I am writing up about my study in English at the moment and needless to say, English is not my native language… since my study has Japanese conversational data collected in Japan, I often have to do translating job – from Japanese into English – , which is not always easy. What I was stuck the other day was… okay the literal translation of the sentence was “soon not needed become” and I really struggled with this sentence…
The situation of the conversation I wanted to translate was like this; one person tried to sell her old microwave oven to her friend and explained why she wanted to sell it. Her explanation was that she soon would move out from her current apartment, her new place had a microwave oven, therefore she would not need hers once she moved there. In Japanese, a word “become” cannot be missed to describe this type of situation. This is about change – from the situation she needs one to the situation she won’t need one and to describe this type of change, Japanese needs a word “become” in a sentence. Although I knew this “become” discipline (?) would not work in English, I just could not get out of the idea using “become” somewhere in a sentence – it’s odd, isn’t it? When I am stuck like this, I often use Eijiro, the internet English – Japanese/Japanese – English dictionary located at http://www.alc.co.jp You just have to type a word or expression in English or Japanese, which you want to translate into English or Japanese. This site gives you all sorts of options how to translate the expression you type by showing a lot of examples from their corpus.
Anyway the expression I found there and decided to settle with was “I will stop needing it soon.” This of course, does not have “become” anywhere, but it should be okay in English… I still feel uneasy with this expression though… I still wish I could put “become” somewhere…
Mo says:
I think “will stop needing” is fine because the verb “will” implies a change of status, much like “become”!
Keep up your blogging!