Thursday, November 30, 2017

Rendering an appositive "which" clause in Japanese


I've been writing little news pieces lately for practice, and I'm presently hung up on this passage. I'm trying to express the idea "This decision caused many protests, which have remained peaceful thus far." I could split these clauses into two sentences and have an easy time of it, but I've been trying to dig up some information on how I could actually convey that "which" appositive relationship.


I had a look at this excellent discussion, but I don't think the examples provided address my usage case, because the closest equivalency I can draw to those would involve changing the sentence to "This decision cause many protests which are peaceful," or "many peaceful protests," and I specifically want to retain the indication that the protests are ongoing and that their remaining peaceful is not a certainty.


I'd field some guesses, but I've come up short on any material that gets any closer to discussing what I have in mind, so I'm at a loss.



Answer



Your original text seems to be an instance of a very English way of sentence-building, which adds comments as appositive afterthoughts. This sort of idea is often hard to transplant into Japanese, because the language doesn't have any postmodifing (i.e. adding adjectives after) mechanism. It is often separated or linked by conjunctions, like multiple sentences.


So a possible translation is:




この決定は多くの抗議活動を巻き起こしたが、それらは今のところ平和裡に行われている。



But if I'm allowed to translate freely, I'd reword it as:



この決定は多くの抗議活動を巻き起こしたが、現時点で暴動には発展していない。
This decision caused many protests, but they have not exploded into violence thus far.



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