Question Help me translate a word into Japanese, please!

[Janosima]

Hello, how are you?
I'm new here and I don't know if this is the right forum, I apologize if I made a mistake.

I am translating a text (a title actually) from English to Japanese and I have doubts about a word, since it is an invented word of Latin origin. It's the title of a book, The Legend Of Patvaterra, where "Parvaterra" is Latin and I don't know how to translate it into Japanese (or if I should). In Latin, "Parva" means "small", and "Terra" means "World", the English translation would be something like Littleworld or Smallworld (it is a story about a world inhabited only by children).

I actually think the word should remain untranslated. However, I don't know how I should write the word Parvaterra in Japanese. Could you help me please? Thank you very much in advance.

 

[thomas]

Welcome to the forum!

If you transliterated "Parvaterra" into katakana, it would result in something like パルヴァテっラ. Arguably, it would be better to translate it as "The Legend of Littleworld". I'll leave that translation up to our language experts.

 

[Janosima]

Thanks for the reply!
The title of the book in English, French and Spanish has remained as Parvaterra (untranslated), as a way of naming that world universally, so I think it should not be translated into Japanese either. But as I said, I also don't know how I should write "Parvaterra" in the different Japanese writings.

 

[thomas]

My better half just corrected me: パルヴァテラ would be closer to the Latin original.

 

[Janosima]

Thank you.
I had something like this: パルバテッラの伝説 (Parubaterra no Densetsu) The Legend of Parvaterra, but I didn't know if it is correct.

 

[thomas]

パルヴァテラの伝説

 

[Janosima]

Great, thanks a lot, guys!

 

[thomas]

Delighted, and good luck with your translation!

 

[mdchachi]

If the R is not voiced it would be better to say something like

Parvaterra
パーバテラ or パーヴァテラ
It really depends on how this word is pronounced.

 

[Janosima]

All Rs are voiced. Is there any reason why they don't?

 

[thomas]

I guess the Rs are voiced in Latin and Romance languages but not necessarily in English (similar to the pronunciation of - for instance - "harbour" or "larvae").

 

[nice gaijin]

All Rs are voiced. Is there any reason why they don't?

Writing words in katakana is guided by pronunciation, and accents can affect pronunciation, which is why there are often a couple choices, especially if the word isn't commonly used.

Just as in some English accents where the syllable-final R's get dropped (imagine how a British person might say the examples Thomas gave above), Japanese doesn't natively use syllable-final consonants except for the moraic nasal (often realized as an N)... Except for that mosaic nasal, you will never see two consonants right next to each other in Japanese (edit: OK I just thought of some phonetic exceptions like "tsu" or devoiced high vowels, but that's a whole other discussion)

Some examples:

The word パンク (panku), which could refer to punk music or a flat tire (short for puncture, I suppose?), shows the moraic nasal next to the [k], but whether it's voiced or not, there must be a vowel after the k... This is because there's no phonetic character in Japanese for "k" by itself, only "ka," "ki," "ku," "ke," and "ko."

With the R, the brand Burberry is written バーバリー (baabarii) where the long vowel is used instead of inserting a ル (バルバリー, barubarii), which would sound less like the word they're trying to approximate, and also throw off the cadence of the word.

With the word "culture," you end up with both treatments for syllable-final consontants, and we get カルチャー, karuchaa.

Sometimes loan words are affected by the accents of the languages they're borrowed from: you can write the anglicized parmesan as パルメザン (parumezan), but the Italian parmigiano is written パルメジャーノ (parumejaano). Perhaps because the source language is Italian, both variations use the "ru" instead of a long vowel for the R, but other sounds get changed to approximate the Italian accent more closely.

That's all to just agree that... it just depends on how it's pronounced

 

[mdchachi]

All Rs are voiced. Is there any reason why they don't?

I was thinking in terms of English. Words like carving are pronounced like kaavingu in Japanese. Or car is kaa. Starter is sutaataa, etc.

 

[Janosima]

Ah, OK, I get it. Thank you.

 

[Janosima]

After your enlightening explanations, I think that my case would be more similar to the example of parmesan (something like paruvatera, not paavatera, similar to the answer offered by Thomas), but I am not sure, since I have no idea what the ideal pronunciation would be in Japanese. :/

Thank you all for your clarifications, I found them very useful and interesting.