Bonus April Birthday Dress with Daisies

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone! Don’t worry… it’s back to English today.

If you can actually read Japanese, I should mention (for the sake of my pride) that it probably sounded rather more stilted than my usual writing because I wrote it specifically to be put through Google Translate, so that it would make sense when people clicked the link. (Thanks, Google先生 ^^) Trying to write in English through automatic Japanese machine translation is actually a challenging exercise. (Try it sometime, if you’re learning Japanese. Alternately, take Translation Party for a spin!)

For example, that’s what accounts for the strange punctuation in “スケッチを描くこと、と日本語を勉強すること、のは私にとって大切です。” As it is, it’s rendered as the awkward yet reasonable “Drawing a sketch, and to study Japanese, are important to me.” Take out the commas and the meaning becomes “The Japanese wanted to learn to draw and sketch for me is important.” So it would all look slightly different if I was writing for clarity in Japanese and not clarity in Google Translate-assisted English…

The other entries I just ran through Google Translate because the content wasn’t terribly important – I just wanted to add to the feeling of being overwhelmed by another language. If you can read Japanese, you can see they’re rather a mess!

Since my April birthday dress was overshadowed by the April Fool’s day joke, I thought I’d do a bonus one. I hope it helps to make up for my cruelty ^^;;

19 thoughts on “Bonus April Birthday Dress with Daisies

  1. Good joke, actually…I was afraid I’d have to click the ‘Translate’ button every time I came to this site…
    Can’t wait to see the next dress!

  2. Thank goodness. Glad to see everything back to normal. The poll still seems to be in Japanese. What does it say?

  3. Ah yes — Arisa had it, essentially ^^ The question is “Can you read Japanese?” Hai = yes. Iie = no. Sukoshi dake yomemasu = Just a little. Kyou wa nani mo wakarimasen = I don’t understand anything today.

  4. Sorry for the double comment, but also, April 5th is my birthday! So this is a birthday gown for me! lolz

  5. I’m so happy that everything is back to normal! I knew it had to be a joke! To bad I’m not born in April! TWO birthday dresses! I’m jealous:)

  6. This was a really good April Fool’s day joke. When I first saw it, I really thought that you were serious (as a new follower, I have been trying to read your older posts and catch up some, so I knew you study Japanese). Then I was sitting around later, and I realized, Today is April Fools Day…

    That was a good one, but boy am I happy it’s back to English!

  7. haha, yes, I’ve been trying to learn Japanese too, but my problem with websites in kanji, is that I can’t get the language pack to load, so all I see is little squares in place of the characters. Even my computer fix-it guy can’t get it to work. Does anyone know how to do it?

    And, yes, lovely dresses – both of them (not to mention all the others on this site – gorgeous!)

  8. Double comment…I don’t usually do that, but…
    Well, I really like this dress, maybe even better than the other! I’m a fan of purple, I must say, so that’s probably why. Great work! ^^

  9. I love these dresses and think that you should have more Mermaid Mondays (and maybe start having Fairy or Fairytale Fridays). You should definitely do more fantasy dresses in my opinion, or even a new doll to kick it all off.

  10. Haha, awesome, I voted “hai” when I should have voted “Kyou wa nani mo wakarimasen” lol

    Thanks for the extra dress Liana =)

  11. Gorgeous dresses, the Japanese had me freaked but I was already planning ways round it. (Google Translate.)

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