Messages one does not wish to received from one's hotel in Japan

[rachelmanija]

The reservation in September which it asks of is nothing. Is it all right?

Free Japanese chocolate to anyone who knows what that means! I replied to say, um, what? And also to reiterate our reservation.

Comments

[nenena.livejournal.com]

Did the message come with any text in Japanese?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Alas, no, that was the complete message, clearly what they got after they fed their original into an online translator. I wish it had, I can read Japanese a bit and I'd have had a better shot understanding it. I am really hoping it doesn't mean, "Sorry, we've canceled your reservation."

[nenena.livejournal.com]

I have a vague sense that might be the case, though. Maybe you could try emailing them in Japanese? I.E., すみませんですが、先のメッセージ 分かりませんでした。もう一同日本語で送っていただきませんか。 ("Excuse me, but I didn't quite understand your message. Would you please send it again in Japanese?")

The same thing often happens to me in Japan: A well-meaning Japanese person will try to give me a vital piece of information in completely garbled English, so I just respond with "日本語で大丈夫" ("I'm fine with Japanese") and then they switch over to Japanese.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

Correction: That should be 送ってくださえませんか。 I hope, I think. I just managed to completely get myself turned around with the keigo. (*sigh*)

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Machine translation leaves much to be desired.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I gotta find it if it is apocryphal or real that they fed in "Out of sight, out of mind" into machine translators into another language (Russian?) and then back to English, and got "invisible, insane", and from "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" got "The vodka is fresh but the meat is spoiled".

[amberdulen.livejournal.com]

I would take it as "Your September reservation does not exist. Confirm?" And then panic.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Me, too.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a polite Japanese particle that basically exists to soften a denial? If so, it'd be like "I'm sorry that I just ate the last plum... [particle translating literally to "Is that okay with you?"]

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

nainaninani desu ga/ desu keredomo is a common one, but that's ordinary speech.

Usually when there's a problem with hotels or any institution (amazon.jp, I am looking at you) there's a wave of verbuage following the flat info (that x isn't available or y can't be done) that basically means 'we know this is an extreme inconvenience but we entreat the favour of your understanding.' Absent anything like that in the machine translation I'm cautiously optimistic, like anacred, that 'nothing' here might indeed mean 'no problem.'

[anachred.livejournal.com]

But on the other side of the spectrum it could mean:

Your requested reservation is no trouble. Is that all?

But that's just figuring from what the phrases could originally have been, not from actual backward translation.
Please, yes. Get the Japanese, or scream for an English speaker to get involved. I'll try and back up to the Japanese in my head here, but honestly...
Transliteration. My least favorite humor-birthing phenomenon.

[homasse.livejournal.com]

My brain just went asplodey trying to figure that out. ASPLODEY. I bet you MONEY they used the craptastic Yahoo!Japan translator for that, and the Y!J makes babelfish look like the height of nuanced translation.

My guess is they are saying the reservation is OK, mainly because there are no apologies. And also, Japanese tends to default to the answer being "NO", so even if something is fine, they confirm--the "Is it all right?" smacks of これで宜しいでしょうか? before everything is taken as all systems go. They're expecting token confirmation of the dates and all.