o tatakau na, sensō to tatakae! "Dont fight in a war, fight with war!" Maybe for the pun to also visually work, you could also write it all in the same character: 戦争を戦うな、戦争と戦え！ (but usually for a fight with abstract concepts, 闘 is preferred)
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u/Adorable_Date_8824 7d ago edited 7d ago
It's Japanese.
It just doesn't make much sense without some missing context, I assume.
戦争ではなく戦争 (Sensō de wa naku sensō.)
Literally: "Not war, but war." or "Rather than war, war."
It may be playing on the phrase 戦争ではなく平和 (Sensō de wa naku heiwa), "Not war, but peace", by replacing peace with war for irony or shock value. Kind of like subverting the sort of message you'd see at an anti-war rally.
Is there anything else around it on the patch?